Students arrive at Brookside Primary School this morning for the first day of the school year. School district leaders are considering a consolidation scenario that would close the Waterbury school in the future. Photo by Lisa Scagliotti/Waterbury Roundabout Credit: Lisa Scagliotti/Waterbury Rounda bout This story by Lisa Scagliotti was first published in the Waterbury Roundabout on Aug. 26, 2026. DUXBURY — The recent listing of Cabot Creamery’s company headquarters in Waitsfield for sale for $2.95 million has caught the attention of Harwood school district leaders who are mulling a major school consolidation effort. The Harwood Unified Union School District School Board at its first meeting of the school year on Aug. 26 agreed to explore a significant consolidation of its seven schools to just three. It also directed its Building Use and Visioning Committee to draft a request for proposals to explore whether Cabot’s corporate office building adjacent to Mad River Park might be suitable to convert to an elementary school that would combine schools currently operating in four of the district’s six communities: Waitsfield, Warren, Fayston and Moretown.  The building committee met Aug. 18 for the first time since June and discussed the news that Cabot is looking to vacate and sell its office complex in Waitsfield. Several school board members and the superintendent had already toured the property and came away interested.   “It’s a nice site,” said Superintendent Mike Leichliter. “It’s not built as a school. It’s built as an office building, but structurally it’s a very good structure — primarily steel — a lot of light, a lot of windows. There would need to be some additional space consideration for things like a gymnasium, cafeteria, large group space and potentially some other classrooms.” School Board Chair Ashley Woods of Waitsfield said the need to modify the facility should not be an obstacle to the district exploring this well-timed opportunity.  “Definitely not perfect, but it’s a standing building in a really central location in the (Mad River) Valley, which — that right there was very exciting,” she said. “I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but I thought it was a really great thing that we should be looking at pretty thoroughly.” Cabot officials say the company is seeking to consolidate its administrative staff, and moving its 115 or so employees from the Waitsfield site is part of that plan. The company has not yet said where that would be. Owned by the Agri-Mark farm cooperative, Cabot Creamery employs over 1,000 workers in multiple production plants in Vermont, New York and Massachusetts, retail stores and a Vermont distribution facility.  Cabot has occupied the 32,000-square-foot Waitsfield office complex adjacent to the Mad River Park playing fields on Home Farm Way since 2014. The building on 7.5 acres originally was owned by Northern Power Systems. Vermont Public reported on the Cabot news in July.  Likewise, Harwood leaders this year have begun looking for ways the district might combine schools as a way to curb operating costs as pressure from the state increases. The state’s ongoing push to slow growth in education costs has resulted in multiple new laws passed in the past two years. Those measures have put into place new efforts for districts to explore merging and to find ways to collaborate to find operational savings.  Separate from the state-level steps, Harwood’s administrators and school board have been discussing how the district on its own might revamp operations to run on tighter budgets in the future. Cuts in the past few years have eliminated more than 10% of the district’s jobs, and district leaders say that trend cannot continue without education quality suffering.  The school board’s building committee in June floated a proposal to downsize from seven to three schools. That would mean replacing elementary schools in Moretown, Fayston, Waitsfield and Warren with one school. The scenario also would close Brookside Primary School in Waterbury, shifting those elementary students to Crossett Brook Middle School. Harwood Middle-High School would continue with additional middle-schoolers from Crossett Brook added.   At its Aug. 18 meeting, the building committee further dug into the consolidation concept. Committee Chair J.B. Weir, of Waitsfield, noted that the three-school scenario is very similar to one of a long list of options that the district received from Burlington architects at TruexCullins in 2025. One proposal at that time suggested the valley elementary schools combine at Waitsfield Elementary School. That location has since been ruled out, Weir said, due to building constraints and site issues including the potential for future flooding.  Still, the committee’s latest recommendation otherwise was very similar, with a location to be determined. Seeing potential  The superintendent said that Nick Managan, chief of staff at Cabot Creamery, approached him in July to discuss Cabot’s plans to sell the Waitsfield building and move staff out. “If the school district has any interest in having conversations, they would certainly be very interested in selling that building to the school district,” Leichliter said.  Given that the school board was not planning to meet until late August, Leichliter said, he contacted board leaders and a site visit was arranged. He and several board members — Weir, Woods and Vice Chair Cindy Senning, of Duxbury — visited the Waitsfield facility for a first look.  Woods said she was “totally surprised” to get the news about the Cabot building. “It was really exciting to go through it and see the potential,” she said.  Senning agreed. “The central location piece of it is excellent. And the building’s quite lovely. There’s a lot of light. … It’s like an office building, but it’s not like an office building,” she said. The superintendent said that combining four elementary schools into one would require a new school that could accommodate about 450 students.  