What-if tool

See every step of the math behind a district's student count and tax rate — with a source for each one. Change a number and watch every step change with it.

Which numbers to use

Load a district (optional)

Prefills the grade counts below from a district's stated budget, filling any gap with the state's AOE count. Each field is labelled with its source, and you can edit any of them.

District or supervisory union

Budget year

How many students

The average number of students, by grade group, for two years. This count is called average daily membership. A rule in the law decides how many of those years actually count.

FY2025 students by grade

FY2025 prekindergarten

FY2025 kindergarten through grade 5

FY2025 grades 6 through 8

FY2025 grades 9 through 12

FY2026 students by grade

FY2026 prekindergarten

FY2026 kindergarten through grade 5

FY2026 grades 6 through 8

FY2026 grades 9 through 12

Students who add extra weight

State-placed students (full-time count, most recent year)

Students in families at or below 185% of the poverty line

Students learning English

Sparsity & small schools

Persons per square mile in the district

Small school name (optional)

That school's average two-year enrollment

Spending and the town

Before the spending below is turned into a tax rate, it is spread across the district's students — first counted, then weighted. Here is that count, built live from the numbers above.

Education spending ($)

Common level of appraisal (how close town values are to real sale prices)

Excess spending adjustments (optional)

Capital reserve fund draws more than 5 years old ($)

150% of this is added to the spending compared against the excess spending threshold (24 V.S.A. § 2804(b)). Leave blank if the district has none.

Principal & interest on bonds approved before July 1, 2024 ($)

Excluded from the excess spending comparison (16 V.S.A. § 4001(6)(B)). This lowers only the amount over the threshold, not the district's base spending. Leave blank if none.

The State's figure

Statewide average spending per student (set by the Secretary of Education)

Under 32 V.S.A. § 5401(12), a district's per-pupil spending above 118% of this statewide average counts as excess spending, which raises the homestead tax rate. The Secretary of Education determines the figure — the statewide average district per-pupil education spending, increased by inflation — on or before November 15 each year, and it is published by the Vermont Agency of Education. Enter that published number here. When a fiscal year's figure has been recorded in the tool's parameters, selecting that year fills this in for you, and you can still override it.

Result

Show the work

Every step of the math, in order, with what it did and why. This is the tool's own work shown directly — not a separate write-up that could drift away from the real math.

Laws and sources used

What we assumed

The guesses this what-if starts with, and why each one starts where it does. You can change every one. One thing to know: when schools combine, the tool assumes no cuts by default. Any cut you see is one you chose and can see — not one the tool made for you.

What this tool will not do

It does not rank what-ifs, score them, or call any result a "saving." Changes are shown as plus-or-minus numbers, both ways. You can set busing costs to go up as well as down, because combining schools often makes bus routes longer. A tool that only let that number go down would be building in an answer instead of showing the real choices.

Some things are left out on purpose and are not part of the math: one-time moving costs, building aid, old-debt perks, and exact bus-route planning. If a job is assumed to be combined but no salary is given, the tool reports the effect as unknown — not as zero.