This commentary is by Jay Hachadoorian, a personal trainer who lives in Winhall.
My wife, Christina, and I are not the people you’d expect to write about Vermont education policy. We’re personal trainers from just outside New York City. We’re not policy wonks or lifelong Vermonters. We didn’t come here with a plan.
We came for a ski weekend in 2019, drove past a sign that said “The Mountain School at Winhall,” and Christina said it was her dream for our son to go there someday. Just based on the name. She had no idea how right she was.
When COVID-19 hit, we came to our Winhall property — which we’d purchased before the pandemic — thinking we’d stay a couple of weeks. Then New York City schools shut down, and Vermont schools stayed open — in person, masked and distanced, but open. Our son Christof was due to start kindergarten, and we needed to make a decision.
Here’s what we didn’t know at the time: Vermont has something called public tuitioning. In towns like Winhall that don’t operate their own schools, the town pays tuition for children to attend an approved school of the family’s choosing, including independent schools. We knew none of this. We just showed up and asked if they’d take our son, who had missed the neighboring town’s enrollment cutoff by five days. The Mountain School at Winhall said yes.
That yes changed our lives.
By the end of that first year, we weren’t going back to New York. Christof was thriving. My son is a high-energy kid, the kind who, in a New York City classroom, would probably have teachers calling us every other week about behavior. At the Mountain School, if he’s a little bouncy, a teacher might say, “Go run a lap and come back in.” Movement is built into the curriculum. Learning happens outdoors. With about 60 kids in the whole school, he’s not a number. He’s Christof.
We left our apartment in New York behind. We opened a small gym in Winhall. We had a second child. We became, in every meaningful sense, Vermonters — doing what a lot of Vermonters do, piecing together a life from several things: working at the ski mountain in winter, managing a rental, training clients and running a gym in New York remotely. The single biggest reason we stayed is that our son had a school that fit him perfectly.
Now that school and the system that made it possible are under threat. I want people to understand what’s really at stake, because I don’t think people outside rural communities like ours really grasp it.
This isn’t just about which building a kid sits in. In a place like Winhall, school choice is the connective tissue of community life.
I coach West River Soccer. The kids on that team come from several towns and several different schools. We often carpool. We cover for each other. Recently, I had six kids in my car heading to bounce on our trampoline before an after-school training class for kids at our gym. These kids aren’t just soccer teammates — they’re the friendships and networks that make rural life actually work.
If redistricting ultimately eliminates school choice, those kids will likely end up on buses going in opposite directions, 45 or 50 minutes each way. They won’t be able to make it to soccer practice. That means West River Soccer disappears, along with the carpool and our community.
You’re asking rural families to blow up everything they’ve built over generations and start over. You’re putting a 10-year-old on an hourlong bus ride every morning, then wondering why he can’t focus when he gets there. And you’re doing it in communities where the grocery store, the pharmacy and everything else are all in one direction. Sending kids in the other direction for school doesn’t just disrupt education. It breaks the daily logistics of family life in rural areas.
I know some people think families like mine are somehow gaming the system by accessing independent schools through public tuitioning. But consider: We bought a house, paid taxes, started a business, expanded our family and put down real roots here. We weren’t strategizing; we stumbled into this system, and it worked exactly as it’s supposed to. Vermont gained a family that invests in its economy and its community.
That is what Vermont says it wants. And public tuitioning is what made it possible.
My wife jokes that she manifested a global pandemic to get our son into the Mountain School at Winhall. The truth underneath the joke is simple: When we needed a school, Vermont had a system flexible enough to say yes. That flexibility is what needs to be protected — for our family, and for every family that comes after us.
