Annual meeting warned for Feb 26
By STEVEN JUPITER
BRANDON—The Otter Valley Unified Union (OVUU) School Board is proposing an increase of 4.53% for Fiscal Year 2025–2026 (FY26), which will begin on July 1, 2025. This proposal will be put before voters on Tuesday, March 4. OVUU’s annual meeting, at which the budget will be discussed and where certain floor votes will be taken, will be held on Tuesday, February 26 at 6:30 p.m. at Otter Valley Union High School.
The OVUU Board voted to approve the proposed budget on Tuesday, January 14. Rutland Northeast Supervisory Union (RNESU) Business & Finance Director Brenda Fleming led the Board through a presentation on the proposed budget.
The 4.53% increase represents a dollar increase of $1,214,177 over the current year’s budget of $26,808,822 and covers all schools and facilities within the OVUU district: Otter Valley Union High School, Otter Valley Union Middle School, Neshobe Elementary in Brandon, Otter Valley North Campus in Brandon, Lothrop Elementary in Pittsford, Otter Creek Academy (OCA) in Leicester, and two specialized facilities in Sudbury and Whiting.
Ms. Fleming said that the proposed budget incorporated the feedback that RNESU received after last year’s budget conflicts, when district taxpayers rejected the proposed budgets twice, eventually passing a third proposal by a narrow 53%–47% margin. The final proposal that passed for FY25 (current year) was still 11% higher than the budget for FY24 (last year).
According to Ms. Fleming’s presentation, feedback from the community included a focus on student needs and a desire for cost savings at the administrative level. District residents complained last year that the reductions that were implemented seems to focus on instructional services while sparing admin.
Cuts in the FY26 proposal include:
- A reduction of 3.9 elementary school teachers. 1 full-time teacher at Lothrop, 1 full- and a part-time teacher at Neshobe, and 1full- and 1 part-time teacher at OCA
- Part-time paraeducator positions at Neshobe and OCA
- A full-time support staff position at Neshobe
- A full-time mental-health clinician at Neshobe
- $25K in departmental budgets at OV
As was the case last year, a major factor in the budget increase is health insurance. Premiums for FY26 will increase 11.9%.
New RNESU Superintendent Rene Sanchez, who was just hired on a permanent basis after six months as Interim Superintendent, has been resistant to major cuts at the administrative level, defending those positions as necessary to the smooth functioning of the district.
However, Superintendent Sanchez noted that the Director of Safety position at RNESU, which was paid $120K per year, is being eliminated. Sanchez and Fleming both suggested in a subsequent discussion with The Reporter that the elimination of this position may look like a cost savings on paper but in reality simply burdens other RNESU employees with additional work that cuts into the time they can spend on their core responsibilities.
“We wanted a level-service budget,” said Sanchez. “Losing this position means we won’t have that.”
And despite calls for administrative cuts, RNESU will be creating a new position at the admin level: Data Manager. According to Sanchez and Fleming, the position is necessary because the collection of student data across the district had been done idiosyncratically, with each school keeping records in slightly different ways. This made it difficult, they said, to assess trends across the district, since it wasn’t always clear how to compare, say, absences at Neshobe with those at Lothrop and OCA.
“We wanted to be sure we weren’t missing data,” said Fleming.
Additionally, the sheer amount of academic data that must be transmitted to various state agencies requires that someone keep track of it in a consistent, thorough way, they said.
The position hasn’t yet been posted, but Sanchez said the salary would be around $80K/year based on experience. This would be a full-time, year-round position that would continue over summers when the schools are closed.
Another factor that played heavily in last year’s budget challenges was the District’s Common Level of Appraisal (CLA), a device by which the state measures the gap between the assessed value of a community’s Grand List and that Grand List’s “fair market value.” Vermont bases its property tax on the assessed value of real estate and when that assessed value dips below the fair market value (as determined by the average sales price for the last 3 years), the state brings the two figures in line by increasing the tax rate to reflect the current value of real estate.
For example, if the average assessed value of a home in Town X is $150,000 but the average sales price for the past three years is $200,000, then the CLA for Town X would be 75% because the average assessed value is 75% of the average fair market value.
The CLA for towns within OVUU has been low since the pandemic, because property values have spiked while towns have been slow to re-appraise their Grand Lists.
With the exception of Whiting, all of OVUU’s constituent towns saw their respective CLAs drop as the average sales prices for the past three years continued to rise.
For Brandon, the drop in CLA means that taxpayers who do not receive income-sensitivity subsidies from the state will pay an extra $0.01 per $100 in assessed property value. This means that a home assessed at $100,000 will pay an extra $10 per year in taxes. A Brandon home assessed at $367,000 will pay an extra $36.70 per year.
For Pittsford, that figure is $0.09 per $100 in assessed property value. So, a Pittsford home assessed at $100,000 will pay an additional $90 per year. A Pittsford home assessed at $367,000 will pay an additional $330.30 per year.
For Leicester, the figure is $0.12 per $100 in assessed property value.
For Sudbury, the figure is $0.00 (no change) per $100 in assessed property value.
For Goshen, the figure is $0.19 per $100 in assessed property value.
For Whiting, the figure is -$0.07 per $100 in assessed property value. This is because the average sales price in Whiting for the past 3 years dropped in comparison to that average last year. So, a Whiting home assessed at $100,000 this year will pay $70 less this year. A Whiting home assessed at $367,000 will pay $256.90 less in taxes this year.
To determine how the CLA affects your taxes, divide the assessed value of your home by 100 and multiply that result by the rate for your town as illustrated above. But keep in mind that the majority of homeowners in the district will end up paying a lesser amount once income sensitivity is taken into account: the state reduces property-tax liability by a significant amount for households whose total income is less than $128,000 per year.
“The Boards worked hard and made difficult decisions this year,” said Ms. Fleming. “We’ve arrived at a pretty fair budget.”
