On the back of historic property tax increases last year, school boards are attempting to heed voters’ call for relief. Many have worked to bring low- or no-increase budgets to school district voters on Town Meeting Day.
But districts are finding that holding spending flat requires tough tradeoffs.
The Vermont-NEA, the state’s teachers union, currently estimates 300 to 400 jobs to be cut based on preliminary budget information for next year, according to Darren Allen, a union spokesperson.
“The concern is this hurts kids,” he said.
Last year, when education property taxes rose an average of 14% statewide, many districts took two or even three attempts to get voters to approve their school spending. The historic proportion of budget rejections saw boards cut staff and programming to appease their communities’ concerns.
Now, early school budget data — used to predict education property tax rates — indicates school taxes may rise a little less than 6% statewide next year. And many of the same school boards are cutting again.
The Champlain Valley School District, one of the state’s largest, cut about 40 positions last year, and is cutting nearly that many this year.
“The board felt we could not be asking our community for another round of — certainly not double digit tax increases. We needed to keep them as low as possible,” Meghan Metzler, the district’s board chair, said in an interview.
Champlain Valley was hit particularly hard by Act 127, a 2022 law that shifted taxing capacity to districts with students who are more expensive to teach, particularly those of lower socioeconomic status and English language learners. In effect, the district would have needed to cut spending in the current year’s budget just to keep tax rates level.
This year, the Champlain Valley board expects the district budget to result in tax decreases. Among the positions cut or reduced: classroom teachers, interventionists, paraeducators and an assistant principal.
Amid the current push from Gov. Phil Scott and his team for school district consolidation, Champlain Valley is already operating at a scale much larger than many districts — it has about 3700 K-12 students, though like many parts of the state, its student body has shrunk in recent years. Other larger, relatively affluent districts in Chittenden County have faced similar budget challenges, including South Burlington and Essex-Westford, where boards have considered reductions in force or programming cuts.
Still, Metzler said Champlain Valley is able to provide “a lot” of educational opportunities relative to other districts “because of (its) scale.” Many of the problems facing the district involve statewide issues and uncertainty, challenges “out of our hands,” she said.
In Vermont, staff salaries and benefits make up about 80% of budgets. Some of those costs are outside a district’s control, particularly teacher health insurance, which is contracted statewide and is rising about 12% this year.
Health insurance alone has made the fiscal year 2026 budget cycle a challenge for many districts. According to Chelsea Myers, executive director of the Vermont Superintendents Association, some boards and administrators began the budgeting process early this year in an attempt to be as well prepared as possible.
Health insurance alone accounted for an $800,000 increase in Rutland City Public Schools’ $67 million budget, according to the district’s Chief Financial Officer Ted Plemenos. Staff attrition and cost deferments helped the district keep expenses down, and the proposed budget decreases spending per student by about 2%.
Voting with an incomplete picture
There are some changes this year to how voters will see their school budgets on Town Meeting ballots. Rather than simply seeing the overall school budget cost, residents will also see how much spending per student has increased or decreased, a key metric in determining tax rates.
That’s caused concern for some districts wary of voters rejecting their spending plans.
The Orange Southwest School District found that it lost “weighted students” in the coming year because fewer kids were counted as coming from low socioeconomic households, Michael Clark, OSSD’s superintendent, said. Vermont, like many states, uses weights to direct more money to students who are more expensive to educate.
Facing a daunting tax increase, the board chose to cut 1.5 nursing positions, library staff, a pre-K classroom and a late bus, among other services, saving about $1.1 million, according to the superintendent.
But while the district’s overall spending is expected to rise 6%, its cost per student is rising more than 22%, due in large part to its reduction in student weights.
With voter sentiment top of mind, Patrick Reen, superintendent of the Mount Abraham Unified School District in Addison County, said his board instructed him to build a budget around not increasing taxes.
To do so, he needed to cut about $1.5 million. But the district was also relying on preliminary information and assumptions passed down from the state.
Among those assumptions is the governor’s recommendation that the state use $77 million in one-time general fund money to buy down property tax rates. That idea requires legislative approval and is based on projections that without a buydown, property taxes are expected to rise just under 6% next year.
Scott has also called for reducing spending by repealing Vermont’s free universal school meals program — an idea legislative leadership has expressed little appetite for.
And current tax rate projections are only that — a best guess, based on preliminary budget information compiled by the Vermont Agency of Education. In the state’s complex education funding landscape, where spending decisions in one district impact tax bills in every other district, boards can only present tax estimates to voters. Finalized tax rates don’t materialize until spring or summer.
For Reen and Mount Abraham, that means information shared with voters is “no longer accurate” once new projections arrive.
“Setting a budget target that focuses on tax impact is a little tricky given the moving pieces that are out of our control,” he said.
