WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — Superintendent Caty Sutton and the Hartford School District leadership team had just wrapped up a nearly two-hour presentation on their plans to consolidate their budget. “You’re going to get off easy,” School Board Chair Nancy Russell joked to Sutton.
But she had spoken too soon; board member Daniel Schapira had a motion to make. He proposed that Sutton and her team prepare a third option for the board to consider, one that manages the $5 million budget reduction without closing any school in the district.
His motion was met with applause from the parents and teachers in the room, and the board passed it unanimously.
Wednesday night’s lively meeting at the Hartford Area Career and Technology Center saw parents and educators urging Hartford’s school board and district to take more input from teachers and students about how to best meet its budget requirement.
Act 169, signed into law in June by Gov. Phil Scott, lowers the amount a Vermont district can spend per student before the state adds a tax penalty. To stay under that threshold, the Hartford School District needs to cut about $5 million from its annual budget. If the district doesn’t reduce its spending for the 2027-28 school year, the state will impose a penalty tax on the overage.
District projections put the homestead tax rate for next year at about $1.94 per $100 of assessed value without cuts, or about $5,830 on a $300,000 home. With enough cuts to get under the threshold, the rate would drop to $1.43, or about $4,300. Taxes on a home of that value are about $3,900 this year. Even with the cuts, the presentation noted, taxes could still rise because of state factors the district can’t control.
“We recognize that these decisions are difficult, painful, and tremendously impactful,” Sutton said to begin. She added by phone Thursday, “Our attention is being diverted from the things that matter most: the care of our students and our communities.”
In two respects, participants at Wednesday’s meeting were united: Nobody seems to want to trim the budget by this much, or to have property taxes go up. The problem is finding consensus on where those budget cuts will come from.
Nine-year-old Mary Owens, a fourth-grader at Dothan Brook School in Wilder, does not want her elementary school experience to change. “It would be overwhelming to be with new kids, teachers, and in a new environment,” she told the board from a podium she was barely tall enough to stand behind.
“At my age, new things can be exciting, but I need time to understand what is changing, get ready for it, and feel safe before the big changes happen. The decisions you are making feel too quick,” Owens said.
April Thorburn, a Wilder native and secretary of the Hartford Education Association, felt similarly to Mary. Thorburn went to school in Hartford and has now been a teacher in the district for 25 years. The process, to her, is “just so rushed.”
“How do we do it well in the short amount of time that we have?” she asked.
Sutton emphasized that the problem her district now faces is not unique to Hartford, or even to Vermont. Under-enrollment plagues schools across the nation; according to her presentation, the U.S. has too few students for its schools.
National data backs her point: Per NPR, the U.S. birthrate has been in decline since 2007, 23% lower in 2026 than it was two decades ago. Compounded with other problems — like students leaving public schools during COVID-19 and a high cost of living in certain areas — a smaller population of school-aged children means schools have fewer students. And in Vermont, like in most states, public education is funded based on the number of students enrolled in a school: a per-capita model.
“We’re losing students, and any time you lose students, you lose funding,” Sutton said Thursday.
The decrease in the allowed excess spending threshold — which Act 169 lowers — also means the district will continue to lose funding as enrollment declines, according to Sutton.
At a Sept. 30 meeting, the district introduced five plans to reduce the budget — Models A through E — along with Model F, a blank option enabling board members to pitch their own ideas. At that meeting, the board voted unanimously to advance Models C and E. In the three weeks between that meeting and the next, Sutton and her team asked for community feedback on the plans and prepared a more detailed presentation on what Models C and E would look like in practice.
Representing the district on the leadership team alongside Sutton are Assistant Superintendent Aron Tomlinson, Finance Director Jacob Vezina and Erica Rogstad, the district’s director of special education.
By Wednesday, they had gathered 435 survey responses, which Sutton stressed represent only about 4% of the town’s population; Tomlinson said most responses came from teachers and parents with children in the district. Fifty-two percent of those respondents indicated that they prefer Model C, with 19.8% indicating favor of Model E and about 28% either supporting neither plan or expressing neutrality.
To consolidate its budget, Hartford will have to eliminate jobs across the school district while maintaining class sizes within the student-to-staff ratios required by Vermont’s Education Quality Standards. Model C would close one elementary school, while Model E would close one elementary school and three district offices, so administrators would share their building with the pre-kindergarten program. In Model C, both elementary schools would include classes of pre-K students.
Tomlinson and Sutton outlined other ways the district could reduce spending: by cutting the number of days teachers have to work, slowing technology upgrades, freezing raises for administrators and sharing arts and physical education staff between schools. They could find cuts in athletics, in how school buses work and in equity spending.
Sutton and her team spent the better part of two hours walking through the specifics of Models C and E before Schapira introduced his motion. Board member Colin Butler, who made the Sept. 30 motion to advance Models C and E, proposed that his fellow board members reopen the floor for public comment so that the board could hear input about Schapira’s idea. Thorburn took the podium.
“I’ve heard tons of things about how this will financially help us, and what I haven’t heard is what’s best for children educationally. Come and ask the teachers,” she said. “Come and talk to them. They have ideas.”
Teachers in the district, by and large, don’t want any schools to close. Many of them would lose their jobs, and some said Wednesday that they don’t believe it’s the best decision for the students. At the same time, Hartford teachers cannot afford a jump in property taxes; according to Thorburn, new hires sometimes can’t accept their jobs because they can’t find anywhere in the area they can afford to live.
Nichole Vielleux, president of the HEA, echoed Thorburn’s sentiment and urged the board to consider the minimum change possible to get excess spending out of the district’s budget. She offered a metaphor: If the district is a cupcake, excess spending is frosting.
“You can eat cupcakes without the frosting,” she said.
Vielleux asked the board to look at the positions it created using the federal funding it was granted for COVID-19 — maybe they could cut some of those. She said the district could push back on state mandates that Vermont doesn’t fund. Then she advocated for a committee including teachers, community members and school board representatives to work together on a plan to reduce the budget.
Sutton asked Vezina if he had the capacity to get together the numbers for a new proposal. “I can do my best,” he said, drawing out the “I” in hesitation. Butler told Sutton that she could ask for flexibility on the timeline of future meetings if needed, and moments later, the board unanimously passed Schapira’s motion.
Tomlinson and Vezina told the Valley News after the meeting that the presentation for Wednesday took “weeks and weeks.” They were tweaking the details until 4:30 p.m., just an hour and a half before Wednesday’s meeting. Another presentation outlining what it would look like to cut the budget without closing any schools will likely take just as much time and effort; the leadership team members have to attend to their regular duties, too.
“We do it because we love the kids,” Tomlinson said.
And the kids — the ones like Mary, at least — love their schools.
“If you ask us, you’ll learn that a school is more than a building. It’s about the people in it who make you feel like you belong,” she told the board. “I’m asking you to keep our schools and staff as they are now.”
