ENFIELD — In a typical year, the first draft of the Mascoma Valley Regional School District’s annual budget estimates a 10% increase in the cost of employee health insurance.
This year’s proposed budget included a 20% increase, just to be safe, Superintendent Amanda Isabelle said. Like many New Hampshire school districts, Mascoma faced a mid-year increase last fall from SchoolCare, which injected a note of caution into planning for the 2026-27 school year.
Ultimately, the added caution was warranted but inadequate: The district’s budget had to absorb a 26% increase in health care costs.
“It was not what we expected,” Isabelle said in a phone interview this week.
Despite the health cost spike, the proposed budget for next year of just under $33 million bears an overall spending increase of less than 1%.
Fortunately for staff at SAU 62, which oversees the district, and the district’s budget committee, another trend helped mitigate the rising cost of health care: declining enrollment.
The Mascoma district serves the towns of Canaan, Dorchester, Enfield, Grafton and Orange and oversees two elementary schools — Enfield Village School and Canaan Elementary School — and a secondary school complex in West Canaan comprising Indian River School for grades five through eight and Mascoma Valley Regional High School.
Budget writers were able to cut a full-time position at the high school and a full-time position at the SAU, both through attrition, and reduced a full-time position to part-time. Those savings partially offset the $799,000 health care increase.
As the small, rural district’s enrollment has declined, school officials have steadily reduced staff, said Isabelle, who is in her eighth year as superintendent and served for three years before that as principal of Canaan Elementary.
Entering classes of kindergartners at the two elementary schools have stabilized at 35 to 40 pupils, and the march of smaller classes has worked its way through the middle school, Isabelle said. Where Canaan Elementary once had three classes at each grade, it now has two, and at the middle school five sections per grade have been cut to four, with a corresponding reduction in staff.
“We’ve been very lucky to do it through attrition,” she said. “Now we’re facing the same cuts at the high school.”
Because of the staff reductions, “we did not have to cut anything that was important for kids,” Isabelle said. The budget includes, for example, a new K-6 English language arts curriculum.
The annual meeting warrant also will include a new contract with the district’s teachers, which will cost the district an additional $353,000 in its first year, and an article to add $350,000 to capital reserves for building maintenance.
If voters approve all warrant articles, the district’s towns would see varying tax increases, ranging from an estimated 38 cents per $1,000 of assessed value in Dorchester to 86 cents per $1,000 in Canaan.
Tax assessments also are influenced by the proportion of students from each town and by each town’s property wealth. Enfield would see a projected 40 cent increase, while rates would rise by 51 cents in Grafton and 50 cents in Orange.
To get a sense of the tax impact, a $350,000 property in Canaan would see a property tax increase of $301. In Dorchester, that increase would be $133. These are estimates until the state Department of Revenue Administration sets tax rates in the fall.
Next year’s budget is the first the district has assembled under a new state law that strips the School Board representative on the district budget committee of voting power, Tim Josephson, a longtime member of the Mascoma board and its current chairman, said in an interview.
But the district has long had a transparent budget process, with open budget committee meetings that School Board members attend, Josephson said.
Starting with a high estimate for health care costs helped with budgeting this year, he said. The district is being cautious in other ways, too, by setting aside reserve funds to maintain the renovated middle and high schools.
“We want to deliver a budget that’s responsible to our voters,” Josephson said.
The Mascoma Valley Regional School District Board will meet to discuss the budget at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 13, in the high school library, and will hold a public hearing on the budget at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 14, in the high school auditorium. The deliberative session for the district’s annual meeting is scheduled for 9 a.m. on Jan. 31 in the high school auditorium, and ballot voting is scheduled for Town Meeting Day, March 10.