Eighteen school districts in Vermont don’t have a budget in place yet for next year, and the state’s pandemic-induced shutdown throws into question when – and how – local officials should hold votes to approve spending plans.
Nine school districts saw their budgets fail at the ballot box during Town Meeting week in early March, and still need to hold a revote. Another nine don’t vote at Town Meeting, and hadn’t yet held their elections when the pandemic put Vermont on lockdown.
In a bulletin issued Friday, the Secretary of State’s Office recommended all elections scheduled for April or May be canceled “if at all possible.”
“This will give us all time to hopefully get past the height of this virus and also to assess the need for, to devise, and to implement any special procedures to conduct these votes more safely,” Will Senning, director of elections and campaign finance, wrote to town clerks and school officials.
In a directive issued Friday, the secretary of state also granted municipalities the option to postpone those elections that are usually held on a specific date by law. The decision to do so remains a local one, and both school and municipal boards are now allowed to convene remotely under temporary revisions to the open meeting law.
In the Harwood Unified Union School District, the school board is planning its first meeting over the web conferencing app Zoom for Wednesday. Board chair Caitlin Hollister said the board will probably take a look at a revised budget, in hopes of finalizing something by late April to put before voters June 2.
“Everything continues to be tentative,” she said.
At this point, Hollister said she envisions the district “strongly encouraging early voting.”
“We have not discussed whether we would mail every voter a ballot. I think that’s still less likely. What’s more likely is we would encourage folks to request ballots,” she said.
But while the logistics of scheduling a vote are complicated, so are the politics of putting a budget request before an electorate at the same time as the economy has come to a screeching halt.
“Voters are going to have a totally different economic situation when they’re voting than the people who passed their budgets earlier. And that is problematic,” said Noah Everitt, co-president of the teachers’ union in South Burlington, where voters shot down a $55.8 million budget in March, likely because it was paired with a deeply unpopular bond proposal.
Statewide, the school funding picture looks grim. Vermont’s Education Fund, which pays for pre-K-12 schools, is facing a severe revenue crunch as consumption tax proceeds plummet in the economic downturn.
The Legislature’s analysts had initially forecast the fund’s non-property tax revenues would fall by as much as $45 million this fiscal year as businesses closed their doors to stem the spread of the disease. But on Friday, those estimates were dramatically revised. The fund, analysts now say, is expected to lose nearly $89 million in non-property tax dollars.
Vermonters themselves are doing no better than the state’s coffers: the Department of Labor has received between 40,000 and 50,000 unemployment claims since the start of the outbreak.
“Certainly I’m also concerned about passing a budget in the economic climate now that we’ve entered,” said Brooke Olsen-Farrell, the superintendent of the Slate Valley Unified School District in western Rutland County.
Per state law, if school districts don’t have a voter-approved budget by July 1, they can borrow up to 87% of their prior year’s budget in order to pay for operations. But even if certain districts do wind up needing to operate with such drastically reduced budgets, they could be hard-pressed to find places to save.
Reduction-in-force notices were due in many districts March 15, and if districts hadn’t issued them by then, they can’t enact layoffs next year.
“There’s nothing to cut out of our budget,” said Olsen-Farrell.
If July 1 rolls around and Slate Valley doesn’t have a spending plan with the all-clear from voters, Olsen-Farrell said she’ll probably direct her staff not to spend “any money, on anything, unless it’s legally required.”
Clarification: This article was updated to reflect that reduction-in-force notices were due March 15 in many, but not all, districts.
