Vermont’s School Choice Law Draws New Residents Who Came for Skiing, Stayed for Education
Vermont’s public tuitioning system — a little-known school choice policy that allows families in towns without their own schools to direct public funds toward approved institutions, including independent schools — is drawing and retaining new residents in ways state policymakers may not have anticipated.
Jay Hachadoorian, a personal trainer who relocated to Winhall with his wife Christina and their son Christof, says the family’s decision to leave the New York City area permanently was shaped almost entirely by their experience with Vermont’s education model.
An Accidental Discovery
The Hachadoorians first visited Winhall for a ski weekend in 2019 and purchased a property there before the pandemic. When New York City schools closed during COVID-19 and Vermont schools remained open — operating in person with masking and distancing protocols — the family faced a crossroads. Christof was about to start kindergarten, and returning to the city was no longer certain.
What the family did not know when they arrived was that Winhall, like several Vermont towns that do not operate their own school buildings, participates in a public tuitioning arrangement. Under that system, the town pays tuition for resident children to attend an approved school of the family’s choosing. The Hachadoorians had no prior knowledge of the policy — they simply walked into the Mountain School at Winhall and asked whether their son could enroll.
He had missed the enrollment cutoff for the neighboring town’s school by five days. The Mountain School accepted him anyway.
Small School, Different Approach
With an enrollment of roughly 60 students, the Mountain School operates on a model that integrates outdoor learning and physical movement into the daily curriculum. For a high-energy child who might have struggled in a conventional urban classroom, Hachadoorian says the environment made a decisive difference. Teachers respond to restlessness by sending students outside for brief activity breaks rather than treating it as a discipline problem.
By the end of that first school year, the family had decided not to return to New York.
Vermont’s reading and curriculum reforms in recent years have drawn attention to the state’s broader approach to elementary education, but the tuitioning system represents an older and distinct strand of Vermont education policy — one rooted in the practical reality of rural communities too small to sustain their own school buildings.
Policy With Personal Consequences
Vermont’s public tuitioning statute has existed in various forms for well over a century, and the state has faced ongoing legal and legislative debate over which types of schools qualify for public funds. For families like the Hachadoorians, however, the policy’s effects are straightforward: it enabled a family with no prior connection to Vermont to put down roots in a rural community, drawn not by tax incentives or remote-work subsidies, but by a school that fit their child.
As Vermont and other rural states grapple with population decline and demographic challenges, the Hachadoorian story illustrates how education infrastructure — and the flexibility built into a school choice framework — can function as an unexpected tool for community retention and growth.