A task force created to propose maps of larger, consolidated school districts as part of Vermont’s sweeping education reform law has instead suggested a different approach that it says is more likely to save money and improve the quality of schools.
The School District Redistricting Task Force recommends voluntary school district mergers rather than the forced ones proposed in Act 73. And it suggests forming regional cooperatives that would allow districts to share certain services to save money and improve quality. Longer term, the task force recommends creating regional high schools.
Such an approach, the task force wrote in a draft report released last week, represents a research-based model of reform “while respecting Vermont’s rural geography, community identity and limited statewide capacity for major structural change.” During the process, the report says, community members “expressed strong concerns about student wellbeing, loss of local control, transportation burdens, rural equity, and a process perceived as rushed or unclear.”
The report is expected to be finalized and submitted to the full legislature by December 1. But Gov. Phil Scott and Education Secretary Zoie Saunders are already pushing back on the plan, saying it doesn’t address the high cost of education in a timely way and ignores the mandates of Act 73.
Instead, the “proposal represents an entirely different policy direction” and does not include “any modeling of cost or clarity on how educational quality will be achieved,” Saunders wrote in email to Seven Days.
Scott was even more blunt at a press conference earlier this month.
“They didn’t redraw the lines, and they were supposed to put forward three maps for consideration, and they failed,” he told reporters.
The disagreement is setting the stage for another high-stakes battle over the future of education during the coming legislative session. Lawmakers must decide whether they want to create new policy based on the task force’s recommendations, move forward with the large-scale consolidation endorsed by the Scott administration or do something in between. And they will face pressure from the governor and local communities over which path to choose.
Created over the summer, the task force was made up of 11 people: six lawmakers and five members with public-school experience. Between August and November, the group held eight meetings and four public hearings. By statute, it was required to create up to three maps of larger, consolidated school districts for the full legislature to consider.
But in the past several weeks, it became clear the task force was deviating from its charge. Rather than suggesting maps, the group proposes three ways to change how education is funded and governed.
First, it calls for five regional partnerships known as Cooperative Education Service Areas. These would allow school districts and supervisory unions to share services such as special education and transportation to save money and improve quality.
Also called Boards of Cooperative Educational Services, or BOCES, a small-scale version of the model has already been successful in southeastern Vermont. Eight school districts and supervisory unions there have pooled money and resources to provide professional development to teachers and administrators, saving districts an average of 66 percent on those costs. The collaboration has also enabled them to hire for hard-to-fill special education roles and create a regional program for elementary school students with social-emotional challenges.
The task force has suggested that these arrangements could yield more immediate cost savings compared to more complicated school-district mergers.
The task force’s plan also calls for voluntary mergers of school districts and supervisory unions. Rather than slicing up the state into new districts using the “arbitrary size targets” of 4,000 to 8,000 students that are specified in Act 73, the task force envisions a more data- and community-driven merger process. It raises the concept of “incentives” for districts that merge but lacks specifics.
There is some precedent for this type of merger. A 2015 law, Act 46, also aimed to consolidate school districts. It offered more than $30 million in tax breaks and grants to those that merged voluntarily and compelled others to do so through State Board of Education directives. There has been no comprehensive evaluation of whether that law achieved the cost savings it promised.
Finally, the group suggests a long-term goal of developing regional high schools. These would offer all students advanced coursework, world languages, technical education, mental health services and extracurricular activities. That possibility would take years to implement since it would require major renovations to existing buildings or the construction of new ones. Without state funding for school construction, which has been on pause since 2007, it would be a hard goal to realize.
“There are so many problems with forcing mergers that it’s shocking to me that anyone would focus on that.”
Rep. Edye Graning
The task force’s report notes that the education system’s biggest cost drivers — health care, special education and facilities among them — would not be addressed by creating bigger school districts. And merging school districts could come with additional costs, said Rep. Edye Graning (D-Jericho), the task force cochair and school board chair of Mount Mansfield Unified Union School District.
