Alburgh school officials prepare quick budget change, schedule election for next week

ALBURGH – The Alburgh Town School District will bring another budget proposal before voters next week after Alburgh voters twice rejected an initial spending plan first pitched on Town Meeting Day.

Alburgh’s school board agreed last week to quickly warn an election for the first week of June, approving unanimously a proposed $8.2 million spending plan funding the
Alburgh Community Education Center and tuition payments for Alburgh students attending high school outside of the Champlain Islands.

The education budget coming before voters next week is slightly smaller than the spending plan voters rejected in March and again in May, with the Alburgh school board agreeing to trim around $50,000 in funding initially linked to building maintenance from their budget plan.

According to school officials, further spending cuts would be legally difficult, as the Alburgh Town School District was now beyond a legal deadline for cutting staff under its contracts with Alburgh’s teaching and support staff. Outside of staffing, most of Alburgh’s school budget was allocated for tuition payments charged by other school districts or Alburgh’s share of the Grand Isle Supervisory Union budget.

“If there were large changes that needed to be made, contractually we cannot touch staffing at this point,” Lisa Ruud, the superintendent for the Grand Isle Supervisory Union, confirmed during a recent school board meeting in Alburgh. “We should be fiscally conservative.”

Voters rejected an original spending plan for the Alburgh Town School District in March. After revisiting their budget over the following weeks, Alburgh school officials opted to bring that same spending plan before voters again in May, arguing that changing tax projections in Montpelier likely lowering taxes in Alburgh would make their original budget more palatable for Alburgh residents.

That second budget plan was only narrowly defeated by voters during a special election in May, with a single vote separating the votes opposing the budget from those favoring it. A recount organized by the town less than a week later confirmed that Alburgh’s school budget had lost by only one vote.

According to school officials, a quick turnaround for another election was needed given an approaching late June deadline for Vermont schools to have a budget approved. An early June vote, according to Alburgh officials, would give the district time to organize one more vote if needed before the end of the month, ideally giving the district another chance to avoid that end-of-the-month deadline.

In Vermont, school districts are required to have a budget approved by the start of the next fiscal year. Without an approved budget, districts are only allowed under Vermont law to borrow for up to 87% of their last approved budget, a step that would likely add to school spending through interest payments for a required bridge loan and dramatically upend local educational programming.

Already, according to local school officials, proposed spending cuts were expected to take a toll on the Alburgh Community Education Center.

The school district previously agreed to avoid increasing discretionary spending for materials and supplies in its original spending plan rejected on Town Meeting Day. According to local officials, the Alburgh Town School District needed to accommodate steep increases in what officials budgeted for contractual raises and benefits like health care and dental insurance.

“There’s consequences for the actions that we take,” Cheryl Dunn, the school board’s chairperson, said when the board met in May. “It hurt.”

According to school officials, a pending audit had signaled that Alburgh would likely see a surplus once the current fiscal year ended. While officials were unable to say exactly how much funding would remain once the fiscal year ended, school officials suggested last week there would be enough of a surplus to support an existing reserve fund the district could tap for maintenance projects.

School officials said they also planned to use an expected surplus to afford both a planned buydown of Alburgh’s local school taxes already baked into the town’s education budget, as well as payments for an outstanding deficit with the Grand Isle Supervisory Union.

“We have a projected surplus,” Ruud, the Grand Isle Supervisory Union’s superintendent, said. “If we cut from this [maintenance] line, we can replenish it directly from the surplus from this year.”

According to the most recent projections shared by the Alburgh Town School District, cutting $50,000 from the district’s initial spending plan would dull Alburgh’s local education tax rate by around 2 cents, lowering an initial projected tax rate of around $1.85 for every $100 of a property’s assessed value to a little more than $1.83 for every $100 of assessed value.

Education taxes in Vermont are calculated through a complicated formula weighing everything from local school spending and demographics to statewide spending and a community’s housing market. Taxes in Alburgh have, in recent years, been heavily shaped by a housing market seeing homes sell well above their assessed values, skewing a ratio in Vermont’s tax formula known as the common level of appraisal.

It remains unclear what a finalized tax rate for Alburgh could look like even if Alburgh voters pass the district’s proposed spending plan next week. Lawmakers are continuing to debate a suite of education reforms that could see existing state funds applied to suppress a statewide increase in school taxes, and while an agreement passed the Vermont Senate this week, a finalized bill remains pending.

After agreeing to cut funding from their school district’s maintenance budget, Alburgh officials spent much of a special meeting in late May debating how to introduce their budget to the public. School board members raised everything from social media posts and using a digital sign outside of Alburgh’s town offices to revising and recirculating a recent budget flyer with an apparent reporting error.

As of press time earlier this week, there were no public postings on either the Alburgh Community Education Center’s website or the Town of Alburgh’s official website announcing a planned election or detailing a revised spending plan.

With around 200 students between its prekindergarten programming and its elementary and middle school classes, the Alburgh Community Education Center is Grand Isle County’s largest public school.

According to the motion approved by Alburgh’s school board last week, polls were scheduled to open at Alburgh’s town office on June 2 at 7 a.m. and close at 7 p.m. The school board said it would incorporate a required informational meeting in its next regular meeting this coming Monday.