Vermont pays two dollars for every national dollar of school administration, half again the nation's upkeep, and — its largest premium — nearly half again as many teachers per student. Not high pay: it staffs the extra teachers its many small schools require. About $2.2 billion above the cost-adjusted national rate over twelve years, while its results fell to the national average.
Vermont pays about two dollars for every national dollar of school administration, half again the nation's per-student upkeep bill, and — its largest premium — nearly half again as many teachers per student. Not because it pays teachers more; it pays them about the national average. Because it runs nearly twice the schools per student, and every small school needs staff. Across five budget lines, the state ran about $2.2 billion above the cost-adjusted national rate over the twelve years the federal books cover. Over the same stretch, Vermont's standing on the nation's tests fell from near the top to the middle, its chronic-absence rate rose past the country's, and its college continuation stopped clearing the national bar. The Gazette adds up what the money bought — and asks the question the numbers cannot answer.
The Gazette reported in Vermont's yardstick moved that Vermont's schools now deliver roughly national-average results: three of the state's four leads on the federal test gone by 2024, the fourth down to a few points, and the median Vermont system fallen from the 78th percentile of U.S. districts to the 40th. This story is about the other side of that ledger — what Vermont pays, per student, for the system that produces those results. The spending figures come from one instrument, the Census Bureau's Annual Survey of School System Finances, which counts every district, state, and the nation on the same definitions. The account-level figures behind this story are public, district by district, on the Excess Budget page.
On the Census Bureau's own published state table for fiscal 2024, the United States spent $351 per pupil on general administration — the superintendent's office and the school board — and $946 on school administration, the principals' offices. Vermont spent $566 and $2,039: 1.6 and 2.2 times the national rate, and $2,605 against $1,297 — almost exactly two dollars for every national dollar — on the two together (elsec24_sumtables.xlsx, Table 8). The comparison survives every honest adjustment. Computed conservatively — the same line items summed identically on both sides, the national figure raised to Vermont's price level — the combined ratio is 1.83. NCES's published state tables put Vermont's combined administration at 1.65 to 1.73 times the U.S. for fiscal 2021 through 2023 (Digest table 236.75). Three instruments, one answer: roughly double.
Two honest counterweights, both from the same files. Part of the superintendent-office gap is district size: central-office cost per student falls steeply with district size everywhere, and U.S. districts under 5,000 students run about $526 per student — roughly where Vermont sits. Small districts are the expensive part, and Vermont is a state made of them. But size does not explain the principals' offices: school administration runs about twice the national rate under every weighting tested. And the nine most-rural states — states that run small schools too — spent $443 per student on superintendents' offices and $795 on school administration in fiscal 2024, with both figures raised to Vermont's price level. Rural is not the explanation either.
Where the premium does not go is teachers' paychecks. Vermont pays its teachers about the national average. Its largest premium is on teachers all the same — and it is a staffing cost, not a pay one, as the next section shows.
Vermont operates more school than almost any state, per student. In 2022-23 it ran 305 public schools for 83,654 students — an average school of 274 students, against a national average of 499 (Digest 216.70 · 203.20). Per student, that is 1.8 times the nation's count of schools. Only five states run smaller schools on average — Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming, Alaska — and the first two are in the rural comparison basket that still runs its principals' offices at less than half Vermont's rate. Over the decade Vermont's enrollment fell about 7%; its school count fell 4%.
Operating more buildings costs more to keep them open: Vermont's operations-and-maintenance line ran about one and a half times the cost-adjusted national rate in fiscal 2024, and NCES puts the state at 1.31 to 1.43 times the U.S. across fiscal 2021-2023. (As a share of its own much larger budget, Vermont's upkeep — 8.0% — is actually below the national 9.3%; the per-student gap partly reflects that Vermont spends more on everything.)
What Vermont has not done is renew the stock it pays to keep. Over fiscal 2020-2024 the state put $6,049 per student into capital — construction, renovation, land, durable equipment — against a cost-adjusted national $9,791: 38% below the national rate of investment. The bill for that arrived in 2023, when the state's Act 72 assessment surveyed 301 school buildings and found an average facility-condition index of 0.41 — repair costs equal to 41% of replacement cost, where 0.30 is the threshold conventionally read as "consider replacement" — a worst building at 0.86, and $4.4 billion in assessed deferred maintenance: about $53,700 for every enrolled student, never on any year's bill.
