Gov. Phil Scott of Vermont has pronounced the work of the school redistricting task force, which submitted its final report last month, a failure. Indeed, the 11-member task force failed to deliver to the Legislature up to three possible redistricting maps required under Act 73, which aims to revolutionize the structure and financing of public education in the state.
“They didn’t redraw the lines, and they were supposed to put forward three maps for consideration, and they failed,” Scott told reporters. Asked where that leaves the state, the governor said, “I think it puts us in a tough position, but I think the majority of people,” including legislative leaders, “understand we need change. We need to do something.”
To state the obvious, doing “something” is not a plan. What the task force did do was present Scott and the Legislature with an alternate plan to the one conceived by Act 73, which envisioned carving up the state into a few new super districts containing 4,000 to 8,000 students each.
As our colleague Alex Hanson reported, the task force – which itself was created under Act 73 – concluded that Vermont would be better off sharing services among school districts and offering incentives for them to merge voluntarily rather than forcing them into shotgun marriages with ill-matched partners. This strikes us as entirely reasonable, and more in accord with the state’s underlying values of local independence and respect for tradition.
In particular, the task force’s proposal to revive state building aid as an incentive to construct new regional high schools holds a lot of promise. Many of Vermont’s schools are in bad physical shape, and the prospect of combining with other districts to tap into state money to rehab or replace them is bound to be alluring for districts facing massive construction projects.
The Scott administration projects that school property taxes could go up nearly 12% in 2026. About half the increase is attributable to anticipated school spending, according to the state Tax Department, while the other half of the increase results from the absence of $118 million in one-time money that the Legislature appropriated last year to hold down taxes. Education property taxes rose only about 1% on average in 2025, but they have gone up more than 40% in the past five years despite a decline in enrollment.
This is the problem Act 73 set out to solve, along with giving students across the state broader access to educational offerings. But Sen. Martine Gulick, D-Chittenden County, co-chair of the task force, told VtDigger that its members did not “see evidence that there are cost savings and improvements in quality in merging districts.” If that’s the case, and we think it is, then the rationale for the whole reform effort is called into question.
There are many things that drive up school spending that local districts have little ability to control, such as skyrocketing health care costs; the migration of students to independent schools, which has the effect of increasing per pupil spending; and mandates to provide social services. Addressing these factors at the state level could ease the pressure on local school district spending.
What makes the most sense to us is to abandon the property tax as a primary school funding mechanism and move to a hybrid system of income taxes for state residents and property taxes for second-home owners and commercial property. That, however, does not seem to be on the table.
If the governor believes something must be done right now, it is incumbent upon him and the Education Department to advance a specific plan of their own to the Legislature that addresses those twin problems of cost and quality, and then to take it to the people for their full consideration, something that was not done adequately when Act 73 was enacted.
In the end, it may turn out that Act 73 will prove to be a failure. But as George Orwell noted, while all revolutions are failures, they are not all the same failure. The redistricting task force created under the reform law came up with some good recommendations.
After all, the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was called to amend the defects in the Articles of Confederation, the then-existing form of national government. Delegates ignored this mandate and instead wrote a whole new Constitution, which for all its shortcomings has so far stood the test of time.