Mount Abraham superintendent urges state standards, construction aid to address school-size pressures

Patrick Green, superintendent of the Mount Abraham Unified School District, told the Vermont House Committee on Education on March 19, 2025, that the state needs legislative standards on school size and targeted construction aid to preserve course offerings and improve equity while reducing costs.

Green said his district projects about 375 high school students and about 80 middle school students next year and that, despite offering a breadth of courses, smaller secondary schools are losing classes and will see further program reductions. "School size is one of the most impactful factors in delivering equitable, high quality educational opportunities for students in a cost effective manner," Green said.

He told the committee that fiscal pressure has already led his district to phase out middle-level world language in fiscal year 2026 and that the district's FY26 spending target required more than $2,000,000 in reductions. "Maintaining a breadth of offerings requires us to run courses with low enrollment, sometimes fewer than 10 students," Green said, adding that small secondary-school class sizes can raise cost per pupil and push up local tax rates.

Green said elementary schools face different but related problems: grade-level enrollments that swing widely year to year force repeated reconfiguration, create single-teacher "singleton" classrooms and increase part-time positions. He gave a specific example: one second-grade class in his district has eight students — seven girls and one boy — and the district chose to keep a smaller-than-desired class instead of combining grades in a way that would exceed their preferred maximum. He estimated that operating that small school with its current grade configurations costs about $200,000 more in classroom instruction than a higher-occupancy configuration would.

Those dynamics, Green told lawmakers, make it harder to staff full-time positions such as nurses, counselors and interventionists and increase what he described as "rounding up" in staffing formulas, where part-time FTEs are rounded up or down in ways that can either shortchange services or raise costs.

To address those problems, Green recommended a multistep, state-led approach: first define a vision for the minimum program every secondary and elementary school should provide; from that standard, calculate the minimum enrollment needed to deliver that program cost-effectively; and then follow with legislation and targeted school construction aid where needed. "If we don't define that, then I'm not sure what we are reducing for or towards," he said.

Green said some regions could absorb students with little or no new construction, while other areas would need significant building work. He urged the committee to explicitly define exceptions for "small by necessity" districts where geography or isolation justify smaller schools and to provide state support for towns that lose a school to study alternative uses for vacated buildings.

Committee members asked about local governance barriers and implementation. Green said removing town veto provisions in articles of agreement would reduce but not eliminate political obstacles: "We would definitely still be held up, but it would not be to the same level," he said, describing earlier attempts in his district that led one town to withdraw from a cooperative over repurposing proposals.

Lawmakers asked about classroom licensing, grade configurations and prekindergarten. Green said his district runs a small pre-K program of about 35 students in one building and has considered moving central office and pre-K into vacated space to increase utilization. He cautioned that expanding district-run pre-K could unintentionally pressure private early-childhood providers and noted he had not analyzed recent home-schooling trends for his district.

Green said superintendents' local solutions alone will be too slow to achieve statewide scale: "Any sort of school reduction is only likely to happen at the scale that's needed through legislation," he said. He recommended convening a nonpartisan group with geographic expertise — compared to a base-closing commission — to translate statewide standards into decisions about which buildings to operate.

The testimony combined programmatic examples, budget figures and operational details Green said should guide lawmakers as they consider establishing class-size or school-size minima, aligning licensure to grade-configuration changes, and funding construction or repurposing to allow districts to consolidate where appropriate.

Green closed by urging the committee to pair any consolidation expectations with construction aid and planning support so towns losing schools could repurpose buildings rather than letting them deteriorate.