Harwood leaders eye Cabot Creamery’s Waitsfield complex as a possible future school site
August 26, 2026 | By Lisa Scagliotti The recent listing of Cabot Creamery’s company headquarters in Waitsfield for sale for $2.95 million has caught the attention of Harwood school district leaders who are mulling a major school consolidation effort.
The full school board meets tonight at 6 p.m. in the Harwood library for its first meeting of the 2026-27 school year, and next steps on school consolidation is on the agenda.
Students arrive at Brookside Primary School this morning for the first day of the school year. School district leaders are considering a consolidation scenario that would close the Waterbury school in the future. Photo by Lisa Scagliotti
Last week, officials with the Harwood Unified Union School District shared that they are eyeing the property as a possible future site for a combined elementary school that could replace individual schools currently serving Moretown, Fayston, Warren and Waitsfield.
“It's a nice site,” said Superintendent Mike Leichliter of the Cabot facility. “It's not built as a school. It's built as an office building, but structurally it's a very good structure – primarily steel – a lot of light, a lot of windows. There would need to be some additional space consideration for things like a gymnasium, cafeteria, large group space and potentially some other classrooms.”
Leichliter was speaking at a meeting of the Building Use and Visioning Committee of the Harwood Unified Union School District School Board last week. Also in attendance was Board Chair Ashley Wood of Waitsfield, who said the need to modify the facility should not be an obstacle to the district exploring this well-timed opportunity.
“Definitely not perfect, but it's a standing building in a really central location in the [Mad River] Valley, which – that right there was very exciting,” she said. “I don't want to get ahead of myself, but I thought it was a really great thing that we should be looking at pretty thoroughly.”
Cabot officials say the company is seeking to consolidate its administrative staff, and moving its 115 or so employees from the Waitsfield site is part of that plan. The company has not yet said where that would be. Owned by the Agri-Mark farm cooperative, Cabot Creamery employs over 1,000 workers in multiple production plants in Vermont, New York and Massachusetts, retail stores, and a Vermont distribution facility.
Cabot has occupied the 32,000-square-foot Waitsfield office complex adjacent to the Mad River Park playing fields on Home Farm Way since 2014. The building on 7.5 acres originally was owned by Northern Power Systems. Vermont Public reported on the Cabot news in July.
Likewise, Harwood leaders this year have begun discussing consolidation, looking for ways the district might combine schools as a way to curb operating costs as pressure from the state increases. The state’s ongoing push to slow growth in education costs has resulted in multiple new laws passed in the past two years. Those measures have put into place new efforts for districts to explore merging and to find ways to collaborate to find operational savings.
But separate from the state-level steps, Harwood’s administrators and school board have been discussing ways the district on its own might revamp its operations in order to run on tighter budgets in the future. Cuts in the past few years have eliminated more than 10% of the district’s jobs, and district leaders say that trend cannot continue without education quality suffering.
In June, the school board’s building committee discussed a dramatic change in the school facilities the district operates: It floated a proposal to shift from running seven schools to just three. That would involve closing the existing elementary schools in Moretown, Fayston, Waitsfield and Warren and replacing them with one school. The restructuring scenario also would close Brookside Primary School in Waterbury. The district would continue to operate Crossett Brook with students younger than middle school attending there, and Harwood Middle-High School.
At its Aug. 18 meeting, the building committee further dug into the consolidation concept. Committee Chair J.B. Weir, of Waitsfield, noted that the three-school scenario is very similar to one of a long list of options that the district received from Burlington architects at TruexCullins in 2025. One proposal (labeled G1 on that list) at that time suggested the valley elementary schools combine at Waitsfield Elementary School. That configuration at that location has since been ruled out, Weir noted, due to floodplain and other site constraints.
Still, the committee’s current recommendation otherwise is very similar – with a location to be determined.
Seeing potential
Superintendent Mike Leichliter told the committee that Nick Managan, chief of staff at Cabot Creamery, approached him in July to discuss Cabot’s plans to sell the Waitsfield building and move staff out. “If the school district has any interest in having conversations, they would certainly be very interested in selling that building to the school district,” the superintendent explained.
Given that the school board was not planning to meet until late August, Leichliter said he contacted board leaders with that information. Since then, he and several board members – Weir, Woods, and Vice Chair Cindy Senning, of Duxbury – visited the Waitsfield facility for a first look.
Woods said she was “totally surprised” to get the news about the Cabot building. “It was really exciting to go through it and see the potential,” she said.
Senning agreed. “The central location piece of it is excellent. And the building's quite lovely. There's a lot of light….It’s like an office building, but it's not like an office building,” she offered.
The superintendent noted that combining four elementary schools into one would require a new school that could accommodate about 450 students.
Weir stressed that no one has begun to estimate any costs connected with using the Cabot property as a future school.
Analysis needed
The committee members acknowledged the long road ahead for decision-making on whether and how to consolidate district schools. Analysis is needed to compare the costs of merging schools and upgrading the facilities that would remain against the costs of continuing to operate the current facilities. Other factors such as class sizes, staffing and logistics all need review.
Along the way, the board members and administrators stressed the importance of involving community members by sharing information and getting feedback.
Weir said that if the full board agrees to pursue the committee’s recommendation, the Building Committee would work with the board’s Public Outreach Committee to draft a schedule of public meetings. “Certainly it is the goal to get out there as much as possible and work this through with our towns,” he said.
