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Cabot had fourteen school districts. They were numbered from one to fifteen, but District 13 never existed, probably because of superstition. Numbers were assigned as communities in the town grew. When the student count dwindled, the school was closed and the children went to whatever school was nearby.
Districts were spaced so that no child had to walk more than about two miles. Parents were taxed to support the schools, paying in cash or in firewood, wheat, janitor service, or supplies. Teachers usually "boarded around," living with nearby families while they taught. Female teachers had to be single and were paid only about half what men earned; girls as young as fifteen or sixteen sometimes taught every grade in a single room, arriving early to fire up the potbelly stove. Schools closed in severe weather and mud season, during haying, sugaring, and harvest, and whenever epidemics of flu, measles, whooping cough, or smallpox swept through and families were quarantined at home.
District 1 — Cabot Plain
The town's first school district sat originally on Shepherd's Hill, where John Gunn taught in the summer of 1792. The first building was a log cabin opposite today's cemetery; it was later moved to a pie-shaped lot at the junction of the Bayley-Hazen Road and Cabot Plains Road. School kept only about three months a year, yet at one time some fifty scholars crowded in. Discipline was strict — the unruly were "regulated by the big ferrule" or a fire-toughened birch switch — and lunch was often barley cakes and potatoes roasted in the ashes of the great stone fireplace. A new school was built in 1929 at Cabot Plains Road and Bolton Road on land donated by Aaron Bolton; it closed in 1948 and was sold in 1950 for $1,000. It is now a private seasonal residence.
District 2 — Center of Town
Formed in 1793 at the geographic center of town, District 2 built a log school about 1796 that later burned and was replaced. In the town's brief years as Cabot's hub of commerce and government, records suggest as many as ninety students — perhaps across more than one building. By 1840 many families had moved downhill to the "upper village" on the banks of the Winooski.
District 3 — Lower Cabot
An early school here was replaced about 1880 by a building erected by local builder True Town. Among the first in town to have individual desks, window shades, and a steeple with a bell, it produced a remarkable number of notable citizens — among them businessman Burnham Coburn; Goddard College president Royce Pitkin; Middlebury dean of English Wilfred E. Davison; surgeons Carleton and Gerald Haines; and educator Abbie Smith Babitt, who earned a PhD from Columbia. The school closed in 1948 despite a town vote to keep it open. Its bell, once stolen, was found years later in a mill pond and returned to the steeple.
District 5 — Merritt (South Walden) School
About three miles from the village on the South Walden Road, the old school later housed members of the Amadon family after a new building went up across the road. Electricity arrived in 1940; the school closed in 1943 and the building sold in 1947 for $500.
District 6 — Read School (Boyle's)
District 6's early building — where young Zerah Colburn attended school briefly — fell into disrepair and was replaced around 1885; that new building burned in 1918 and was not rebuilt. The few remaining children — from the Smith and Gamblin families — went to the village school. The Read School stood on land later owned by Velma Urban Smith, who was responsible for placing a marker at the site on the present Urban Road.
District 7 — East Cabot
Built around 1886 and similar in design to Cabot's other mid-1800s schools, the East Cabot School was overseen by Walter Abbott, a school director at just seventeen. It closed in 1948 and sold at auction in 1949 for $1,025; it is now a private residence.
District 8 — The Village School
The first village school was a one-room log cabin where the Cabot United Church is now. In 1845, a two-story school was built immediately north of that spot and was in use until 1863, when it was replaced by a larger two-story building where the present school is now. That school came to include a two-year high school after 1909; it graduated its first four-year class in 1920. Before that, students seeking further education were tuitioned to Montpelier Seminary, Goddard Seminary in Barre, and academies in St. Johnsbury and Peacham. In 1938 it was torn down and the present school's main building was built. This new school building was praised as being "exemplary" in a nationwide survey. It has been expanded over the years to include satellite classrooms and a large gymnasium in 1971, and a Performing Arts Building in 2008–09.
District 10 — Southwest Hill (Burnap School)
On Southwest Hill, "Burnap" School usually held about a dozen children — from the Wheeler, Lyndes, Tebbetts, Carpenter, Lyford, Hopkins, Powers, and Dwinell families — until it closed in 1914. Remnants of the foundation may survive near the corner of Tebbetts and Ducharme Roads.
District 11 — Walbridge School
Located on what is now Route 215 (the Walden Road) and shown on an 1870 map, the Walbridge School served for at least fifty years before closing in 1916, when its children were transported to the Village School. In 1972 the town sold the building for $50 to Richard Spaulding, a Walbridge descendant, who moved it to Cabot Plain — directly across the road from the site of the town's very first school on the Bayley-Hazen Road.
District 12 — South Cabot ("Hookerville")
South Cabot still has two school buildings standing. The older, unused after 1929–30, later hosted PTA dances to help fund its successor. The newer school, built by Bud Bruce in 1930, enrolled thirty-three students in 1933 and was the last one-room school in Cabot to close, in 1954. Both school houses are now privately owned.
District 14
The Whittier Hill school was built before 1895 and closed around 1908; no photographs survive, and no trace remains on Whittier Hill Road.
District 15
Petersville was organized in 1858 by selectman Peter Lyford — hence the name — at the request of the town select board. The community consisted of four dwellings and a sawmill on Molly's Brook. Lyford oversaw having the school built, and it operated until 1910. In 1926 a large dam was built to create Molly's Falls Reservoir, and the buildings, including the school, were either demolished or moved before the valley was flooded.