Vermont taxpayers can’t compare school budgets. The state could fix that.

This commentary is by Matt Rkiouak, founder of Hunger Mountain Intelligence, a growth and automation consultancy for small and mid-sized businesses.

Every March, Vermonters vote on school budgets they cannot compare with the district next door. Each district lays out its budget differently. What one district calls “special education shared services” is three separate lines in the next. When a budget goes up, the explanation is a list of pressures: health insurance, special education, enrollment. Voters have no way to tell whether those pressures are bigger here than next door.

The state’s reports should settle this. Instead, they contradict each other. The Agency of Education’s staff survey is the only place every district’s positions and pay are coded the same way. Yet for one district, it lists 7.2 teaching positions costing $4.9 million. For the same district, it shows $18 million in salaries and no benefits, while federal census figures show $6.9 million in benefits.

To compare districts, the state divides each one’s spending by a weighted pupil count, known as LTWADM. The count starts with resident students and adds extra weight for those who cost more to educate, including students from low-income families, older students, English learners, and students in small schools or sparsely populated areas. The state published the breakdown of that count for 2025-26 in January 2025. It hasn’t done so for 2026-27.

I wanted to see how my own district, Washington Central, compares with four nearby districts. Washington Central runs six schools. Measured per weighted pupil, and leaving out debt payments and building projects, it spends about $2.3 million a year more than it would at the average rate of Harwood, Montpelier Roxbury, Mount Abraham and Barre.

Most of the gap is pay. Washington Central’s average teacher salary on the staff survey, $79,827, is the highest of the five. Higher pay rates, not more teachers, explain most of the difference. Its superintendent is the lowest paid of the five. But its special education director and curriculum director are the highest paid in their roles, and its administrative costs are second only to Mount Abraham’s.

Building costs rose by a third over three years while consumer prices rose about 13%. Special education and student support spending grew 36%, nearly half the district’s total increase. Yet its cost per child with an individualized education program is at the neighbors’ average.

The district’s annual report includes an enrollment table where the school columns don’t add up to the totals in any of the seven years. This year’s budget comes in two versions, one for three elementary schools and one for five. They have the same total but different line items, and nothing shows how money moved between them.

The district estimated that closing two schools would save $881,920 in 2024 and $1,088,508 in 2025. In January 2026, it said neither figure “is accurate data as of our current budget scenario.” It has not published the model behind them. Calais and Worcester voters rejected the closure of their elementary schools in February, but in August district voters gave all five towns a say in future closures. My own math, using the district’s salary roster and enrollment projections, puts the savings at $1.5 million to $1.9 million a year. I may be wrong, but there’s no published figure to check it against.

None of this is unique to Washington Central. It is what the rules allow.

Vermont requires districts to file budgets on the state’s form and report staff to its survey. It then compares them using a pupil count it hasn’t fully published this year. Under Act 73, passed in 2025, the state would pay each district a set amount per weighted pupil, starting in 2029 if certain conditions are met. A formula that pays per pupil makes one question central: What does it cost to run a school here, compared with there? Right now, the state cannot answer it.

Three things would fix that. The Legislature and the Agency of Education can make all three.

First, require every district to publish its general ledger by purpose and type of expense, in a spreadsheet, on the state’s chart of accounts, with its position roster by year. Not a budget book. The ledger.

Second, have the state publish its own calculations every year, once they’re final: the weighted pupil count broken down for every district, as it did for 2025-26; special education cost reports for every year; and the per-pupil spending measured the same way from year to year.

Third, reconcile the three sets of numbers that describe each district: the district’s budget, the state’s surveys, and federal census and education reports. Where they disagree, say which is right and why. That takes staff and money, and the Legislature should fund it.

Vermont’s new education law puts pressure on small schools, and state spending limits tighten every year from 2028. Voters will be asked to approve whatever comes next. They should be able to see, in numbers that mean the same thing in every town, what their district spends and what the alternatives would cost.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont taxpayers can’t compare school budgets. The state could fix that..