Matt Rkiouak On the U.S. Census Bureau’s own state table for fiscal 2024, the average American student costs $1,297 in school and district administration. The average Vermont student costs $2,605 — two dollars for every national dollar.
The principals’ offices alone run 2.2 times the national rate ($2,039 per student against $946); the superintendents’ offices 1.6 times. Computed conservatively — identical line items on both sides, the national figure adjusted to Vermont’s price level — the ratio is 1.83. The federal education statistics agency puts it at 1.65 to 1.73 for the three years before 2024. Three instruments, one answer: roughly double.
That premium does not reach the classroom. In fiscal year 2022, the last year covered by the federal series, the average Vermont teacher earned $63,669. The average American teacher earned $66,397.
Some of this has honest explanations. Small districts are expensive everywhere, and Vermont is a state made of them — U.S. districts under 5,000 students spend about what Vermont does on central offices. But size does not explain the principals’ offices. Neither does rurality: the nine most-rural states, which also run small schools, spend $443 per student on superintendents’ offices and $795 on school administration — less than half our rate, with their dollars adjusted upward to Vermont prices.
The buildings tell the same story. Vermont operates 1.8 times the nation’s schools per student — 305 schools averaging 274 students, against a national average of 499 students — and pays about one and a half times the national rate to keep them open. What we have not done is renew them: over fiscal years 2020–2024, Vermont invested 38% below the national rate in construction and renovation. The bill arrived in 2023, when the state’s own assessment of 301 school buildings found $4.4 billion in deferred maintenance — about $53,700 per student, never showing up in a budget on any year’s ballot.
Add the premium up, fiscal years 2013 through 2024: Vermont spent about $1.3 billion more on administration and upkeep than the same students would have cost at the cost-adjusted national rate — while investing $658 million less than the national rate in its buildings.
And what did it buy? A decade ago Vermont sat near the top of the Nation’s Report Card. By 2024, three of its four leads were gone, and the median Vermont district had fallen from the 78th percentile of U.S. districts to the 40th. Chronic absence reached 27%, above a worsened national rate of 24%. College continuation fell from 62% to 46% — on Vermont’s generous 16-month count, while 62% of American graduates enroll by the first fall. On no measure I can find did Vermont’s national standing improve while the premium was being paid.
So the questions write themselves. Why do we pay two dollars for every national dollar of school administration — a premium that district size doesn’t explain, that rural states don’t share, and that doesn’t reach teachers — for results that have fallen to the national average? Why do we operate nearly twice the nation’s schools per student while our buildings carry a $4.4 billion repair bill?
Responsibility for oversight of our school districts sits with our administrators and our school boards in Vermont. It’s time to ask them these questions and what they are doing to put our local districts back on track. If they don’t have any plans, it’s time to remove and replace them with Vermonters who care about our community and are willing to do the work needed for all of our children to thrive.
Matt Rkiouak lives in Middlesex. The district-by-district figures behind this piece, with sources and methods, are public at hungermountaini.com/schools/budgets/
The material presented here represents the opinion of the author and does not reflect the opinions of The Bridge. Commentaries may be submitted to editor@montpelierbridge.com. Preference is given to submissions by those who live in central Vermont. Submissions are encouraged to be 500 to 750 words in length.