Vermont's biggest premium is not administration or buildings. It is teacher payroll — and it is the line most easily misread. Over the twelve years, Vermont spent about $1.6 billion more per student on teacher salaries than the cost-adjusted national rate. Not because it overpays: on the last comparable federal year it paid its teachers about four percent below the national average — $63,669 against $66,397. The entire gap is in how many teachers it employs per student. Vermont staffs about 9.5 teachers for every 100 students; the nation staffs 6.5 — roughly half again as many.
That staffing follows from the buildings. A school of 270 students needs a teacher for each grade and each core subject much as a school of 500 does; spread the same children across nearly twice as many schools, as Vermont does, and it takes more teachers to cover them. The extra teachers are the staffing cost of the extra schools — the same small-schools structure behind the high upkeep and the $4.4 billion repair bill. It is a real cost, and a fair one to question. But it is a class-size-and-buildings cost, not a teacher-pay one.
Vermont identifies more students for special education than the nation — 18.5% of public enrollment served under IDEA against 15.2%, among the highest rates in the country. It is fair to ask whether the extra teachers are really special-education staffing in disguise. The federal personnel files say mostly not, twice over.
First, the teachers. Vermont employs about 1.7 special-education teachers per 100 students; the nation employs 1.0. That differential accounts for about a quarter of Vermont's overall teacher surplus. The other three quarters are general-education staffing — the teacher-per-grade arithmetic of small schools.
Second, the aides. Vermont's special-education model runs on paraprofessionals: about 2,660 paraprofessional FTE against 1,442 special-education teachers — 1.8 aides per special-education teacher, where the nation runs 1.2. Nearly two-thirds of Vermont's special-education instructional personnel are paraprofessionals — and paraprofessional wages appear in none of the five accounts on this page. The teaching-payroll line counts licensed teachers only. Whatever Vermont's aide-heavy model costs — it runs 2.7 times the national rate of paraprofessionals per student — it sits on top of the $2.2 billion, not inside it.
Add the five lines up, one instrument, both sides at Vermont's price level. Administration — superintendents' and principals' offices together — ran about $0.8 billion above what the same students would have cost at the national rate. Upkeep: $0.5 billion. Teacher payroll: $1.6 billion, the staffing cost above. Against those, capital ran $0.66 billion below the national rate — Vermont under-invests in its buildings even as it over-spends staffing and keeping them, which is how a state comes to owe $4.4 billion on schools it spends half again the national rate to operate. Net the five, and Vermont ran about $2.2 billion above the cost-adjusted national rate over twelve years, for a system enrolling about 83,000 students. The figures are nominal — a 2013 dollar and a 2024 dollar counted alike — and the price adjustment is small for Vermont (within about 2% of the U.S. in every year). Teacher payroll is measured over fiscal 2013–2022, where the federal salary series ends; the other four lines run through 2024.
The Gazette has already published the outcome side, and it spans the same years. On the federal test, Vermont held leads of 9 to 12 points in 2013; by 2024 three of the four checks sat at or below the national average and the state was falling at close to twice the nation's pace on the grade-8 checks — most of the loss booked before the pandemic. On the Stanford scale, the median Vermont system fell from the 78th percentile of U.S. districts to the 40th. Chronic absence ran 18 to 21% before the pandemic and 27% in 2023-24 — above a national rate that has itself worsened to 24%. College continuation fell from 62% to 46% on Vermont's 16-month count, while 62% of American graduates enroll by the first fall — a shorter, stricter clock than Vermont's. Even graduation, long the state's safe number, reads 83% on the last federal count against a national 87% — only nine states lower. On no measure the Gazette can find did Vermont's national standing improve while the premium was being paid.
Nothing in a finance file assigns a cause, and this story does not. What the record settles is narrower, and it is enough to put three questions squarely:
Why does Vermont pay two dollars for every national dollar of school administration — a premium that district size does not explain for the principals' offices, that the rural states do not share, and that does not reach the people in front of the classroom — for results that have fallen to the national average?
