HARTFORD – The Hartford School Board will hear options Wednesday night for cutting millions of dollars from next year’s budget, including possibly closing school buildings, after the state lowered the amount districts can spend before triggering a tax penalty.

Superintendent Caty Sutton and Director of Finance Jacob Vezina will present options to the board to cut at least $3.7 million at a special meeting at 6 p.m., according to a district presentation from Sep. 2.

In a letter to the district community Monday, Sutton said Wednesday’s presentation “will include some dramatic ways for the board to consider in approaching this reduction to our budget, including reconfiguring our facilities and potentially closing some buildings.”

“No decisions have been made or will be made at this meeting,” she wrote.

The district says it needs to cut $3.7 million to stay under the state’s excess spending threshold, which drops from 118% to 115.5% of the state average per-pupil spending for the budget year that begins next July. The threshold falls again each year until it hits 112.5% in fiscal year 2032. Districts that spend above it are effectively taxed twice on the amount over.

Hartford has always stayed under the threshold, the district says. Going over it now would raise the local tax rate by a projected 15.8%, according to the Sept. 2 presentation. The district says $3.7 million is roughly the cost of 37 positions. By comparison, it says transportation costs about $920,000 and food service about $1 million.

The change comes from the yield bill lawmakers passed at the end of the session. Gov. Phil Scott signed it June 18 as Act 169. The same day, Scott signed H.955, now Act 170, the education overhaul that sets up a new round of voluntary school district mergers.

The Valley News reported in March that the excess spending proposal was designed to curb spending, and in May that a version of the bill threatened to block construction of a new middle and high school in the Mountain Views School District in Woodstock.

Sutton’s letter opens with an apology. She wrote that she was sorry “to relay information that will be a challenge for us all as we grapple with challenges that were placed upon us by outside and external factors and led by those who are not familiar with our communities nor our work to support our students and families.”

She said the district raised alarms with legislators last spring about proposals that were “compelling larger, consolidated districts while fiscally starving our local districts.”

The district’s presentation said leaders could not have predicted the change. “We are not being given much ‘runway’; for this to go into effect for next fiscal year is unusual and very challenging,” one slide reads.

Sutton wrote that the threshold change lands on top of “ongoing astronomical increases to health insurance costs,” inflation, PCB testing and cleanup, and a new Medicaid funding mechanism that will bring in less money.

In January, the district put a $58.7 million budget before voters, one that Sutton described as largely holding staffing and programs level.

Even without adding anything, that budget is expected to grow. The district’s slides point to cost-of-living increases to salaries, rising health insurance costs, inflation of about 3% a year and unplanned repairs to aging buildings. Together, the district estimates those push its budget up about 5% a year.

At the same time, the state’s threshold keeps dropping, so the amount the district projects it would need to cut to stay under it grows every year, reaching a cumulative $17.5 million by 2032.

“What this means is that this year is not the only year we will be facing reductions,” Sutton wrote.

She closed the letter by saying the administration knows what is at stake.

“When we are talking about ‘reduction’ and ‘reconfiguration,’ we are talking about human beings. We are talking about careers and livelihoods and essential and critical programs that serve our most vulnerable students,” she wrote.

“It feels impossibly hard to navigate through such a challenging time that will involve such intense conversations about our special district community without feeling like our value, our worth, is being exponentially diminished by technical discussions about reduction.”

The special board meeting is at 6 p.m. Wednesday in the BEST Room at the Hartford Area Career and Technology Center. It will also be streamed online via Google Meet. The board can be reached at schoolboard@hartfordschools.net.