Revotes have begun on the 35 school budgets that were defeated on Town Meeting Day. Voters in Fairfield go to the polls Saturday and Montpelier residents will decide on a reduced spending plan Tuesday.
Since Town Meeting Day, three districts have held revotes. Residents in the Leland & Gray and Middletown Springs school districts approved new budgets, while those in Fairfax rejected their budget proposal for a second time (by one vote), according to officials at the Vermont Superintendents Association.
Montpelier school officials pared $158,266 from the initial budget proposal of $17,985,069 through a combination of program reductions and accounting changes. The first budget failed by 81 votes, 1,211-1,130.
The new proposal cuts the budget to $17,826,803 by trimming $93,266 from expenses and shifting $65,000 from the schools’ revenue fund balance.
The spending reductions were reached by:
• leasing instead of buying a new driver’s ed car ($12,500);
• funding a new custodial position at half time instead of full time ($28,406);
• eliminating girls’ lacrosse ($8,434);
• eliminating National Honor Society ($2,288);
• eliminating middle school baseball ($4,560);
• cutting a high English teaching position by .4 ($29,004);
• and reducing the total salary of assistant principals by $8,074.
According to Sue Aldrich, chair of the Montpelier School Board, the new budget represents an effort to let voters know their message was heard.
“There were a lot of people coming to us and saying ‘Don’t change the first budget at all. Put the exact same budget out there.’ That was not ever a remote option,” Aldrich says.
Instead, the board asked the administrative teams at the three district schools to recommend cuts. The teams presented three different tiers of reductions, ranging from least to most drastic. Instead of accepting one of the three, the board took an a la carte approach, selecting cuts from across the tiers.
The board also agreed to form a committee of board members and other residents to explore ways to control school spending.
These actions, and an anticipated adjustment in the projected statewide property tax, were enough to convince Phil Dodd, a member of the citizens’ group Vibrant Affordable Montpelier, to change his “no” vote on the first budget to a “yes” on the current one.
“The school board did make some cuts to the budget,” Dodd said. “Maybe not as many as some people would like to have seen, but at least they were somewhat responsive. The other thing is the reduction of the state’s projected residential property tax rate from 7 cents to 4 cents. When that is factored in, the tax rate increase will drop to 8.5 percent from 13 percent.”
The new budget won’t be enough to convince Tina Muncy, a former teacher at Main Street Middle School, principal at Washington Village School and school support coordinator at the Vermont Department of Education, to change her vote to “yes.”
“I do want to support the children of Montpelier. I am an educator,” Muncy said. “But I think it was time for the school board to hear that they really have to rethink education. They have lost a lot of students, and they are spending as if they had all the students they have had before.”
That said, Muncy “went to the last school board meeting ready to vote ‘yes.’ It’s hard when your budget gets voted down to make much of a change and get a new budget out in quick order. I knew they couldn’t make massive changes. They cut a half of 1 percent from the budget, and over $60,000 of that came from the reserve. I wasn’t in love with that idea, but I thought they had given it a try.”
Still, that meeting ended up pushing her back to a “no” vote. She feels the board did not do enough to inform the public of a change in the location and time for that meeting — from the high school at 7 p.m. to the middle school at 6 p.m. And although the new committee was proposed, she’s frustrated that the board did not do more to define its parameters and timetable.
“It’s hard to say at this point that we will go on trust and it will all work out,” she said.
Charlie Phillips, a former Montpelier educator and vice chair of the school board, is concerned about what might happen if the new budget were to fail.
“We have a very strong school system,” he said. “Cutting more would begin to erode the quality of the education. But that doesn’t mean that for next year’s budget, we don’t need to look at ways to economize.”
Aldrich is optimistic the new budget will pass.
“The silver lining here is that people are galvanized now. We have a lot of people — and not just parents who have a vested interest — but people who see education as a community value.”
Regardless of the outcome, Dodd said the role of the state in school funding should be carefully reconsidered.
“When you look at the numbers, at how much the spending has increased in Vermont, they are quite remarkable,” he says. “It’s a difficult subject, but I think the state is going to have to wrestle with it here, or it will crowd out other things, and budgets will get defeated. I think everyone agrees that further steps are needed.”
Tom Brown contributed to this report.
