Best School Psychology Programs in Vermont Rankings for 2026

To work as a school psychologist in a Vermont public school, you need the School Psychologist license from the Vermont Agency of Education. This is the credential almost everyone in Vermont schools holds, and the requirements line up closely with the NASP national standard. You complete a specialist-level degree of at least 60 graduate semester hours, or a doctoral degree, from a program approved by the National Association of School Psychologists or the American Psychological Association. You finish a 1,200-hour supervised internship with at least 600 hours in a school setting, supervised by a credentialed school psychologist who has three years of post-degree experience. And unless your degree is doctoral, you pass the Praxis School Psychologist exam (#5403) at the qualifying score of 155.

Vermont licenses educators at two levels. You start at Level I, valid for three years, then move to Level II after three years of successful practice and documented professional learning. Applications run through the Vermont Licensing System for Educators (VLSE). There is also a clean alternative route: a Nationally Certified School Psychologist (NCSP) is treated as having met the knowledge and performance standards for the Vermont license, which is one more reason the NCSP is worth earning, especially if you train out of state.

Vermont keeps the school license separate from the psychology license, so it is worth being precise. The Agency of Education credential authorizes you to provide school psychological services in public schools: assessment, counseling, crisis response, and intervention design. It does not let you practice independently outside the schools. If you want a private practice, seeing families for evaluations or therapy outside a district, that is the Licensed Psychologist route through the Vermont Board of Psychological Examiners, part of the Office of Professional Regulation. It requires a doctoral degree in psychology, supervised experience, and a passing score on the national Examination for Professional Practice in Psychology (EPPP). Most Vermont school psychologists never pursue it and work entirely within the schools.

Vermont pays school psychologists below the national median, and there is no way to spin that honestly. The BLS May 2025 data puts the Vermont median at $82,820, against a national median of $95,990, a gap of about 13.7%. The range runs from roughly $61,940 at the 10th percentile to $105,920 at the 90th. Pay generally follows each district's certificated salary schedule, the same step-and-column scale that pays teachers, so it climbs with experience and graduate credits but starts modestly. One honest caveat in the other direction: outside the Burlington area, Vermont has no high cost-of-living premium like Boston, so your housing dollar can stretch further in the rural parts of the state, which softens the gap a little.

Location inside Vermont matters less than it does in bigger states, because the workforce is so small and there is essentially one metro. Burlington-South Burlington is the top-paying and largest-employing area for school psychologists in the state, with a median of $82,910 and roughly 80 of the state's positions, according to the BLS metro file. The rest of the jobs sit in the two rural regions the BLS tracks. The Northern Vermont nonmetropolitan area actually edges out Burlington on the median at $83,350 with about 50 positions, while the Southern Vermont nonmetropolitan area sits a bit lower at $80,400, also around 50 positions. In other words, the pay is fairly flat across the state, and the rural regions are not a pay cut so much as a different cost of living. The candid comparison is across the borders: school psychologists in New Hampshire and Massachusetts tend to earn more, which is one reason Vermont struggles to keep people. If salary is your single biggest factor, that gap is real and you should weigh it.

In a one-program state, choosing is less about ranking campuses and more about deciding whether to stay in Vermont, cross a border, or go online. Here is how the options sort out for the work you want to do.