[E]ven though voters can’t be certain how much they will owe in taxes, only five school budgets were defeated on Town Meeting Day. A 96 percent approval rate is not unheard of, but 2012 was the last year that fewer than seven local budgets failed.
There are 166 school districts — down from 220 last year, due to mergers — of those 142 voted on their budgets on Tuesday and 136 passed (another is expected to pass). The five that failed were in Alburgh, Cabot, Fletcher, Green Mountain Unified Union School District and North Hero. The rest of the districts have yet to vote.
School boards heeded the state’s call to keep increases in spending to a minimum, and that is likely the reason so many towns supported their school budgets, according to Nicole Mace, executive director of the Vermont School Boards Association.
Mace said getting information to school boards early in the budgeting process helped. In October, Secretary of Education Rebecca Holcombe sent a memo to boards asking them to think about staff to student ratios while planning. Gov. Phil Scott asked them to keep any spending increases in line with growth in wages and the economy — 2.5 percent or less.
“All of that is very useful for budget developers to have early on in the process so they can leave no stone unturned in terms of how they approach a particular budget cycle,” Mace said. “Clearly, a lot of hard work was done at the local level to respond to the state’s call for fiscal restraint and that was backed by overwhelming voter support this year.”
In December, the tax commissioner and Agency of Education prepared voters for a 3.5 percent increase in school spending and a possible 9 cent hike in property taxes. But when proposed budgets came in, spending grew by only 1.5 percent overall and less than 1 percent in per pupil spending, which is the point at which taxes key off.
That helped get budgets past the finish line too, according to Jeff Francis, head of the Vermont Superintendents Association. He said because towns were prepared for big tax bills, “it worked to the advantage of the budget approval process” when rates came in lower.
Gov. Scott personally voted for the Berlin Elementary School budget because the town kept growth down and decreased per pupil spending, according to Rebecca Kelley, his spokesperson. But U-32, the high school in his district, grew spending by 3.90 percent.
“Governor Scott voted no, given the school’s per pupil spending grew faster than Vermonters can afford to pay,” Kelley said.
Voters pushed back against austerity in Norwich. The Marion Cross School Board heeded the governor’s call for both low spending and tightening staff to student ratios in their proposed budget. The budget committee proposed a budget with one less teacher in next year’s fifth grade class — the two classes would each have had around 22 students.
But parents didn’t like the plan. They gathered signatures on a petition to add a warrant article for an additional $100,000 to pay for a third teacher. The wording wasn’t legal because parents can’t direct a board and administration on a specific use of funds, according to School Board Chair Tom Candon. But the board wanted to honor the concerns and added it as an article.
After a heated email debate among community members about some residents’ inability to pay increasingly higher taxes, the measure ultimately passed 529-524.
“I think the near even split on the outcome of the vote is illustrative of the board’s struggle with decisions it had to make in developing the budget this year,” Candon said.
Taxpayers with a $400,000 home will have an additional $70 added to the $361 property tax they would have paid under the budget proposed by school board members.
But all these budget decisions assume taxes will be calculated the same way they were last year. That might not be so. A week before towns were set to vote, the House Ways and Means Committee approved a bill that will change the way towns are taxed for schools beginning with the current fiscal year.
While supporting the $100,000 added to the Norwich budget, Fred Faudie said, “We don’t know what our taxes will be and we don’t know how much what we do will affect the bottom line because it is dependent upon the rest of the state.”
Because of the uncertainty over the changes to the tax formula and the elusive understanding of what his final taxes would be, Faudie said it was best to make sure the school has the money it needs.
On Monday, VSBA and VSA told school board members and administrators to present budgets based on current law, but added that it could change because of bills the Legislature is considering.
Rep. Jim Maslin, D-Thetford, told Norwich residents to think of the tax proposal as a “work in progress.” He said it has several different committees to go through and the Senate before the governor can weigh in on it. “Look at it with that in mind,” he said.
Making changes to the education funding formula for fiscal 2019 would undermine the hard work of the budgeters in putting forward budgets that were overwhelmingly supported by voters, according to Mace. VSA and VSBA implored lawmakers to hold off changes.
“Voters knew what they were voting on based on current law. If they choose to change then they have to explain to their communities why they did so,” Mace said.
Whatever they do next, lawmakers should see how well Act 46 is working to help keep costs down and remember how much is being asked of school districts, Francis said, ticking off a list of policies being implemented: universal pre-K, personalized and proficiency-based learning, unifications, and school safety measures.
“I don’t think it’s particularly useful for the General Assembly to say: thanks for your work on your budgets, we realize you are extraordinarily challenged to respond to everything we asked you to respond to and we are going to ask you to contend with a law that materially affects these budgets,” Francis said. Any new funding scheme should have a two or three year roll out, he added.
School budgets failed in Alburgh (174-216), Cabot (236-315), Fletcher (59-67), Green Mountain Unified Union (345-394) and North Hero (106-133).
Cabot’s school spending went up more than 10 percent to $3,669,885 and would raise the tax rate by 29 cents. Spending triggered a tax penalty because it crossed the excess spending thresholds by about $1,000 per pupil. Budgeters said a rise in special education costs, increases in teacher contracts and new hires caused the spike. The town voted against an Act 46 merger last year that would have closed the high school.
Fletcher voters would have taken on a tax increase from $1.48 to $1.72 for those who pay on property, and from 2.31 percent to 2.68 percent for those who pay based on income.
Residents of the Green Mountain district were voting for the first time as a unified union — after an Act 46 merger — on a $12.5 million budget to run Chester-Andover and Cavendish elementary schools and Green Mountain High School. The new board hastily approved a budget that would have made changes to staffing. Voters wanted more educational opportunities out of Act 46 changes and thought the budget was hard to understand, according to news reports in the Chester Telegraph.
Alburgh and North Hero are both in the Grand Isle Supervisory Union. Both towns were experiencing double digit increases in the percent spent on schools. Alburgh spending increased nearly 11 percent to $17,463 per equalized pupil and North Hero’s proposed budget spent $16,319 per equalized pupil, an increase of nearly 16 percent from the current year.