Since teacher pay varies considerably from district to district, she said, mergers would likely mean “leveling up” lower-paid educators’ salaries. That could cancel out savings from reducing the number of administrators. Nonvoluntary mergers could also lead to pricey litigation from resistant districts, she said.
“There are so many problems with forcing mergers that it’s shocking to me that anyone would focus on that,” she said.
Redistricting, though, was just one piece of the education-transformation plan that Saunders unveiled this past January. The administration called for consolidating Vermont’s 52 supervisory unions and 119 school districts into five regional school districts, starting in the 2027-28 school year. It also proposed a more straightforward funding mechanism, known as a foundation formula, that would give more power to the state and less to local taxpayers to determine how much money school districts receive.
The agency’s proposal for larger districts “was intentionally designed around three interconnected policy levers — quality, scale, and funding — meant to be implemented together,” Saunders wrote in an email to Seven Days.
“There is no question that education dollars will go further with new, larger school districts.”
Education Secretary Zoie Saunders
Saunders noted that Act 73, the law prompting this educational overhaul, passed with bipartisan support and was “subject to rigorous statistical modeling that demonstrated cost savings.”
“There is no question that education dollars will go further with new, larger school districts,” Saunders continued.
But in public hearings across the state, written comments and surveys, the task force said it heard from more than 5,000 Vermonters who mostly voiced skepticism about the large-scale redistricting.
Public sentiment clearly hasn’t swayed the governor who, on November 14, said he believed members of the redistricting group “didn’t fulfill their obligation” because they did not draw new school district lines. Their actions suggested they were “OK with the ever-increasing property taxes and cost of education” and didn’t want to see change, Scott said.
Saunders, meanwhile, criticized the idea of Cooperative Education Service Areas, saying in a letter to the task force that they “add bureaucracy, cost and complexity to an already top-heavy system.”
Because each service area would have a governing board, executive director and staff, it would expand, rather than reduce, Vermont’s “administrative footprint.” And the model would “complicate the agency’s ability to ensure compliance and enforce quality,” Saunders wrote.
Yet champions of the approach say these voluntary collaborations have already resulted in measurable savings in southeastern Vermont and other rural states that use them.
“It strengthens local boards rather than replacing them, and preserves community-based schools while easing upward pressure on property taxes,” Margaret MacLean of the Rural School Community Alliance, a coalition of school boards, selectboards and community members from more than 100 Vermont towns, wrote in an op-ed sent to local media.
Campaign for Vermont, an advocacy group, believes that the state could eventually save up to $334 million annually if school districts share services the way the task force has suggested. The organization’s executive director, Ben Kinsley, said he arrived at that number in part by looking at cost savings achieved in other states.
“Act 46 already proved that forced mergers produce lawsuits, resentment and little to no savings,” Kinsley wrote in a November 24 blog post. In it, he called the task force’s report “the first mature and well-researched education savings proposal Montpelier has seen in decades.”
At its final meeting last week, task force members suggested that its work, completed with community input over several months, represents Vermonters’ views better than the governor’s plan does.
“This task force has been an example of how we need to work together,” said Rep. Rebecca Holcombe (D-Norwich), who served as Vermont’s education secretary from 2014 to 2018. “We need to take our time. We need to do our due diligence. We need to check our assumptions. And we need to find ways to work together from all different corners of the state and all different parties.”
But given Scott and Saunders’ strong opposition, Graning, the task force co-chair, told Seven Days that she worries about what will happen when the General Assembly reconvenes in January. She said she hopes the governor will read the task force’s final report and that his administration will “work on doing the right thing and focus on data-driven decision-making.”
“I have very big concerns,” she said, “about what happens if … the governor and the administration dig in and say, ‘We like our plan. We’re going to stick with that.’”
Read Secretary Saunders’ full response to the task force below:
The original print version of this article was headlined “Different School of Thought | A group tasked with redrawing school district maps has suggested an alternative scenario, rankling the Scott administration”
This article appears in Nov 26 – Dec 2 2025.