Why does Vermont operate 1.8 times the nation's schools per student — paying half again the national rate to keep them open, staffing nearly half again as many teachers to run them, and still investing 38% below the national rate in renewing them — so that the repair bill now stands at $4.4 billion, about $53,700 per student, on buildings whose average condition index sits past the threshold where replacement is normally on the table?
And what did the $2.2 billion buy? Over the twelve years Vermont spent it, proficiency fell to the middle of the country, chronic absence rose past the national rate, and college continuation stopped clearing the national bar. If the premium was buying something the national comparison cannot see, the burden of naming it now sits with the people who asked for it.
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 that care about our community and are willing to do the work needed for all of our children to thrive.
The evidence is public. The Excess Budget tool carries every district's accounts — against its peers, the state, the rural states, and the country — so the questions can be asked with the numbers in hand.
No line here says administration caused the decline, or that cutting it would reverse one. Small rural systems are genuinely more expensive to run, the accounts shown are five lines of a budget and not the whole bill, and the outcome measures carry every caveat the Gazette attached to them in July. What the numbers do settle: the premium is real on three federal instruments; its largest piece is teacher staffing, not teacher pay, and it tracks the same small-schools structure as the buildings; and the results it accompanies are no longer above the country's. Above or below a national rate is a fact, not a verdict — but facts this large belong in the same sentence.
Method and caveats: dollar figures are Census F-33 line items — general administration (E08), school administration (E09), operations & maintenance of plant (V40), total capital outlay (TCAPOUT), per fall membership (V33) — one definition for district, state, and nation. Statewide Vermont figures sum every Vermont LEA row; national rates are re-expressed at Vermont's overall price level using BEA regional price parities (Vermont has averaged within ~2% of the U.S., so the adjustment is small); the twelve-year totals are nominal sums, fiscal 2013-2024. The 2.0× headline ratio is the Census Bureau's own published Table 8 for fiscal 2024, unadjusted; the conservative same-method, price-adjusted version is 1.83×. Schools-per-student divides NCES Digest school counts (2022-23) by fall-2022 membership; schools are not the same units as the 301 buildings Act 72 assessed. Teacher salary is the NCES/NEA state series, discontinued after 2021-22, against Vermont's AOE-derived average for the same year. Teacher payroll per student is average salary times teachers per student, from Vermont's AOE Teacher & Staff FTE report against the same fall membership; the national line is the NCES/NEA salary series divided by the published pupil-teacher ratio, and it ends at fiscal 2022 with that series (Vermont staffs about 9.5 teacher FTE per 100 students against the nation's 6.5). The $2.2 billion total nets five accounts over their own comparable years — teacher payroll over 2013–2022, the four F-33 lines over 2013–2024. Special-education personnel are the IDEA Section 618 Part B collection, school year 2023-24 (teacher and paraprofessional FTE, all ages), per fall-2023 public enrollment; the IDEA-served share is NCES Digest table 204.70 (2022-23). The quarter-of-the-surplus figure compares the special-education-teacher differential (1.75 vs 1.00 per 100 students, 2023-24) with the overall teacher differential (9.5 vs 6.5, fiscal 2022) — adjacent vintages, stated as approximate. Outcome figures and their methods are as published in "Vermont's yardstick moved." The account-level comparisons survived a six-vector adversarial review, documented on the Excess Budget page.
Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, Annual Survey of School System Finances (F-33), FY2013-FY2024 district files and FY2024 state summary Table 8; NCES Digest of Education Statistics tables 236.75 (per-pupil expenditure ratios), 216.70 (schools by state, 2023 ed.), 203.20 (enrollment by state, 2024 ed.), 211.60 (teacher salary, discontinued 2021-22), 204.70 (IDEA share of enrollment, 2022-23); IDEA Section 618 State Part B Personnel, SY2023-24 (data.ed.gov); BEA regional price parities; Vermont Act 72 statewide facilities assessment (2023); Vermont AOE Teacher & Staff FTE report; NAEP, Stanford Education Data Archive 2025.1, AOE attendance and postsecondary series as published in "Vermont's yardstick moved."
The Middlesex Gazette is a one-man paper, kept by a neighbor for his neighbors. A town is best governed when its doings are known in every kitchen — so here they are, set down plain and free of charge. Back to the front page →
The Gazette comes free by email — a note when there's town news worth knowing. Subscribe by email →