Response to Governor Scott's Address to the VT Legislature, January 8, 2026

 Governor, 

Your remarks were delivered with passion and confidence, projecting a vision of progress that you argue will follow if Vermont’s towns adopt a model of school consolidation (and closure) drawn from places like Barre. Yet passion alone is not proof, and vision alone is not evidence. 

What was missing from your remarks was a clear explanation of how closing rural schools will produce meaningful savings or reduce the crushing burden of property taxes borne by working Vermonters. You spoke of increasing teacher salaries—a goal many share—but you did not explain how this will be accomplished while simultaneously lowering property taxes. These two aims, laudable on their own, stand in tension unless supported by facts rather than assumptions. We can talk about Barre as an example worthy of emulation. But if consolidation is the remedy you suggest, why not also speak of Roxbury? Why not address communities where consolidation has brought longer bus rides, weakened town centers, people moving out of state, and unresolved questions about cost savings and community loss? Rural Vermont deserves to hear the full accounting, not a selective one. 

Closing schools does not eliminate children. It merely displaces them. Education must still be delivered elsewhere, often at increased cost for transportation, facilities, staffing, and administration. In rural Vermont, sending young children from a local primary school to a distant, bused school is not the simple matter it may be in a compact city. Distance matters. Geography matters. Families matter. 

Nor did your remarks address what becomes of the abandoned school buildings that sit at the heart of our towns. Unlike larger municipalities, many rural communities lack both the resources to maintain these structures and the alternative uses that might give them new life. The loss is not merely financial; it is civic and communal. An awful lot of schools would need to close—and an awful lot of people would need to lose their jobs—to achieve the outcomes you outlined. That reality deserves honest reckoning, not rhetorical assurance. 

President Theodore Roosevelt, in convening the Country Life Commission, warned against reforms that prized efficiency while ignoring the lived realities of rural communities. He understood that a nation weakens when its countryside is hollowed out in the name of progress measured only on paper. Reform, he believed, must strengthen the whole—not sacrifice the many for the convenience of the few. 

I am disappointed that the concerns raised by the study committee appear not to have been fully heard or addressed. Rural Vermonters are not resistant to change; they are resistant to being asked to bear irreversible harm without credible evidence of benefit. 

Our shared obligation is not merely to act boldly, but to act wisely—and with respect for the communities that have long sustained this state. 

Respectfully, 

Eric C. Pomeroy, Peacham