School board member Macon Phillips of Warren, who was attending the committee meeting, commented on the challenges ahead in keeping the public informed and involved. “The public interest isn't focused on the feasibility of a new site particularly,” he said. “It's about the necessity of this kind of change.”
Before the community can debate details of a significant consolidation, people will need more information, Phillips suggested. “I don't fully understand the cost of the status quo… We should be able to show people why this is a better option than doing nothing.”
Harwood Finance Director Lisa Estler said she is prepared to put together financial forecasts using known data and current state policy that dictates tighter restrictions on how much district budgets may grow before they trigger financial penalties.
Early community feedback
At least a dozen members of the public logged into the Aug. 18 building committee meeting via Zoom and others have watched the video recording since. Viewer Robert Perry commented at the start of the meeting, noting that he’s a property taxpayer in Warren, Waitsfield and Burlington, who supports the current push to slow down the growth in education costs in the state.
“The people of Vermont want this change. Vermont is increasingly unaffordable, and the education costs are driving that unaffordability,” Perry said. “While the board should have acted years ago to deal with this structural problem of too much infrastructure and too few students, I'm really happy that now you're actually paying attention to this and making some plans.”
Perry, however, questioned the three-school scenario the committee is now considering. His remarks came before the Cabot facility was discussed. “Building a new school for a declining population – that doesn't seem to make any sense either. So, I don't know why you don't pick a more incremental approach.”
Perry lauded the building committee for proposing bold change, but asked school leaders to consider moves that lower costs sooner rather than later. “I ask you to be responsible and work on reducing the infrastructure to match the declining enrollment and start with an incremental process to make a difference now,” he said.
Matt Lillard also was in the online audience and commented, asking about the status of needed repairs and upgrades at Harwood. He requested that any proposals for future consolidation also address building needs there. After a failed bond in 2021 that would have paid for major upgrades at Harwood, a renewed effort in 2023 to focus on renovations at the middle-high school was shelved after voters rejected the district’s annual budget, prompting multiple revotes in spring 2024.
Board member Steve Rosenberg from Moretown, who chairs the school board’s Outreach Committee, attended the Building Committee meeting. He shared notes from messages he’s received from Moretown residents over the summer since the Building Committee first proposed the three-school consolidation idea in June.
A top question has been about comparing the cost of consolidation to continuing to operate the schools the district has now. Another is whether bonding to pay for consolidation efforts will result in spending penalties from the state, he said.
“Residents also want to know if consolidation will allow us to reinstate programs we've cut over the past three years and to preserve the next items potentially on the chopping block such as AP courses, athletics, theater, etc.,” Rosenberg said.
People are asking how many more teachers and staff will be cut if the district shrinks the number of schools and what the impact on bus rides will be if students have to travel farther to and from school, he said, reading from a list of notes.
A final theme Rosenberg shared was a “worry that towns that no longer have elementary schools will be less attractive to the young families we want to move into our towns – where there's one winner town and several loser towns as a result of consolidation.”
Weir nodded in agreement, replying to Rosenberg’s list: “Those are all questions that we hope to have answers to sooner rather than later. I would at least add that our overarching goal no matter what is to make sure we're providing our kids with the best education we can get them both in and out of the school, whether it's on the soccer fields, on the stage, in the music room, or in the classroom; that is always our top goal.”
Rosenberg added a personal comment to the discussion, expressing frustration with state leaders and the direction state education funding policy has taken. “I do feel there are too many legislators and one governor who have concluded that since we've cut our budget so deeply, we must have been living large and therefore should just cut more. That's a simple line of reasoning and completely wrong,” Rosenberg said.
Legislators “owe it to us to be on top of this tough issue,” he continued. “I think it's past time to hold our legislators and governor more accountable for what I think is their wrong-headed approach to funding our kids' education.”
Next steps
Before it paused for its summer break, the full school board asked the Building Committee for recommendations for facility consolidation. The committee now is suggesting the district explore the three-school scenario with the Cabot facility as a possible combined elementary school site. The group also is recommending that the board issue a request for proposals for architectural services to detail what would be needed to convert the Cabot building to a school and what the potential costs would be in addition to purchasing the property.
Leichliter told the committee that the district could seek proposals from outside firms to assess the Cabot property’s potential as a future school rather than automatically add that to the list of work done to date by TruexCullins. The firm has been working with the school district for much of the past decade on school facility planning projects.
The fact that the Cabot site and facility are new to the district’s consideration makes it a reasonable project to seek contractors for, he explained. Leichliter said that he and Estler support a process to request proposals and would be comfortable with any firm that emerges from such a step, including Truex.
“I do think when you're coming up in a new project like this, it's also a good matter of public accountability to go through that process to ensure that we're doing it in an open and fair way for anyone – not just in the state, but anyone in the New England region – who would want to put their [proposal] request in,” he said.
Tonight’s school board meeting is available via Zoom to participate (link on the agenda) and on YouTube to watch live or recorded. Mad River Valley Television also covers.
Another item on the board’s agenda is to appoint Vice Chair Senning as the Harwood district’s school board representative to the Act 170 Merger Study Committee that’s looking at regional school consolidation possibilities with other districts, including Montpelier-Roxbury, Barre, Paine Mountain and Washington Central.
The Harwood School Board has posted two Q/A documents online regarding school consolidation and upcoming budget preparations for the 2027-28 school year. Read more here.