Vermont’s public education system is in crisis, and it is tempting to frame that crisis as a failure of local governance. But that narrative is both inaccurate and unfair. What we are witnessing is not the collapse of school boards or district leadership, but the consequences of years of state-level avoidance of the real cost drivers of education in a rural state.
Nowhere is this clearer than in districts like the Harwood Unified Union School District, where leaders are being asked to manage the unmanageable — balancing legal mandates, ethical responsibilities to children and community outrage over rising taxes within a funding system that is fundamentally broken.
I have watched our superintendent and our school board members show up to school board meetings carrying a burden no one signs up for. The heartbreak and frustration are visible, and they reflect a broader truth: Local education leaders are being asked to absorb the emotional, political and financial fallout of decisions they did not make and cannot fix alone.
Since the passage of Act 46, Vermont has slowly imploded on itself financially. Governors and legislatures of both parties have repeatedly kicked the can down the road, failing to address the true drivers of education costs — particularly health care and the human services so many children rely on to be able to learn at all. Instead of grappling with those realities, the public debate has devolved into a fight over governance structures, as though reorganization alone could solve a systemic funding problem.
State governance has placed the primary burden of cost savings squarely on the shoulders of local school boards. Boards are told to “cut more,” even when they have already reduced programs, staffing and services to the edge of what is educationally and morally defensible. At the same time, they remain bound by legal mandates and ethical obligations to educate, protect and support children — obligations the state seems increasingly willing to ignore.
Across Vermont, school boards have done everything they can to be creative, responsible and fiscally disciplined. They have worked tirelessly to provide as much tax relief as possible for their communities. What they cannot do is solve a structural funding crisis through austerity alone without causing lasting harm to students and schools.
What Vermont needs now is not further erosion of public education, nor scapegoating of local leaders. We need a new formula for funding public education that reflects the real costs of educating children in a rural state. And more importantly, we need a renewed commitment from state leadership to treat public education as the public good it is — not as an expense to be minimized, but as a responsibility to be honored.
Getting our priorities straight means acknowledging that education for all children requires sustained investment, honesty about costs and courage at the state level. Until that happens, local districts will continue to be forced into impossible positions, and the damage will not be limited to budgets — it will be borne by the very children Vermont claims to value.
Hartshorn lives in Duxbury.
