Preliminary town-meeting results: most Vermont school budgets pass as health care costs bite into districts

Agency of Education interim CFO Sean Kusnell and representatives of the Vermont Superintendents Association and Vermont School Boards Association updated the Ways & Means committee on preliminary school budget results after Town Meeting Day.

Sean Kusnell said preliminary data covered 115 of the state’s school budgets and showed roughly $1.9 billion in spending among the 115 districts that had submitted budgets for the collection. He said the increase in net education spending measured so far is about 5.83 percent, or roughly $109,550,000 more than last year at this point in the reporting cycle.

Chelsea Myers, executive director of the Vermont Superintendents Association, told the committee that voters approved “over 90% or a hundred and 4 school budgets in town on town meeting day,” while nine school budgets were defeated — a number Myers said aligns more with historical norms than last year’s low defeat count. Myers said 113 budgets were voted on town meeting day with another 11 scheduled between March 10 and May 13, and that five of the nine defeated budgets have a history of prior defeats within the last decade.

Both Myers and Sue Cyclowski, executive director of the Vermont School Boards Association, identified rising health insurance costs as a major pressure on districts. Cyclowski said health benefits for public school employees now exceed $300,000,000 per year and rose about 16 percent in fiscal year 2025 and another 12 percent in fiscal year 2026. She said health-care costs have risen from under 10 percent of school budgets in 2018 to about 15 percent today; if current trends continue, those benefits could account for about 20 percent of budgets in the near future.

Committee members asked for further breakdowns: Kusnell said most districts had submitted data and that the agency could provide additional details later on drivers such as use of reserves, bond payments and district-size effects. JFO economist Julia Richter and other witnesses noted that per-pupil metrics are driven in part by the long-term weighted average daily membership (ADM) and by changes to pupil weights, which can move districts into or out of the excess-spending threshold.

Members discussed whether failed budgets correlated with tuitioning districts (districts that send high-school students to other districts). Myers said by her count “it's a little more than half” of the defeated budgets were tuitioning districts. Committee members asked the Agency of Education to provide further validation on long-term weighted ADM data; Rebecca (AOE staff) confirmed AOE has a new validation process and will follow up.

No formal actions were taken by the committee during the update. Committee members asked witnesses for more granular data on reserve use, bond exclusions, per-pupil cost distributions and how districts are communicating tax-rate implications to voters.

The committee will receive updated spreadsheets as late votes and outstanding district approvals are reported.