South Burlington School District proposes $71.5 million FY26 budget, cites special education and health-care cost drivers

South Burlington School District Superintendent Violet Nichols on Monday presented a $71.5 million proposed fiscal year 2026 budget that the district says preserves core programming while responding to a drop in state education funding and rising fixed costs.

Nichols said the budget keeps structured literacy, visual and performing arts, nursing and co-curricular activities while proposing staff reductions driven in part by the end of pandemic-era federal funding and by changes to the state education funding formula. "If students cannot get to school, they cannot learn," Nichols said when explaining the district's plan to add two bus drivers to improve access.

The budget, Nichols told the steering committee and public hearing, responds to multiple cost pressures: a nearly 12 percent statewide increase in health-care costs that districts must pay through statewide bargaining; a shift in the education funding formula’s weighting that, the district said, reduced its Long Term Weighted Average Daily Membership by about…