Board considers budget revisions, calls for new Waterbury members
March 17, 2024 | By Lisa Scagliotti Editor’s note: Waterbury Roundabout and The Valley Reporter have a community survey on the Harwood school budget vote. Results will be reported by both newspapers. Take the survey here.
Following a stinging defeat of the proposed 2024-25 school budget, the Harwood Unified Union School District School Board has so far met twice since the March 5 vote.
The group has elected new leaders — Ashley Woods of Warren as chair and Cindy Senning from Duxbury as vice chair — and held two sessions to discuss how to revise the budget with the goal of earning voters' approval at the ballot box this spring.
The second meeting since the Town Meeting Day defeat was Wednesday, March 13, an extra meeting in the board’s schedule to primarily focus on the budget. The board also held a closed-door executive session regarding labor negotiations in connection with the teachers’ union contract that expires at the end of June.
District Finance Manager Lisa Estler prepared a “budget reduction discussion” slide presentation for the board that lists four different reduced variations on the $50.8 million budget that voters rejected on Town Meeting Day.
Harwood is one of 30 school districts around Vermont where voters on March 5 failed to approve budgets for the coming school year. The vote for Harwood was 65% against the measure, 2,640 to 1,439.
Before the discussion began, Estler and Superintendent Mike Leichliter shared some new bad news: Additional expenses for 2024-25 have arisen, adding another $409,360 in spending that will need to be included/trimmed in whatever scenario the board adopts next. Of that, $98,000 was added due to the support staff union contract that was finalized recently; another $311,000 comes from a loss in federal grant funding that was anticipated for the coming school year due to new federal calculations of poverty rates in the district, Estler said.
The scenario slides break down the rate of increase over the current year’s budget, the accompanying school district tax rate, and the rate of increase before the town-specific Common Level of Appraisal calculations are made.
The new calculations also use a new “yield” figure that the state Agency of Education is recommending school districts use in calculating their revised budgets to bring to voters. It represents the dollar amount per pupil that the state’s share of education funding will cover. The new figure is $10,000 compared with $9,171 that the school board used when it adopted its original budget in January. A higher state yield value results in a lower tax rate in the final calculations, school officials noted.
Several scenarios presented
The reduction scenarios started with cutting $1 million that was originally budgeted to be put into the district’s Maintenance Reserve Fund. That was separate from the $535,000 surplus from 2023 that voters on March 5 approved to put into the maintenance fund. An additional $409,000 would be trimmed—to account for the new expenses since the March 5 vote—from regular operations and maintenance budgets, supplies, and technology expenses, Estler noted.
Eslter said she does not recommend redirecting the $535,000 from the 2023 surplus that voters approved for the maintenance fund because that would be complicated by the fact that it already involved an affirmative vote and would require a new question to voters to reverse or rescind that decision. Voters approved the surplus transfer by a vote of 2,556 to 1,497.
Each reduction proposal in the presentation includes the items in the previous ones, building on them to increase the proposed cuts.
The next three scenarios would include cuts to personnel. The first would trim the equivalent of three full-time positions ($312,000); the next would cut 13 full-time equivalent (amounting to $1.477 million); the final scenario proposed cutting a total of $4 million and relies on reducing staff by 22.5 full-time positions (just under $2.5 million).
Whereas the original failed budget called for an overall spending increase of 11.94% over this year’s budget of $45.4 million, Estler’s reduction scenarios called for spending increases dropping between 9.74% and 3.86%.
For comparison, between 2018 and 2024, school district budget increases have ranged from 2.45% to 6.5% (see chart in this Feb. 10 Waterbury Roundabout post).
In this slide, the failed budget is Scenario 1 with additional scenarios outlining various combinations of budget cuts. Source: HUUSD data.
Board discussion
Woods asked board members to consider the various scenarios to weigh in on what level of cuts they could support for a revised budget and what they think their communities would approve. “We don’t want to do this more than once,” she said of the revoting process.
Most board members admitted that the next budget they approve will likely need to reduce some staffing.
Board members asked questions of the administrators at the table including about ratios for school principals to students in individual schools. Leichliter said the statewide ratio is about one principal to 180 students.
