BRADFORD, Vt. — Voters in the Oxbow Unified Union School District have again rejected a proposed budget for the 2020-21 school year.
Tuesday’s 273-184 vote against the $17.1 million spending plan leaves the newly formed district without a budget even as its schools are reopening for the year next week. The district comprises the Bradford and Newbury elementary schools, Oxbow High School and River Bend Technical Center.
The district’s board will likely move forward with a new budget this fall, Emilie Knisley, superintendent of Orange East Supervisory Union, which oversees Oxbow, said Wednesday. It’s unusual for a district not to have a budget by now, she said.
“It could be an expensive problem not to have an operating budget,” she said.
That’s because the district will have to borrow money to operate its schools. Under state law, a district can borrow up to 87% of the previous year’s budget to run its schools if voters haven’t adopted a spending plan. Borrowing comes with interest costs, Knisley noted. Without a budget in place, the state education fund provides only 25% of funding, and a district can set a tax rate of only $1 per $100 of assessed value.
To run for a full year, “we would probably have to borrow a little over $9 million,” Knisley said.
The district’s first vote was delayed until the end of June by the emergence of the novel coronavirus. At that vote, a much larger turnout rejected the budget by a count of 520-323.
Since the budget year is well underway, the district is already bound by contracts with teachers, principals and support staff as well as for transportation and other services, that were signed with the expectation that the district would have a budget. “There aren’t as many places for wiggle room” on spending as there would be in a normal year, the superintendent said.
The Oxbow board’s next regular meeting is on Wednesday, but the board could hold an emergency meeting to get back to work on the budget, Knisley said.
One item the board added to the budget was a universal meals program, which provides free meals for all students.
“I think they still are very deeply invested in that,” Knisley said of the board. But the district might now miss deadlines for federal funding even if voters approve a budget in late October or early November.
The budget rejected on Tuesday cut nearly $180,000 from the proposal defeated earlier this summer but still carried increases in spending and tax rates, which likely accounted for much of the opposition to the plan, Knisley said.
Also at issue is lingering resentment in Bradford and Newbury of the forced merger of the towns’ schools.
Had the districts opted to merge on their own under Act 46, the state’s 2015 school consolidation law, as many other districts did, the merged district would have qualified for tax incentives. Instead, the merger is taking place under protest and at a cost. The Oxbow board has no authority to dissolve the district, Knisley said. The two towns would have to vote, then petition the State Board of Education, which required the merger in the first place, to change its mind.
“If people are unhappy with the merger, there is a process to go through to continue with that,” Knisley said. In the meantime, “we do need to have schools that operate and provide services for students.
“My request would be that we try to get to the point where we can achieve that.”
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
