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With just weeks to go before the start of a new fiscal year, some school districts are nervously bringing budgets before voters again.
Most school districts in Vermont bring their budgets to the electorate on Town Meeting Day in early March. But when the pandemic swept the state just weeks later and put the state on lockdown, 19 districts didn’t yet have a spending plan in place, and elections were put on pause for nearly two months.
Budget votes in the Covid-19 era have been a mixed bag so far. In the Essex-Westford School District, where every voter was sent a ballot by mail, the electorate approved a school spending plan on June 2 by overwhelming margins – 3,124 to 1,844. Turnout was also exceptionally high compared to last year, when a total of just 934 people cast their ballots.
Voters in South Burlington, meanwhile, soundly rejected the school district’s budget 2,924 to 1,613 in a special election held late last month. And in the Rivendell Interstate School District, which serves four Upper Valley towns in Vermont and New Hampshire, voters also struck down the schools’ budget, with 349 voting yes and 484 voting no. In Rivendell, where the late May election also saw record turnout, according to the Valley News, a revote has already been scheduled for June 30.
In the Slate Valley Unified School District in southwestern Vermont, where voters are set to return to the polls on Tuesday to weigh in on $26.6 million in expenditures, Superintendent Brooke Olsen-Farrell said before the vote that she was admittedly anxious.
“I think we have a really fair budget that we’re putting out to voters and I’m hoping that folks understand that. But yeah, given the economic climate certainly, I’m a bit worried,” she said.
Slate Valley officials are strongly encouraging residents to vote by absentee ballots, but in-person polling locations – with social distancing protocols in place – will be open in all six of the district’s towns. If the budget fails again, Olsen-Farrell said district officials will have no choice but to warn another vote.
“And I guess we would be looking at non-essential items such as extracurricular, athletics, transportation,” she said.
Current law allows a school district without a voter-approved spending plan in place by July 1 – the start of the new fiscal year – to borrow up to 87% of their prior year’s budget. Lawmakers were at work earlier this spring on legislation to provide a more generous default, but talks between the House and Senate have reached an impasse. Legislators could return to the subject in August, when they are expected to reconvene.
“I think it’s important to let the local process move forward without intervention. Whether there is intervention needed in the future is something we will address as the remaining information comes forward,” said House Education committee chair Rep. Kate Webb, D-Shelburne.
But lawmakers have sent one important signal to likely apprehensive local voters. The state’s education fund, which pays for preK-12 schooling in Vermont, is facing unprecedented shortfalls as consumption tax revenues plummet.
To plug the hole, lawmakers could raise the property tax rate by over 20 cents. But House Ways and Means, the lower chamber’s key tax-writing committee, has already taken that option off the table, and committed to a property tax rate in line with pre-coronavirus assumptions.
In Harwood, where voters will go to the polls on June 16 (or vote by mail ahead of time, as district officials are strongly encouraging them to do) School Board Chair Caitlin Hollister said she was optimistic – though cautiously so – about the outcome.
“It’s very hard to predict, like so much right now during the pandemic,” she said.
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