Vermont will have a new governor this fall, and it’s going to be a fifth grader.
The Secretary of State’s Office, a partner on Kids VT‘s Good Citizen Challenge, is offering a new civics program called Vermont’s Kid Governor. Fifth-grade students from around the state will launch classroom campaigns vying for the top executive seat.
Each participating school holds a primary election to nominate one student to run for kid governor. Candidates make a three-point platform around an issue such as more walk-to-school days or more local food in the cafeteria. “The teachers will work with the kids to help design something that fifth graders can actually achieve,” Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas said.
After the primary, each school’s candidate makes a video with their classmates. A committee of judges will use a rubric to score each video, and the top seven scorers will be on the final ballot. “One of those students will receive the most votes and become kid governor,” Copeland Hanzas said. The remaining six students still get to be involved; they’ll make up the cabinet.
Voting coincides with the actual election cycle, taking place in the fall. The seven candidates will have the opportunity to bus their classmates to the Statehouse for the inauguration in January.
The program started with the Connecticut Democracy Center in 2015, with the goal of teaching kids about the voting process. It’s already spread to Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Oregon and now Vermont.
“One of the things about becoming a voter is understanding how to vote but also understanding how to evaluate the candidates who are on the ballot,” Copeland Hanzas said. She hopes kids will not only learn how voting works but also develop important skills that will help them be civically engaged as adults.
Pam Fallon, a fifth-grade teacher in St. Johnsbury, spearheaded the program’s spread to Vermont. Her former class in Connecticut loved the program. She appreciated how teachers can decide how involved they want to get based on the class’ interest; they can just vote for kid governor, nominate one themselves or learn how to run a polling station. In Fallon’s Connecticut class, they even made campaign videos.
“It helped me to build that sense of democracy within the classroom, in not a bogus way — in a truly rigorous and relevant way,” Fallon said.
Find more information and learn how to get involved at vt.kidgovernor.org.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Rocking the Youth Vote”
This article appears in Kids VT, Back to School 2025.
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