TONIGHT: School board to review budget scenarios ahead of March 5 vote
February 14, 2024 | By Lisa Scagliotti Update Feb. 15: The Harwood school board decided to not change its budget proposal for the Town Meeting Day ballot. The budget voters will be asked to support will result in school property tax increases of 30%-40%. A separate story on the Feb. 14 board meeting will be posted soon.
The Harwood Unified Union School District School Board meets tonight to review fresh calculations from the administration to inform their discussion of how to present a proposed budget for the 2024-25 school year to the voters.
Changes to the state education funding formula are moving ahead in Montpelier with the goal of eliminating a problematic part of the new funding law, Act 127, before Town Meeting Day.
The measure in bill H.850, on the legislative calendar for a House floor vote today, would give school boards across Vermont the option to revise their proposed budgets to bring to voters, although making changes would mean delaying votes to dates after March 5 and before April 15.
In Harwood’s case, the school board on Jan. 31 adopted a budget of $50.8 million to put on the March ballot. That was when the board thought the district’s tax rate would be capped based on the new state formula. Under that scenario, tax increases per town in the district would have ranged from 16.6% to 25.8% (approximately $300-$500 per $100,000 in assessed property value).
The cap has proved problematic and lawmakers are now moving forward to pass revisions to the formula without the cap.
Harwood’s budget under the revised state rules in H.850 would trigger tax increases ranging from 30% to 40% across its six communities (approximately $575 to $795 per $100,000 in property value).
District administrators have been crunching numbers for the past several days to include in a presentation for tonight’s meeting that will look at a variety of scenarios the board might consider if it decides to offer voters a different spending plan.
Despite the detailed breakdowns, however, Superintendent Mike Leichliter said the recommendation he and Finance Manager Lisa Estler are making to the board is to proceed with the March 5 vote on the budget as planned. The information laying out alternate scenarios would be to reference in the event the board needs to revisit the budget after Town Meeting Day.
“The administrative recommendation is to move forward with the question as warned. Lisa [Estler] and I know that we will get the biggest turnout at Town Meeting Day,” Leichliter said in an email to Waterbury Roundabout. “Before we start making large cuts to the budget we feel that the public has a right to weigh in and the best way to do that is to put out the question when we know we will get the biggest turnout. The board has been transparent about what has been warned. We have a level service budget which includes reducing 13 positions through attrition/turnover/transfer. It also includes money for identified capital maintenance needs. The vote and percentages will help inform district decisions moving forward.”
The various options Estler and Leichliter have outlined for the board include:
Cutting the $1 million addition into the Maintenance Reserve Fund that the board put in the initial budget with the tax cap.
Not putting the fiscal year 2023 surplus of $535,000 into Maintenance Reserve as the district customarily does with the prior year’s unspent funds; those funds would be used for general revenue.
Two other scenarios show the impacts of taking both of those steps along with eliminating the equivalent of either 10.5 or 26.7 full-time positions.
As Leichliter noted, the proposed budget already reduces the district’s staffing level by 13 positions due to attrition. The board’s $50.8 million budget was built as a “level-service” spending plan with no new programs included. It represents a nearly 12% increase in spending over the current year’s budget, however, due to increases in key large fixed cost categories including health insurance benefits, contractual wage increases, and a new state child care payroll tax.
If the board follows the administration’s recommendation, it would stick with the $50.8 million budget on the ballot and proceed with a March 5 vote. If it opts to make changes, that would mean delaying the school budget vote to later in March or early April.
The board meets at 6 p.m. in the Harwood library. The meeting is also available on Zoom (where viewers can interact during comment periods) and a view-only livestream on the district’s YouTube channel.
The agenda has the Zoom link and links to the administration’s financial presentations.