Nearly a quarter of Vermont’s public schools have not tested for radon, a cancer-causing gas, despite a state law passed in 2021 that required them to do so. A memo from the state auditor’s office, released in February, found that nearly one in four schools had still not completed testing by the end of January, seven months past the mandatory deadline.
The findings point to a law with serious structural gaps. The 2021 mandate required radon testing but did not require schools to report results to the state, leaving officials with little ability to track compliance. The law also provided no funding for the testing itself, a problem that became acute in districts already stretched thin.
In Winooski, school officials cited the estimated $20,000 cost as the reason testing never happened. In Orange Southwest schools, the explanation was starker: radon testing “just didn’t happen,” according to a district official. At Brighton Elementary School in the Northeast Kingdom, testing eventually revealed elevated radon levels, but mitigation wasn’t completed for nearly a year.
Radon is an odorless, colorless gas that forms when radioactive elements in bedrock and soil decay. It accumulates to dangerous concentrations inside buildings and, with long-term exposure, significantly raises the risk of lung cancer. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency identifies radon as the second-leading cause of lung cancer in the country, trailing only smoking, and the leading cause among non-smokers. Students, staff, and families in schools that skipped testing have no way of knowing whether they have been breathing elevated concentrations of this gas.
The auditor’s memo also tracked schools where testing did occur and revealed radon levels above 4 picocuries per liter of air, the EPA’s threshold for recommending remediation. Even that threshold carries risk, and concentrations below it are not considered entirely safe.
One legislator who helped draft the 2021 law acknowledged the failures directly. After the auditor’s memo was released, the legislator told reporters that lawmakers “didn’t do the due diligence” when they wrote the statute. That admission, while candid, does little to protect students currently sitting in classrooms that have never been tested.
The pattern here is familiar: legislatures pass health and safety requirements without the enforcement mechanisms or funding necessary to make them work. A mandate without reporting requirements is essentially voluntary. A requirement without funding asks under-resourced districts to bear costs they cannot absorb. Vermont’s radon law had both problems built in from the start.
The timing of this story carries additional weight. Vermont lawmakers are currently weighing whether to eliminate a state program that tests schools for PCBs, a class of chemicals linked to cancer and other serious health conditions, because of the program’s cost. Cutting that program while simultaneously confronting the failure of the radon testing mandate sends a troubling message about how seriously the state treats environmental health risks in its schools.
For schools that do find elevated radon levels, Vermont law still does not require them to mitigate. Most schools with high readings have chosen to address the problem voluntarily, but that choice remains discretionary. A child’s exposure to a known carcinogen should not hinge on the goodwill of a school board or the availability of a budget line.
Radon is not a new or poorly understood threat. The science connecting it to lung cancer is well established, and testing technology is affordable and widely available. What Vermont lacked was not information or resources but political will to design a law that actually worked. Legislators wrote a mandate and then walked away from any mechanism that would make it meaningful.
The auditor’s memo has now forced that gap into public view. The next question is whether Vermont legislators respond with substantive fixes, mandatory reporting, state funding, mitigation requirements, or whether the revelation quietly disappears once the news cycle moves on. Students in Vermont schools deserve better than a law that looked good on paper while leaving them exposed.
