By STEVEN JUPITER
BRANDON—The Rutland Northeast Supervisory Union is approaching the Fiscal Year 2025–26 budget a bit differently than it did the current FY25 budget, which failed twice at the ballot box last spring. Hoping to avoid that fate, RNESU interim Superintendent Rene Sanchez and the Otter Valley Unified Union (OVUU) Board are trying to involve the district community in the process from the beginning.
“We’re looking at this process as having a beginning, a middle, and an end,” said Sanchez in a recent conversation at RNESU Central Office in Brandon.
Sanchez is just wrapping up the beginning phase, which he began in September and which entailed meetings with district residents at local establishments like Mae’s Place in Brandon, Keith’s Country Store in Pittsford, and Sugar & Spice in Mendon. These events were intended to give district residents a chance not only to meet Sanchez, who took on the position this summer after the departure of former RNESU Superintendent Kristin Hubert, but also to weigh in on the school budget.
Sanchez is also making the rounds of the Selectboards in RNESU’s constituent towns. So far, he has been to Mendon, Chittenden, and Pittsford, with Brandon, Leicester, Sudbury, Whiting, and Goshen to come.
“We want them to be a part of this,” he said.
RNESU is also soliciting responses via an online survey, hoping to bring in as much feedback as possible before beginning the middle phase of the process: discussing actual dollar amounts in school board meetings.
The district already knows it will face a tough audience this season. The first OVUU proposed budget for the current fiscal year (FY2024–25) requested a 12.71% increase over the previous year. It was shot down at Town Meeting in March with 60% of voters rejecting it. In April, the OVUU Board submitted a second proposal that cut only 1 percentage point from the first and got an even worse reception, with roughly 67% of voters turning it down. The third proposal, which requested an 11% increase over the previous fiscal year finally passed, with 53% of the vote.
“It was a perfect storm,” said RNESU Business Manager Brenda Fleming. Health insurance costs for the district had spiked 16%. COVID-era funding had ended, forcing districts across the state to request money from taxpayers to close the gap. Moreover, property values in the OVUU district had risen sharply since the pandemic, adding to taxpayers’ frustration with the state’s method of calculating school tax based on property value.
Adding to the district’s pain, the legislature unexpectedly retracted a statutory 5% cap on property tax increases only after OVUU had already cut $500K from its budget to get below the cap’s qualifying threshold. The statewide retraction, which occurred at the end of budget season, removed what many districts had seen as protection against what were otherwise expected to be soaring tax rates and left them little time to adjust before having to submit their budgets to voters at Town Meeting.
“Our annual report was based on the cap,” said Fleming. “We didn’t have time to redo it. And we had to go to voters with a budget that assumed we’d be protected.”
Mr. Sanchez had a similar experience at Champlain Valley School District, where he had been Superintendent during the last budget season.
“The budget failed at Champlain Valley, too,” said Sanchez. “We’d had to put the brakes on an 8-page informational mailer. The community didn’t have correct information.”
Districts around the state, including OVUU, were caught flat-footed by all these factors last spring, prompting some superintendents, such as Sanchez, to try a different approach this time around.
“We struggle with getting feedback from the community,” said Fleming.
“This is why we’re offering so many opportunities to meet with us,” added Sanchez.
RNESU has also commissioned a demographic study of the district from Statistical Forecasting of Dorset, VT. The purpose of the study is to try to predict the longer-term enrollment trends of the district in order to prepare for the longer-term financial needs of the district.
“We don’t want to base our budgets on narratives,” said Sanchez. “We want to base them on data.”
The study, which was presented to the OVUU Board by Dr. Richard Grip of Statistical Forecasting last week, predicted that the district would lose almost 60 students by 2030, due mostly to a decline in K-6 enrollment. Grip attributed this to an aging district population and a low local birth rate.
It was also apparent from the study that most students graduating from 8th grade at Barstow in Chittenden, which is under the supervision of RNESU, do not choose to continue on to Otter Valley. Instead, the largest percentage choose Rutland High School. Of the 93 students who left Barstow in 2024, only 3 enrolled at OV, while 56 chose Rutland. The remainder dispersed among other public and private schools.
Dr. Grip also noted that almost all of RNESU’s schools would be undersubscribed by 2030, meaning that the physical buildings would have unused capacity and would not be serving as many students as they could. The only exception to this was Neshobe Elementary in Brandon, which was projected to remain slightly above capacity, as it is today. This will directly influence important decisions that will need to be made about expensive facility maintenance over the next few years, as the district’s buildings are starting to show their age and will need costly overhauls.
In response to criticisms that the district was not seeing a return on taxpayer investment, given the district’s poor testing over the last several years, Sanchez acknowledged that the district needed to be more forthcoming with parents and other residents about what it is trying to do to address the problem. However, the results of the most recent academic assessments won’t be made public until a week before Town Meeting.
“It really prevents us from talking about our essential work,” lamented Sanchez. “We need to be able to say, ‘We have students in need. Here’s what we’re doing to address it. Here’s what it will cost.’”
Sanchez added that overall “our goal is somewhere between level funding and level service.”
“Level funding” means that the dollar amount of the budget does not change from the previous fiscal year. However, because of increased costs, fewer services may be covered by that same dollar amount. “Level service” means that the services offered will remain the same but the budget might increase depending on the cost of those same services compared to last year.
It’s a choice that RNESU and OVUU will have to make based on feedback from residents. Fewer services for the same amount or the same services for a greater amount? It’s also certainly possible to reduce services to reduce the overall budget as well.
Anyone who has not yet seen or responded to RNESU’s online surveys can find them on the district’s website: www.rnesu.org/page/budget. It can also be accessed through the QR code accompanying this article.
And as always, OVUU School Board meetings are open to the public.
“An organization’s budget tells you who an organization is,” said Sanchez.