Warren member Jonathan Young ticked off quick calculations that would reduce the number of principals in the district’s larger schools and even combine principal positions for smaller schools. “We’re going to be cutting positions. No matter what we do, that’s going to happen,” he said. “If we have to choose between cutting actual educators—people that are teaching the kids—and then therefore increasing class sizes, which increases the burden on those teachers … I would prefer to make the administrators take that strain than the teachers teaching the kids.”
Life LeGeros of Duxbury urged caution and disagreed that cutting principals would be wise. “We have to be very cautious when we’re looking at statewide maximums on paper,” he said. “This has nothing to do with how hard people work…. Really, it’s about the well-being and safety of our kids.”
Leichliter was asked about further cuts due to resignations and attrition. The failed budget already incorporated cutting 13 positions from attrition. He said any further resignations or retirements would be reviewed, but that some positions would need to be filled if they were jobs fulfilling required work. “Every position that comes up, we look at and determine whether that’s a position we can do without,” he said.
Board members also discussed how to engage the community before a new budget is adopted for a revote. Suggestions included making presentations at local select board meetings and holding a specific public informational meeting to get input from community members.
The board reached no consensus in this first go-round. Some said they needed more or different information; LeGeros said he thought the board should look closer at the possibility of redirecting the surplus from maintenance to the general budget.
New board member Steve Rosenberg of Moretown said he appreciated the slide in Estler’s presentation that breaks down each reduction scenario by tax impacts on three sample home values in each community. “I think this is what townspeople want to see,” he said.
In this slide, tax impacts are broken down for each budget reduction scenario based on three sample home values in each of the Harwood school district’s communities. Source: HUUSD data
As the discussion wound down, Estler added a reminder to the board about most of the cuts listed in the scenarios. “These are not permanent cuts,” she said. “These are temporary cuts. We’re pushing things off for one year.”
Woods wrapped up asking Estler for more detail on the scenario that cuts the most without reducing staff, and the first scenario that reduces the fewest positions. Summing up, she said, “This has been informative and depressing. We definitely have some different opinions. That’s good. We’re supposed to have different opinions. I think we are all feeling the pinch of how hard this is.”
Two action items
The Wednesday meeting was an extra budget session added to the school board’s regular schedule. There were two action items on the agenda pertaining to union contracts. One was an amendment to the recently ratified agreement for the support staff contract to clarify a section.
The other was a side letter to the current teachers’ union contract regarding notification for employment for the 2024-25 school year. Instead of the usual April 1 notification to teachers, the letter states that teachers would be notified within 30 days of a 2024-25 budget being approved by the voters, an acknowledgment of the delay caused by the budget defeat.
A date for the budget revote has not been set yet.
Recruiting Waterbury representatives
The school district last week posted an official call for volunteers to fill the two now-vacant seats on the school board representing Waterbury. Both Kelley Hackett and Marlena Tucker-Fishman ended their terms on Town Meeting Day. Neither ran for re-election and no one filed to get on the ballot or to run as a write-in candidate.
Town Clerk Karen Petrovic said there were 170 write-in votes cast on March 5, but none of the people voters wrote in received the needed 30 votes to win election.
The board has asked that those interested in the positions send a letter of interest to board Chair Woods and Superintendent Leichliter by March 27. They also include a short application that the Waterbury Select Board uses in screening applicants for town board and commission appointments to gather some general information about the applicants’ backgrounds and interests. The application is just for informational purposes, Leichliter stressed.
The district’s custom is for select boards in the town where there is a school board vacancy to interview interested candidates and to make a recommendation to the school board. The school board then votes to appoint members to the open seats. New members added under that process serve until the next March election. At that time the seat would be open for election for the remainder of the time left for its term, and the appointee may run for it or step down. Both of the Waterbury vacancies now are for full three-year terms.
The Waterbury Select Board meets on April 1 and would interview school board candidates then, based on this schedule. The school board’s soonest meeting after that would be April 10 when it would like to make the appointments, according to the announcement.
If the board does not receive any or enough applicants to fill both positions, the seats would remain vacant until potential candidates come forward. Waterbury currently has two other members whose terms are up in 2025 and 2026 respectively: Victoria Taravella and Jake Pitman. With the largest population of the Harwood communities, Waterbury has four seats on the school board; each of the other five towns has two.
The school board’s next regular meeting is Wednesday, March 27, at 6 p.m. in the Harwood library and online via Zoom and YouTube. Meeting recordings are available on YouTube and Mad River Valley Television.