This week lawmakers delved deeply into education funding and reform, reflecting ongoing efforts to build a more equitable and sustainable system amid demographic challenges and a persistent spending crisis.

H.67 creates a Pilot Government Accountability Project, to be conducted by the Joint Fiscal Committee, to examine governmental practices, make recommendations on improving those practices, and develop effective tools for evaluating government accountability.

Long-Held Beliefs About Healthcare Costs Don’t Hold Up 

As Stat readers know, Vermont has the highest commercial insurance rates in the nation. We can credit a prolonged period of poor oversight, lax accountability, price gouging, and asset hoarding by some hospitals for much of this crisis. 

Adding to that, the state’s largest insurer, BCBSVT failed to negotiate aggressively with the UVMHN over prices. According to BCBS-VT, UVMHN had taken the position that if their rate demands were not met, they would stop seeing BCBSVT patients. 

All in all, leaders and regulators failed to focus on costs and Vermonters are left paying the bill. 

Here it is... the first legislative update of the year!

Lawmakers dusted off major 2025 reforms, such as last year’s landmark economic and workforce bill, S.122, which continues to steer targeted grants and training dollars to small businesses and high-demand fields, positioning Vermont to compete for workers and employers in a tight regional market. Legislators also began early discussions around how the new, long‑term CHIP infrastructure and housing finance program can be deployed on the ground. The program has the potential to channel up to $200 million per year into local infrastructure that supports new housing and grows the tax base.

We leaned into our core strengths in 2025: providing clear, data-driven, nonpartisan analysis at a time when Vermonters are hungry for practical solutions. Our mission remains the same, to reconnect middle-class Vermonters to their government and champion policies that support family-sustaining jobs, environmental stewardship, and social responsibility. But this year, our work took a sharper edge in three key areas: transforming education, defending ethics and government accountability, and confronting Vermont’s long-term economic and demographic challenges.

Dear Members of the Vermont General Assembly,

We urge you to prioritize and refine the work of the Act 73 Task Force. Their start towards evidence-based education reform is the right direction for Vermont. The shift toward shared services and away from top down, state mandated mega districts is clearly the most effective plan to date, but it does not yet go far enough to meet the scale and urgency of our affordability crisis.

We share the strong public opposition to forced mergers and small school closures that the Task Force heard. The data does not support this type of consolidation and there is considerable risk of losing time, energy, and political capital implementing the wrong fix for our education challenges.

We also agree that learning happens in classrooms, not in the 52 central offices that exist today. To maximize cost-savings and minimize student disruptions, we need to look there.

Everyone wants answers about why property taxes are going up another 12% next year. Some blame small schools, some blame administrative overhead, some blame legislative inaction regarding our education funding system and school governance.

Sadly this news was inevitable. While the Legislature, the Governor, and local Vermonters negotiate over what the next iteration of public education looks like in our state, they bought down property taxes last year using one-time monies. The Governor and the Legislature were both in alignment on this, but these one-time funds[1] created a $98 million hole for property taxes to fill in FY2027 (which is the 2026/2027 school year) before schools even spent a dollar more.

Vermonters have always valued education as the cornerstone of our communities—places where children learn not just facts, but the grit that comes with rural life and the kindness to lend a hand to a neighbor. I remember my own school days: lessons in reading, arithmetic, as well as those that went beyond the textbooks. Vermont education has worked for generations because it was accountable—to parents, to townsfolk, to the shared stake we all hold in our kids' futures.

Today, that foundation feels unsteady. Our public schools remain vital to our towns, yet they're caught in a troubling bind: declining student outcomes amid escalating costs that strain budgets and drive families out of our state. Enrollment has dropped 20% over the past two decades, leaving echoing hallways and underutilized resources, while education spending tops $2.4 billion annually; more per pupil than nearly every other state. All the while, students are struggling to achieve the same outcomes they did just a decade ago.

Governor Scott says the Act 73 School Redistricting Task Force “failed” because it refused to deliver a mandatory consolidation map that would force Vermont into a handful of mega-districts. Respectfully, I disagree with this assessment.