School District Redistricting Task Force finalizes mapping proposal

November 24, 2025  |  By Sophia Buckley-Clement

The School District Redistricting Task Force held its final meeting on Thursday.

Since August, the group has been working to design no more than three maps of school district boundaries that attempt to achieve scale and efficiency across Vermont’s 119 school districts and 52 supervisory unions.

Tasked with its work by landmark education bill Act 73, the task force is required to submit its report to the Legislature on or before Dec. 1.

At its Nov. 10 meeting, the task force voted to move forward with a single proposal that would incentivize voluntary mergers and focus redistricting efforts on comprehensive regional high schools and boards of cooperative educational services, or BOCES.

The task force spent the majority of its Thursday meeting refining the 37-page draft of its final report, breaking into small groups to discuss language and last-minute additions.

“The task force operated within a compressed four-month timeline and faced challenges obtaining complete and consistent data from the Agency of Education,” the draft report read. “While the task force began its work in August, the bulk of this data was not made available to the task force until (Oct. 6).”

The draft went on to say that despite these constraints, the task force conducted a rigorous, data-driven review of Vermont’s educational landscape, drawing on statewide fiscal and enrollment data, research from comparable rural states and public input from more than 5,000 Vermonters.

“The Task Force did not find evidence that mergers of the scale contemplated in Act 73 would reliably lower costs, improve educational outcomes or expand equity. Instead, the evidence pointed toward targeted, regional approaches that strengthen opportunity while respecting Vermont’s rural geography, community identity and limited statewide capacity for major structural change,” the report read.

Recommendations

The report recommends that five regional Cooperative Education Service Areas overlay Vermont’s current supervisory unions and districts, providing shared-service structures for special education, transportation coordination, staffing, purchasing, data systems and other high-cost, low-scale areas that small districts cannot efficiently manage alone.

Additionally, strategic voluntary mergers based on shared educational purposes and feasibility will be incentivized, without the “arbitrary (district) size targets” outlined in Act 73.

Finally, the report identifies that establishing more comprehensive regional high schools would expand opportunities for students.

“The data reviewed by the Task Force consistently showed that Vermont’s largest cost drivers — health care, special education, facilities, transportation, and agency capacity — are not solved by district size,” the report read. “(Our) approach aligns with the intent of Act 73 — it advances them in a way that is realistic, evidence-based and responsive to the voices of Vermont communities.”

The report outlines four phases of its plan, which begin by establishing regional readiness and a shared baseline through creating regional planning teams, mapping services, staffing, facilities and transportation patterns, identifying immediate shared service opportunities and providing technical and financial assistance for such planning.

Phase two, set to take place over the first two years of the proposal, expects to launch shared service pilots, begin regional staffing models where feasible and produce annual progress reports that allow for mid-course corrections.

In years two through four, phase three will involve conducting feasibility studies for potential mergers or regional high school partnerships, supporting community engagement and data-sharing and enabling voluntary merger votes with targeted incentives.

The final phase will follow year four onward and will expand successful cooperative models statewide, implement approved mergers and regional high schools and continue to evaluate success as time goes on.

Mixed reactions

The task force received numerous thanks from community members during public comment, including from a Steering Committee member of the Rural School Community Alliance — a group that formed in response to the task force and fought for consideration of small schools in the task force’s final proposal.

“I came in person to thank you, personally, for your thoughtful deliberation, for your respectful disagreements and for what you’ve come up with as a very thoughtful, very strong, very responsive proposal that you’re carrying forward,” said Cheryl Charles, chair of the Westminster Town School District Board and the Windham Northeast Supervisory Union Board.

Task force members were also asked to share their final thoughts on the process, which member Jennifer Botzojourns used as an opportunity to say why she had previously voted ‘no’ on this final proposal she helped draft.

“The short answer is, I wanted more time to work on it more in-depth, and I felt like I didn’t get that opportunity. I wanted it to be thicker and richer, and it wasn’t there,” she said. “There’s always a disappointment with something like this because you never get what you want to.”

She said that despite these feelings, she is proud of the work that has been done.

Gov. Phil Scott has previously denounced the proposal from the task force, saying that the group failed to meet its obligations under Act 73.

Task force co-chairs, along with the body’s consultants, are expected to finalize the report before it is submitted to the Legislature.