Stowe mulls three options for the school budget

Stowe also has to pay its share of updated accounting software and of a new assistant for the curriculum and technology directors in the Lamoille South Supervisory Union.

The differences among the three proposals involve staffing.

Option one: Under the base proposal, which includes the costs listed above, the budget would be $11,757,700. That would trim the local homestead tax rate by 0.7 percent, from $1.524 per $100 of home value in the current fiscal year to $1.513. That would save people $11 on the property tax bill per $100,000 of property value.

Option two: Increase the budget by $80,000, to $11,837,700, but maintain the local homestead tax rate at $1.524.

This option includes everything in the base budget proposal, and would move $80,000 from the budget to a capital projects fund in preparation for adding instructional space in buildings that have almost reached capacity.

Stowe’s enrollment has risen 17 percent since the last renovation in 2007 — bucking the statewide trend in which enrollment has declined by 20,000 students in the past 20 years. School officials have already repurposed most of the available space, including closets.

The board was already planning to transfer $500,000 into the capital project funds as part of next year’s budget, and the extra $80,000 would boost it to $857,229 for future use without a tax rate increase.

Option three: This option includes everything in the base budget proposal, plus two more full-time employees, for a total of three new faculty members — the math teacher in the original proposal, a literacy coach for the middle level and high school, and a literacy interventionist.

The local homestead tax rate would increase by 1.7 percent, from $1.524 per $100 of property value in the current year to $1.550 for the next fiscal year, increasing the budget by $265,000 to $12,011,700.

Stowe Elementary School already has a literacy coach, and Principals Dan Morrison and Jeff Maher placed the position at the top of their wish list for the middle level and high school to drill into performance data, research how to structure small group instruction, and co-teach lessons, adding instructional supports to teachers.

A literacy interventionist would add another layer of support to students by most likely including instruction before school, after school, and summers for students who have fallen behind in reading and writing.

The hope is that both of the new literacy positions, and the additional math position, will help narrow the achievement gap between the roughly 100 students who are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches — a measure of family poverty, which shows a correlation with the level of academic achievement — and the rest of the student body.

The school board could also decide it wants to add only one of the literacy professionals, reducing the budget increase to $175,000, which would result in a local homestead tax rate of $1.537 per $100 of property value or $1,537 on home valued at $100,000.