Op-ed: Keep our schools to keep our town

By Carl Henshaw
©2026 Telegraph Publishing LLC

At a recent Chester Planning Commission meeting, Kellen Appleton and Allison Hopkins from the Mount Ascutney Regional Commission shared a statistic that stopped me cold. Chester’s average age is rising one year for every two that pass. At that pace, within 30 years, our average resident will be 65 or older.

The numbers confirm it. In 2020, Chester had 745 residents over 65 and only 532 under 18. Our median age climbed from 41.9 to 50.5 in just twenty years. For the first time in modern memory, we have more seniors than school-age children.

An aging population is one of the clearest signals of a community under strain. In any healthy society, we make a bargain: we care for the old through Social Security and Medicare. We care for the young through public schools. In between, working-age adults produce, build, raise families, and keep a town alive.

That balance is breaking here. Chester is losing children, and a major reason is housing constraint. Act 181 was designed to loosen land-use barriers and create housing where infrastructure supports it. The goal is not growth for its own sake. It is to give younger families a reason to move in—and to give older residents the option to downsize.

That is why I struggle with Act 73. Act 73 is presented as a path to efficiency through education consolidation. But even the state’s own redistricting task force reported it did not find evidence that mergers on this scale would reliably lower costs, improve outcomes, or expand equity. Vermont has been down this road before. An analysis of Act 46 found that merged and unmerged districts ultimately spent about the same—just in different ways.

And those analyses miss the soft costs.

In Chester, our schools are woven into daily life. Some kids walk. Some ride bikes. Many families have short drives. If consolidation pushes students farther away, the cost does not disappear. It shifts from the state ledger onto working families: longer drives, more fuel, more wear on vehicles, more lost time.

Meanwhile, we face a more immediate crisis. Chester’s GMUSD school budget—$19.34 million—failed at the polls in March. Superintendent Layne Millington has warned that substantial cuts would produce only small tax reductions. The district has already begun contemplating reductions in force. That means firing teachers.

If we start cutting teachers to squeeze a budget into place, we weaken one of the very things that makes a town attractive to new families. The enrollment data makes this vivid. Two Rivers SU has lost 22 percent of its students in five years — from 919 in 2020 to 721 in 2025. Chester Andover alone dropped from 241 to 211.

Cutting schools will not reverse that trend. It will accelerate it. If Vermont wants intelligent growth, it cannot invite housing development with one hand while undermining local schools with the other. Strong schools are not a side issue.

They are one of the core reasons families choose a community. Before we cut teachers in the name of efficiency, we should exhaust smarter alternatives:

• shared services,
• better sourcing,
• bulk purchasing,
• regional contracts, and
• creative partnerships that reduce costs without reducing quality.

Chester votes again on May 12. For many homeowners, the added cost is closer to the price of a fast-food breakfast each month than the financial catastrophe some fear. In return, we keep teachers in classrooms and preserve one of the strongest assets that still draws young families here.

Vote yes on the GMUSD budget. Our town’s future depends on it.

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Carl Henshaw, a member of the Chester Planning Commission and co-chair of the Chester Economic Development Commission, emphasizes that these opinions are strictly his own and do not reflect an official position of town government.