BRADFORD, Vt. — Voters in the Oxbow Unified Union School District approved a budget and decided at a meeting Tuesday night to conduct future annual meeting votes on budgets and officers by Australian ballot.
The budget passed by a count of 205-141 after it was amended to restore $300,000 that the School Board had cut in an effort to win budget approval. It goes into effect July 1.
Voters at the annual meeting on April 28 rejected the budget, 145-119.
“I think they presented a really responsible budget,” Derek Williams, who moved to restore the original budget amount of $23.3 million, said in an interview. The school system, which includes Bradford and Newbury elementary schools, Oxbow High School and Riverbend Career and Technical Center, doesn’t offer as many opportunities for his two children as it did for him, said Williams, a Newbury resident.
The successful vote in the high school gym Tuesday evening means the district will avoid the sort of prolonged battle over funding that it faced in 2020, when the district was the last in the state to approve a budget. Voters approved school spending in mid-January 2021 for the 2020-21 school year.
But it also means that residents of the district’s two towns, Bradford and Newbury (except the village of Wells River, which is part of Blue Mountain Union School District) will see property tax rate increases of 15.5% and 18.6%, respectively. (Resident households that earn less than $115,000 a year pay taxes on their homesteads based on a percentage of their income, rather than on their property value and rate.)
The property tax increase is only partially attributable to higher spending. The budget is 8.3% higher than the current year’s, driven mainly by higher wages under new faculty and staff contracts and higher special education costs.
But the district also has been hit by a projected 6.4% decline in its long-term average weighted daily membership, a measure of its schools’ enrollment and of factors such as poverty and special education rates that affect state funding. That decline means the district’s spending per weighted pupil is projected to increase from $13,232 to $15,151.
At the same time, both Bradford and Newbury have tax rolls that are under-assessed. The state Tax Department conducts a yearly study of where each town’s property assessments stand relative for fair market value. The Oxbow towns sit at around 80%, so the state adjusts the tax rate upward to adjust for the lower values. Ideally, property should be assessed at 100% of fair market value.
Although a crowd of people descended on the Oxbow High School gym on Tuesday, there was very little discussion of the budget. Debate was cut off on the motion to add $300,000 back to the budget, an amendment approved by a narrow vote of 144-136. A subsequent motion to cut off debate on the budget and vote by paper ballot was swiftly approved.
Williams said he didn’t know all the details of the budget, but moved to add money to it because the district needs to keep options for students.
“I just know that these budgets don’t have extra,” said Williams, who’s the director and superintendent of River Valley Technical Center, in Springfield, Vt.
“I think it’s great,” Danielle Corti, chairwoman of the Oxbow board, said after the meeting. “I think that our community really came together,” though she noted that it was still a relatively close vote.
The district must now embark on a discussion about the cost of education. Orange East Supervisory Union, which oversees the Oxbow district, has hired a consultant to study opportunities for school consolidation across the supervisory union, which includes schools that educate students from Bradford, Corinth, Groton, Newbury, Ryegate, Thetford and Topsham.
“We need to push into some of those conversations as a community,” Corti said. “We’re going to have to open our minds to different structures in order to have options for our students.”
But as the lack of debate at Tuesday’s meeting suggested, residents who have been through the forced mergers of Act 46 and the ongoing statewide debate about further consolidation might be tuning out the prospect of further changes to school governance.
“I worry because of the length of the process,” Corti said. “I think people do tune it out.”
The projected tax increase will likely provide motivation to consider how to manage costs, she said.
Further decisions about spending will be made by Australian ballot, a change voters approved by a contested voice vote. Voting by Australian ballot will take effect at next year’s annual meeting.
The district’s record with Australian ballot voting has been a mixed bag. During the coronavirus pandemic, when Australian balloting was used as an emergency measure, the district saw much higher turnout, but also had to go through four votes to pass a budget.
But an Australian ballot vote on amending the district’s articles of agreement drew only 189 votes in May 2022.
By comparison, 346 ballots were cast in person Tuesday night on the budget.
While Oxbow voters will consider budgets and elect officials via Australian ballot, they will continue to weigh public questions — policy decisions that don’t directly involve spending — in a floor meeting.
