BRADFORD, Vt. — The Oxbow Unified Union School District board has set a Jan. 13 date for a fourth vote on a budget for the current school year and left the bottom line at $16.8 million.
School officials said they hope voters in Bradford and Newbury who narrowly rejected the budget for the third time on Nov. 24 by a count of 593-578 will see that cuts would be devastating and widespread.
“We lost by 15 people,” board member Carol Cottrell said in the Oxbow School Board’s meeting on Thursday. “I think if we do a better job of communicating and making sure that we’ve turned over every rock possible that we can get this budget passed. I think it’s a reasonable budget.”
The board voted unanimously to approve the same budget after hearing support from faculty and staff at Newbury Elementary School and Bradford Elementary School, as well as from a citizens group that is trying to dissolve the district, which was created under the state’s school consolidation law, Act 46. The district also oversees Oxbow High School and River Bend Career and Technical Center.
“Most of our group really feels like you shouldn’t cut any more,” said Marvin Harrison, a Newbury resident and a member of the Bradford-Newbury School Advisory Group, which gathered signatures in Newbury calling for a vote to disband the district. That vote is scheduled for Dec. 29, and would have to be followed by a similar vote in Bradford and action by the state Board of Education.
“While we believe that the dissolution of the district is necessary, at this time we strongly believe that getting a budget passed is paramount, and we will do what we can individually and collectively to help make that happen,” the group wrote in a letter to the board.
Without a budget, the district can receive 25% of what it would have gotten from the state Education Fund and can borrow above that up to 87% of the previous year’s spending. So far, the district has been borrowing what it needs to spend to keep programs operating in the expectation that a budget would be approved eventually, said Emilie Knisley, superintendent of Orange East Supervisory Union. But a fourth defeat for the budget would force the district to make deep cuts.
There’s a widely held perception that the schools are currently running on 87% of last year’s spending, Knisley told the board, but that’s not the case.
“It’s because we can’t run the school on 87% of what we spent last year,” she said.
If forced to get down to that spending level now, the board would have to cut about $2.6 million, Knisley said. Such cuts would affect transportation, academic programs, guidance, mental health, social services and extracurriculars and require “large-scale” staff layoffs. If the schools have to cut staffing, it might necessitate a return to full-time remote learning, because there wouldn’t be enough personnel to operate the schools safely under state health protocols for the coronavirus pandemic, Knisley said.
The district has secured funding through January, but will struggle thereafter if no budget is approved, Knisley said.
“We hit a brick wall in about March,” Knisley said. “If it fails again,” she added, “and we’re running up against that wall, then we’re looking at all of these things” as places to cut.
Board members opted not to make cuts in advance of the budget vote in hopes that the budget will pass. They also discussed how best to get the word out about the situation.
“I think if the community knows what’s in the budget, they would vote for it,” community member Caitlin Gendron told the board.
An informational meeting about the budget is planned for 6 p.m. Jan. 4 on Zoom. District voters will have to request mail-in ballots from their town clerks.
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
