As voters in our area prepare to weigh in on school budgets for the Mountain Views School District (MVSD) and the districts within the Windsor Southeast Supervisory Union (WSESU) at Town Meeting on March 3, state and local officials are striving to educate the public about the ever-increasing impact of health care costs on the price of public education in Vermont.
“[The cost of] health care benefits for public school employees is approaching $400 million annually,” an educational primer from the Vermont School Boards Association (VSBA) stated recently. “[The costs] are one of the fastest-growing drivers of education spending and property taxes in Vermont,” the school board association lamented, adding that the cost hike “far exceeds student enrollment trends, inflation, and state revenue growth.”
Vermont lawmakers acted eight years ago to consolidate health care benefits programs for public school employees into a statewide pool with consistent premiums for all school districts and supervisory unions statewide. The state action took away the power of local school administrators to directly negotiate benefits packages with unions, teachers, and school support staff. According to data supplied by the VBSA, recent and projected cost increases for health care benefits for Vermont schools spiked 16% in fiscal year 2025 and 12% in 2026. The costs are projected to jump another 7.3% in the coming fiscal year.
“For schools that don’t have school choice, I would say health care is the fastest growing driver of budget increases,” Larry Dougher, the chief financial officer for the Windsor Southeast Supervisory Union (WSESU), said during a phone conversation with the Standard last week. “For the schools that have school choice, it’s a combination of health care benefits and the cost of school tuition,” he added.
In a separate phone interview, Dougher’s counterpart at the MVSD, director of finance and operations Jim Fenn, called attention to “a 54% increase in health insurance costs over the past five years,” while MVSD budgets climbed 33% between 2023 and the coming fiscal year. “Benefits costs and wage increases are the primary drivers of budget hikes,” Fenn said.
Dougher and Fenn both echoed calls from the VSBA for Vermont lawmakers to address the steadily mounting price of benefits for public school employees in the context of ongoing education transformation and health care cost containment discussions at the State House. One focal point of the legislative deliberations, the finance administrators concur, could be to address the current arbitration system that locks the state education system into an either/or conundrum in annual negotiations with teachers and support staff unions and representatives.
“The current negotiation model is that if they go to arbitration, there’s no compromise,” Dougher said. “So, for example, if management wants a 6% increase or wants [employees] to pay $100 more into their own HSA, but the employee associations want something different, they go to arbitration, and instead of coming up with a compromise, the arbitration process is all set by law. [The arbitrators] are only allowed to select one position or the other. And every time they’ve done arbitration, [the arbitrators] have sided with the associations and not with management,” he continued. “When we managed our own benefit plans [prior to 2018] — and mind you, I’m not saying statewide negotiations don’t make sense — but we would sit down and say ‘We want you to pay $100 more’ and they would say, ‘How about $25 more?’ and we would go to arbitration and work it out at $50. We’d always come to an agreement.”
For more on this, please see our Feb. 19 edition of the Vermont Standard.
