Voters in the Harwood Unified Union School District will be asked to approve a $47,892,873 budget in district-wide voting on May 30.
This third budget represents cuts of $2,951,830 from the original $50.8 million budget that voters rejected on Town Meeting Day and achieves further cuts over the $48.8 million budget that was rejected on April 30 by 166 votes. The proposed budget now cuts a total of 27.5 administrative, teaching and support positions through RIFs, retirement, and attrition. Programming, including foreign languages in elementary schools, has been cut across all schools in the district.
Four FTEs in the elementary world language program will be cut along with four intervention FTEs, one administrator, one 504 coordinator and one non-union staff member for an additional savings of $945,446.
The board unanimously approved this third budget at its May 8 meeting. During that meeting director of finance and operations Lisa Estler presented the updated budget information and its impact on per pupil spending, the equalized tax rate and taxpayers in the district.
These reductions result in a district tax rate of $1.435, slightly less than the current tax rate of $1.44. It drops equalized per pupil spending to $14,250, compared to the state average of $13,396 and represents a 5.44% increase in spending over last year’s budget of $45,422,241.
So how does that new budget impact taxpayers? Taxes are still going up even though the tax rate is going down. The tax increases will vary from town to town based on each town’s Common Level of Appraisal (CLA) which is based on a town’s appraised property values compared to fair market value. Even if all towns in the district had equal CLAs taxes would still go up.
That is because all of the property taxes raised from towns in the HUUSD are sent to Montpelier to be distributed according to the state funding formula. Not all of those funds come back, hence a 5.44% percent spending increase results in post-CLA tax increases that range from 10.5% to 19.3%.
PAT, IF THE CHART I SENT FITS, PLEASE DELETE THE HIGHLIGHTED INFO FROM EACH TOWN
Here's how that breaks down across the district. These tax increases have dropped significantly from the 20% to 30% project with the original Town Meeting budget.
- Duxbury 10.5% / $199 per $100K assessed value
- Fayston 13.3% / $237 per $100K assessed value
- Moretown 10.8% / $209 per $100K assessed value
- Waitsfield 18.7% / $338 per $100K assessed value
- Warren 19.3% / $378 per $100K assessed value
- Waterbury 14.0% / $267 per $100K assessed value.
Estler’s budget presentation can be found on the school board section of the district website, huusd.org. The May 8 meeting can be seen on MRVTV.com and YouTube.
In the run up to the May 30 vote, board members are working on community outreach, including sending voters postcards encouraging them to go to the polls.
If the district does not have an approved budget in place by June 30, the district is allowed to borrow 87% percent of the current budget which would provide $39,517,349 and require extensive further reductions of staff and programming, Superintendent Dr. Mike Leichliter said at the May 8 meeting. He said the district will be unable to meet its mandated educational programming at that rate.
Prior to the board’s budget work, during public comment, the board heard from educators and community members urging them not to cut programming, including programming and heard from David Specht, Duxbury, who asked that the board make a detailed line-item budget available. Estler and later Leichliter explained that the computer software used to create the budget makes it difficult to provide a line-item budget and said that was expected to be solved with a software upgrade later this year.
The board also discussed concerns voiced by former board member Brian Dalla Mura, Duxbury, about a potential conflict of interest involving Moretown board member Ben Clark. In an email to the board, Dalla Mara asked whether it was appropriate for Clark to participate in discussions about staffing cuts, including administrators because Clark’s wife, Jennifer Durren is a co-principal at Crossett Brook Middle School. Board chair Ashley Woods said that district attorney Pietro Lynn had been asked about the issue multiple times in the past year and had not found it problematic.