Weir stressed that no one has begun to estimate any costs connected with using the Cabot property as a future school.  Analysis needed The committee members acknowledged the long road ahead for decision-making on whether and how to consolidate district schools. Analysis is needed to compare the costs of merging schools and upgrading the facilities that would remain against the costs of continuing to operate the current facilities. Other factors such as class sizes, staffing and logistics all need review.  Along the way, the board members and administrators stressed the importance of involving community members by sharing information and getting feedback.  Weir said that if the full board agrees to pursue the committee’s recommendation, the building committee would work with the board’s public outreach committee to schedule public meetings. “Certainly it is the goal to get out there as much as possible and work this through with our towns,” he said.  School board member Macon Phillips of Warren, who was attending the committee meeting, commented on the challenges ahead in keeping the public informed and involved. “The public interest isn’t focused on the feasibility of a new site particularly,” he said. “It’s about the necessity of this kind of change.” Before the community can debate details of a significant consolidation, people will need more information, Phillips said. “I don’t fully understand the cost of the status quo. … We should be able to show people why this is a better option than doing nothing.” Harwood Finance Director Lisa Estler said she is prepared to put together financial forecasts using known data and current state policy that dictates tighter restrictions on how much district budgets may grow before they trigger financial penalties.  Community feedback  At least a dozen members of the public logged into the Aug. 18 building committee meeting via Zoom. Viewer Robert Perry said he’s a property tax payer in Warren, Waitsfield and Burlington who supports the current push to slow down the growth in education costs in the state.  “The people of Vermont want this change. Vermont is increasingly unaffordable, and the education costs are driving that unaffordability,” Perry said. “While the board should have acted years ago to deal with this structural problem of too much infrastructure and too few students, I’m really happy that now you’re actually paying attention to this and making some plans.” Perry, however, questioned the proposed three-school scenario before the Cabot facility was discussed. “Building a new school for a declining population — that doesn’t seem to make any sense either. So, I don’t know why you don’t pick a more incremental approach.”  Matt Lillard asked about the status of needed repairs and upgrades at Harwood Union High School. He requested that any proposals for future consolidation also address building needs there. After a failed bond in 2021 that would have paid for major upgrades at Harwood, a renewed effort in 2023 to focus on renovations in excess of $60 million at the middle-high school was shelved after voters rejected the district’s annual budget, prompting multiple revotes in spring 2024.  Board member Steve Rosenberg from Moretown chairs the school board’s outreach committee and shared feedback from local residents that he’s received over the summer with the building committee. Comparing costs of merging schools with the status quo was high on the list, he said. Other concerns he’s heard include whether bonding to pay for consolidation will trigger state financial penalties and whether consolidating will allow the district to bring back programs it has recently cut. Local residents want to know the impact on bus ride times and staffing levels if schools are combined, Rosenberg said.  There’s also “worry that towns that no longer have elementary schools will be less attractive to the young families we want to move into our towns — where there’s one winner town and several loser towns as a result of consolidation,” he said. Committee Chair Weir nodded as he listened to the list. “Those are all questions that we hope to have answers to sooner rather than later. I would at least add that our overarching goal, no matter what, is to make sure we’re providing our kids with the best education we can get them both in and out of the school, whether it’s on the soccer fields, on the stage, in the music room, or in the classroom.” The Harwood school board held its first regular meeting of the 2026-27 school year on Aug. 26. Several members of the public attended to plead that the board consider cost-cutting measures that don’t involve closing schools.  Moretown resident, former school board member and educator Peter Langella challenged the notion of closing schools, asking, “What if we treated our community schools as assets instead of liabilities?” He suggested an overall redesign of the district’s programming before closing schools. “There are so many intelligent and compassionate people in this room, and throughout this district, so please don’t say there are no other options,” he said.  “Help me understand how outfitting an entirely new giant elementary school building fixes our current budget crisis,” Moretown resident Sasha Bianchi told the board. “We have to think outside of this box that we’ve been bouncing around in for almost a decade.” Board members in their discussion later in the meeting acknowledged that exploring the Cabot facility is just the first of what will likely be multiple options they will consider going forward. But board Chair Woods said that the potential to improve an existing building rather than start from scratch gives the elementary consolidation proposal an attractive starting point. “This building has opportunity that we can’t ignore,” she said. Read the story on VTDigger here: Harwood district leaders eye Cabot Creamery’s Waitsfield complex as a possible future school site. ...read more read less