What Happens Between Now And March 2028

Your town has a decision coming

July 30, 2026

In June of 2026, Vermont passed a law called Act 170.

You may have heard it forces school districts to merge. It does not.

You may have heard it changes how your taxes are figured. It does not, yet.

What it does is start a clock. At the end of that clock, in March of 2028, your town votes.

This piece covers what the clock is, what is on the table, and what to watch.

It does not tell you how to vote. Nobody can tell you that.

Think about two towns. One has a new school and more kids coming. One has a 60 year old building and half the kids it used to have.

Those two towns do not have the same right answer.

The short version

Act 170 makes every school district in Vermont sit down with its neighbors and study one question.

Should we become one district?

Every committee has to write a report. Every report has to show the numbers. Then voters decide.

That is it. No town is forced into anything. But no town gets to skip the conversation either.

The clock

• September 2026. Every district names a board member to a study committee.

• October 2026. The committees start meeting. The state hired eight people to guide them, seven for the regions and one to lead.

• September 2027. Every committee turns in its report. The report says whether a bigger district is a good idea or a bad one. And it shows the math behind that answer.

• February 2028. School boards review the reports and comment on them.

• March 2028. Town Meeting Day. Voters decide.

• Fall 2029. Any merger that passed takes effect.

Notice how much of this happens before you get a vote. The report is written a year and a half before the ballot. If you want to shape the numbers, the time is 2027, not 2028.

The law also suggested 20 groupings of districts as starting points. The guides can change them. The target is neighboring districts that add up to at least 2,000 students. Grade schools stay local. Middle and high schools get shared.

Find your grouping early. It tells you who you are about to be in a long conversation with.

The money on the table

Act 170’s real power is not legal. It is financial.

School buildings. This is the big one. A district that merges can get the state to pay up to 75 percent of the cost of a new or rebuilt school. A district that does not merge tops out at 30 percent.

Think about what that gap means. On a $30 million school project, 75 percent is $22.5 million from the state. Thirty percent is $9 million. The difference is $13.5 million, and it lands on local taxpayers.

If your town has an old, tired school building, that number is probably the single biggest thing on your 2028 ballot, whatever else gets argued about.

Old debt. A merged district can get 75 percent of its existing debt payments covered.

Planning money. There is a $900,000 fund for facilities planning grants.

Now here is the fair criticism, and you should hear it from someone who is not selling you a position.

The money rewards merging. It does not require saving. A group of districts can combine on paper and collect the building money. Then keep running the same number of buses, offices, and buildings underneath. Governance changes. Costs do not.

Whether that happens in your region depends entirely on what your committee actually proposes. Which is why reading the report matters more than reading the headlines.

The new regional offices

Set apart from all the merger talk, Act 170 created seven CESAs on July 1, 2026. The letters stand for Cooperative Educational Service Areas. Nobody says the long version.

Every district has to belong to one. Each CESA has to offer three things. Special education services, business and back office work, and help for districts thinking about combining.

The idea is to capture savings from sharing without needing a merger at all.

This is worth knowing because it changes the argument. Someone will say “we have to merge to share a special education director.” That may not be true anymore. The CESA is supposed to do that job.

The funding formula is still coming, just later

In 2025 Vermont voted to replace its whole funding system with a foundation formula. The state would decide what one student’s education costs, then pay that per student, plus extra for students who cost more.

Act 170 pushed the start date back to the 2029 to 2030 school year. And it added a condition. The Legislature has to receive the required reports and then act again before it happens.

So the formula is not settled. Consultants were due to report to lawmakers in December of 2026 on the hardest pieces.

• How much extra for special education?
• How much extra for tiny remote schools?
• How much extra for high school?
• How to handle career and technical education?

Those numbers are not small details. They decide which towns win and which towns lose.

What this means for your bill right now: nothing. Your tax rate for the next three years still runs on the old system described in Piece 2.

The thing that bites first

Everything above is 2028 and beyond. Here is what is already happening.

Remember the excess spending penalty from Piece 2. If a district spends above a set line, the money over that line gets taxed twice.

A separate law this year is walking that line down. To 115.5 percent of the state average, then 114.5 percent, then lower.

Nothing about a merger study changes that. Your district’s costs keep rising and the line keeps dropping. Business managers are already feeling this in next year’s budget.

If your board seems stressed about money in a year when nothing obvious changed, this is usually why.

One small change worth knowing

If the foundation formula takes effect, Act 170 puts a limit on schools that take publicly paid tuition students. They will not be able to charge more than what the sending district pays.

This matters mostly to towns without their own school that pay tuition elsewhere. If that is your town, ask about it.

What to actually ask

Take these to a committee meeting. Every one of them has a number for an answer, and any of them being met with a shrug tells you something.

• What is our building worth, what does it need, and what would we do differently at 75 percent state aid versus 30 percent?

• What is our student count doing over the next ten years? Not this year. Ten years.

• What exactly gets combined in this proposal? Offices only, or buses, buildings, and staff too? Ask for the list.

• What happens to my town’s tax rate under this plan, and under staying put? Both numbers. A committee that will only show you one is not showing you the whole picture.

• Which schools stay open, and who decides that later? A merger agreement can protect a building for a set number of years, or not. Find out which.

• What are we already getting from our CESA, and what would merging add on top of that?

• Who wrote the numbers in this report, and can I see the assumptions?

The bottom line

Act 170 does not close a school. It does not merge a district. It does not change a tax bill.

What it does is make every town in Vermont look hard at its own numbers, in public. Then it hands the choice to voters.

Some towns will come out of this better off merged. Some will come out better off alone. Both are real answers. Which one is yours depends on math that belongs to your district alone.

The towns that do well will be the ones that understood their numbers before March 2028. Not after.

You have until then. Use it.

Where to read the law yourself

Act 170 as enacted: https://legislature.vermont.gov/Documents/2026/Docs/ACTS/ACT170/ACT170%20As%20Enacted.pdf

The Agency of Education’s page tracking the process: https://education.vermont.gov/schools/school-governance/education-transformation

Dates and dollar figures come from the act itself. Check the current session before relying on any of them, because the 2027 Legislature can change these terms before committees report back, and probably will.