Champlain school district projects nearly 10 percent increase in budget

The Champlain Valley School District’s spending for fiscal year 2025 will increase by nearly 10 percent, according to preliminary budget projections for the 2024-25 school year.

The 9.9 percent increase brings the district’s projected expenditures to just over $105 million. The spending increase, district officials say, is driven primarily by contractually negotiated increases and a nearly 20 percent increase in health insurance.

Gary Marckres, the district’s chief operations officer, said that an increase to health insurance came in at 16.4 percent. Officials originally estimated those costs would increase by 10 percent.

The district’s fiscal year 2024 budget, which totaled just over $96 million, was at the time a 7.5 percent increase in expenditures from the previous fiscal year, driven by similar factors like salary increase obligations and health insurance costs.

“Every year I’m struck by how little actual wiggle room there is in our budget,” school board chair Angela Arsenault said. “These are contractual obligations that are really driving the increase.”

While the district’s budget is months away from being finalized — the district still needs revenue projections and its final weighted student count from the state — officials are feeling pressure to tighten spending with the impending effects of Act 127, a new education formula signed into law last year that adjusted the state’s education funding formula.

The new law is expected to have a major impact on districts like Champlain Valley, as well as South Burlington and the Mount Mansfield Unified School District, among others. The legislation allows for a 5 percent cap in tax rate increases from fiscal years 2025 through 2029.

Because of this, the Champlain Valley School District this year will require offsetting reductions for any new proposed expenses.

The end of federal COVID-19 relief funds, meanwhile, means that the district will have to try and absorb some of the 15 positions “that the administration, principals and directors’ thought were critical to keep and make a recommendation of what we could retain as an addition to the general fund for the fiscal year 2025 budget,” Marckres said.

The district’s first pass at its budget does include some added expenses, including a new early education teaching position. District officials are also floating the creation of a new administrative position.

The district’s director of digital learning and communication, held by Bonnie Birdsall, would be split into two separate roles.

“We determined over the last several years that having a half-time communications coordinator and a half-time director of digital learning really were two jobs, not one job,” Marckres said. “It’s too much for one person, so we’re proposing to add a communications coordinator position.”

To offset this and other new expenses, the district pointed to “tech department efficiencies,” a “summer school redesign,” the elimination of the district’s innovation fund, as well as savings from a change in benefits to management contracts.

But the offsets also include a reduction of four para education positions within the district, as well as a reduction of two kindergarten positions and three middle school teaching positions due to a lack of enrollment, Marckres said.

One board member, Keith Roberts of Hinesburg, asked to see “a comparison of our administrative staff to the administrative staff of comparable districts,” before deciding on additions to the administrative staff.

“One of the concerns that we had in connection with the consolidation of the district, when we heard from our constituents, was the ballooning of administration staff,” he said. “I just want to make sure that we’re still on the right page with the staffing that we have in central office versus student-facing teachers that it looks like you’re reducing.”