A claim circulating before the August 11 vote holds that closing a school would cost nearby homeowners. The research on schools and house prices points somewhere else.
Several residents have raised a worry before the August 11 vote: that closing an elementary school would cost nearby homeowners. The research doesn't support the worry.
The difficulty in measuring what schools do to house prices is that good schools and desirable neighborhoods often appear together. Compare prices across districts and you are mostly measuring the neighborhoods.
The studies that carry weight compare houses on either side of a school attendance boundary — same street, same shops, same commute, different assigned school. Holding the neighborhood constant cuts the apparent school effect substantially. Kane, Staiger and Riegg, studying Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, found it was about a quarter of what the raw comparison implied.
What remains is a finding about quality, not address. The best-designed work puts it at 3 to 4 percent of a home's value for every standard deviation of test scores, a consensus that holds from Boston to England. In the one study that priced school quality and distance in the same model, moving from the district's 10th-percentile school to its 90th was worth ten to fourteen miles of distance. The authors call the larger estimate imprecise. The direction is not in question.
Proximity is worth far less. The entire premium for living close to a school is about 3 percent of a home's value close to a school, and it fades to nothing within a mile.
Washington Central has given up close to a full grade level since 2013 — the slide from the 86th to the 71st percentile of U.S. districts — roughly half a standard deviation as districts are measured. That is 1.5 to 3 percent of a home's value. House prices in the five towns have risen $6,000 to $15,000 less than they otherwise would have: the lower figure against a $400,000 house, the upper against the $490,000 median Middlesex recorded in 2025.
Reach is the difference. A closure would affect the houses within walking distance of Doty or Calais Elementary. The slide affects every house in Berlin, Calais, East Montpelier, Middlesex and Worcester, and has done for twelve years.
This is arithmetic, not an appraisal. The estimates come from suburban American and English markets; none exists for rural Vermont. Treat the dollars as a sense of scale.
What the research shows is narrow: if you are worried about property values, worry about what students learn, not which building they learn in.
Sources: Stanford Education Data Archive, district achievement estimates for Washington Central; Kane, Staiger and Riegg, "School Quality, Neighborhoods and Housing Prices: The Impacts of School Desegregation," NBER Working Paper 11347; Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics, occasional paper 29; Neil E. Metz, "Effect of Distance to Schooling on Home Prices," The Review of Regional Studies 45(2); Vermont Housing Finance Agency town-level median primary-home sale prices, derived from Property Transfer Tax records, calendar year 2025. The district's percentile trajectory is set out in full in the Gazette's Before August 11: What Washington Central Is Actually Deciding.
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