BRADFORD, Vt. — Voters in the Oxbow Unified Union School District will be asked to vote on a reduced budget on June 16.
The district’s board set the new warning at a meeting on May 6, and plans to meet again on Wednesday, May 13.
While the board set a new budget amount of $23.04 million, which is $300,000 lower than the budget voters rejected on April 28, members discussed a range of possible cuts to meet that target without voting on individual measures, according to a video record of the meeting.
Following the April rejection, the district conducted a survey that found that the majority of respondents, 53%, want the board to make cuts to spending at the district’s schools, Bradford and Newbury elementary schools and Oxbow High School. Respondents also said they’d like the cuts to come from administration and new initiatives, such as a plan to create a pre-kindergarten classroom at Newbury Elementary.
“We are trying to follow the majority in the survey,” Heather Lawler, superintendent of Orange East Supervisory Union, said during the May 6 meeting. “We can only cut so deep in any one pocket.”
In some cases, the cuts the board discussed also would reduce sources of revenue. For example, cutting the Newbury pre-K plan means the district would forgo $60,000 in federal Head Start funding, and would still have to pay tuition for children to attend a preschool outside the district.
“What is it going to take for the community, people, everybody to understand … how important early childhood education is to the long-term success of kiddos?” Kristin Meeks, a resident who spoke up at the May 6 meeting, said. “Newbury really is the only school directly around us that still does not offer a public preschool.”
Under the new $23 million proposed budget, per pupil spending would still increase by 14.5%.
Bradford residents would see a tax increase of 36 cents per $100 of assessed property value, while Newbury residents would see a 40-cent increase. That’s down from 40 cents and 44 cents, respectively, in the budget voted down last month.
At the April 28 meeting, voters rejected a proposal to cut the budget by $800,000, and board members said on May 6 that they didn’t want to cut that deeply. They settled on the $300,000 cut as a reasonable figure.
In addition to the proposed cut of the preschool classroom, board members also discussed cutting transportation for extracurriculars at the high school and administrative jobs.
Many of the proposed cuts involved potentially unpleasant trade-offs. For example, cutting transportation to and from school risks raising the truancy rate, which would have an effect on state funding.
Among the roughly 300 responses to the district’s survey, 21 people, or about 7%, said they wanted to see schools be consolidated.
“We can’t close a school, based on the articles of agreement,” Lawler said. “But (School Board Chairwoman) Danielle (Corti) has done some looking into those articles and it does seem possible to talk about different ways to use them, as long as they remain schools.”
The district could bring options to voters within 60 days of the next budget vote, Corti said.
The budget vote on June 16 will take place at an in-person meeting at 6:30 p.m. at Oxbow High School. The board also voted to place on the warning a measure that would change budget voting in the future to Australian balloting.
