Vermont Act 46 School Consolidation and the Rise of Homeschooling

Vermont's homeschooling rate nearly tripled between 2019 and 2024 — from 2.6% to 6.66% of all Vermont students. That's one of the steepest rises in the country during a period when national homeschooling was already growing. Several forces drove it, including COVID-era disruption and a growing preference for educational flexibility. But one factor specific to Vermont played a significant background role: Act 46 and its aftermath.

What Act 46 Did

Vermont's Act 46, passed in 2015, was a school governance reform law designed to reduce the number of independent school districts in the state. Vermont had — and still has — a striking number of small, locally governed schools for its population. Many towns have their own school boards, their own superintendents, and their own elementary schools serving a few dozen students. Act 46 used a combination of financial incentives and governance mandates to push these independent districts to merge into larger supervisory unions.

The stated goal was efficiency. Vermont's rural demographics mean school populations are declining. Consolidating districts, the theory went, would reduce administrative duplication, allow shared services, and put more money into classrooms.

The implementation created significant friction. Many small Vermont towns resisted mergers fiercely. Community identity, local governance, and proximity to school were deeply held values. Towns that had maintained an elementary school in their village for generations saw it threatened by merger into a district where their children would be bused somewhere else.

What the Yale Study Found

A widely cited 2019 study by Yale researchers examined whether Act 46 delivered its promised savings. The findings were sobering: the consolidations did not produce the financial savings the state projected. Instead, they found evidence that merged districts experienced salary leveling — teachers in lower-paying merged districts received raises to match the higher-paying partner districts — and increased transportation costs as students were bused longer distances to fewer schools.

The promised efficiencies in administrative overhead were largely offset by these new costs. The study's conclusion was that Act 46's fiscal case was, at minimum, weaker than proponents claimed — and in some cases, consolidation appeared to have increased per-pupil costs rather than reduced them.

This finding resonated with families in affected communities who had opposed consolidation on principle. It validated the concern that the disruption to their local schools wasn't even achieving the goal it was justified by.

How Act 46 and Homeschooling Connect

The connection between Act 46 and Vermont's homeschooling growth is not a direct causal chain — there's no single moment where the legislature passed a school consolidation bill and families immediately turned to home study. The relationship is more diffuse.

Several patterns emerge from conversations in Vermont homeschool communities:

Loss of the neighborhood school. When an elementary school that parents trusted and chose their home's location around was merged into a larger school 20 or 30 minutes away, the value proposition of public school changed. Families who might have stayed in the system through the elementary years instead evaluated alternatives. For some, the calculation shifted toward homeschooling.

Changes in school culture. Merged schools don't always maintain the culture of their predecessor schools. A small-town Vermont school might have had strong outdoor education integration, a particular approach to project-based learning, or a close-knit community dynamic. When it merges with a larger district, those elements may or may not survive. Families who valued those specific characteristics sometimes found them gone.

Transportation burden. For rural Vermont families, a 40-minute bus ride each way is not a small imposition on a young child's day. When consolidation significantly lengthened commutes, some families began weighing whether home study was actually less disruptive than three-hour daily bus rides.

Trust erosion. The Act 46 process was contentious. Towns that voted against mergers were sometimes overridden. For families who fought consolidation and lost, that experience sometimes reduced their trust in the public school system broadly — not because the school itself changed immediately, but because the governance relationship had.

Vermont's Home Study Growth in Context

The 2.6% to 6.66% growth in Vermont homeschooling from 2019 to 2024 is striking regardless of cause. Vermont's overall student population has been declining — the state has fewer school-age children each year. Homeschooling's share of a shrinking pie growing that rapidly reflects real behavioral change, not statistical artifact.

COVID-era school closures clearly accelerated the trend — many Vermont families who went remote in 2020 and 2021 never returned to conventional schooling. But the underlying conditions that made homeschooling viable and attractive — Vermont's relatively light regulatory touch, the strong VHEN advocacy organization, the availability of dual enrollment through the Community College of Vermont, and a culture that had long valued alternative educational approaches — predate COVID.

Act 46's role is probably best understood as one contributor among several: it frayed some families' attachment to their local public school at a moment when alternatives were becoming more accessible and culturally acceptable.

What Your Options Are If Consolidation Affected Your District

If you're in a Vermont town whose school changed significantly through Act 46 consolidation — whether through merger, school closure, or governance change — and you're evaluating whether to continue in the public system, you have several options:

Vermont home study. The option covered throughout this site. Governed by 16 V.S.A. § 166b, simplified significantly by the 2023 Act 66 update. Vermont is a relatively manageable state to homeschool in: no curriculum approval, no annual submission of lesson plans, five flexible assessment options, and a strong support network through VHEN.

Vermont's tuition towns. About 90 Vermont towns have no public secondary school of their own. Students in those towns receive a publicly funded tuition voucher to attend a school of their choice — public or approved independent school. If you live in a tuition town, this is worth investigating before assuming homeschooling is the only alternative to a school you're unhappy with.

Independent school. Vermont has a significant number of independent schools — not charter schools, which Vermont doesn't have, but genuinely private institutions including Waldorf schools, Montessori schools, and traditional preparatory schools. Costs vary widely. Some Vermont independent schools participate in the tuition town program.

Hybrid arrangements. Vermont's integration law (16 V.S.A. § 563(24)) allows home study students to take up to two courses at their local public school. Vermont's Flexible Pathways Initiative (16 V.S.A. § 941) allows high school-age home study students to take free college courses at CCV or Vermont State University. A hybrid approach — some home study, some public school courses, some dual enrollment — is legal and increasingly common.

Starting Vermont Home Study After Act 46 Disruption

Families who decide to homeschool after a consolidation experience often come in with a specific frustration: they liked what their school was, not what it became. That's a useful frame for designing a home study program. What did your child's old school do well that you want to preserve? What's missing from the merged school that you want to build? Vermont gives you the freedom to design around those answers.

The legal steps are straightforward: file a Notice of Enrollment with the AOE, wait for acknowledgment, then send the withdrawal letter to the new school. The Vermont Legal Withdrawal Blueprint provides the complete paperwork sequence, with templates for the Notice of Enrollment checklist, the withdrawal letter, and the records request — organized around Vermont's specific 10-day waiting period and the current Act 66 legal framework.

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