By Tom Ayres, Senior Staff Writer
The Mountain Views School District (MVSD) on Monday evening acceded to input from concerned educators, parents, students, and community leaders, nixing in full controversial proposed cuts to Unified Arts, foreign language, and math and science programs while recommending a $30,773,078 budget for the seven-town school district for the 2025-26 fiscal year. The budget posits per pupil spending of $17,278.57 next year, an increase of 1.08% over the present school year.
The proposed budget will go before voters in Barnard, Bridgewater, Killington, Plymouth, Pomfret, Reading, and Woodstock at Town Meeting on Tuesday, March 4. The budget, which was approved unanimously by the 18-member MVSD School Board on Monday, restores full funding for elementary school-level Unified Arts (UA) programming at a cost of $352,908. UA programs integrate art, music, dance, theater, foreign language instruction, and science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) studies in a combined curriculum at the district’s five elementary schools in Barnard, Killington, Pomfret, Reading, and Woodstock. The budget cuts for UA programming that the MVSD administration and the school board’s Finance Committee initially proposed last month drew a firestorm of criticism from parents, students, and teachers, who packed two public budget workshop meetings last month and turned to the Standard and social media outlets to share their grievances.
The $30.77 million budget recommended by the MVSD also calls for the reinstatement of high school-level Latin and French classes at a projected cost of $160,370 and the restoration of two half-time math and science positions at Woodstock Union High School and Middle School (WUHS/MS) at a cost of $100,250. In an effort to improve the budget’s bottom line, the school board okayed a hike in tuition of $1,500 a year for all students enrolling at MVSD schools from pre-K through high school — a move that is projected to add $120,000 to the MVSD’s coffers in 2025-26. The new budget also eliminates pre-K programming for three-year-olds district-wide, at an estimated savings of $306,225. Lastly, the board-approved budget calls for a 10% reduction in expenditures for athletic and co-curricular programming for 2025-26, reducing by more than $71,000 the projected cost of those programs for the coming year.
MVSD Director of Finance and Operations James Fenn and Finance Committee Chair Ben Ford put both the suggested tuition hike and cuts to sports and extra-curricular programming in perspective at the Monday evening meeting. Fenn said tuition for students attending WUHS/MS from sending towns will climb to $22,510 next school year, while elementary school attendees will pay $19,680 and pre-K class tuition will spike to $12,120 in 2025-26. Fenn and Ford both emphasized that tuition is paid by sending towns via property tax revenues and not by the individual parents of students from sending communities. The annual budget for all athletic and extra-curricular programs is just over $700,000 per year, Ford noted. In the coming year, varsity football expenditures are expected to be trimmed from $7,000 to $6,300, while the budget for the high school girls’ field hockey program will drop from $1,100 to just under $1,000.
The 2025-26 budget as recommended by the MVSD School Board soars about $900,000 above the recently lowered penalty threshold imposed by Vermont’s complex education funding formula. This means that district taxpayers will have to kick in two dollars for every dollar that the MVSD budget allots over the state limit — or approximately $1.8 million in the case of the budget that will go before voters in March. Nonetheless, Ford told his fellow school board members Monday, there will be a projected decline in the education tax rate per $100 of property value for homestead taxpayers in five of the seven towns in the school district in fiscal year 2026, based on projected student enrollment numbers and the penalty threshold cap announced by state officials on Dec. 6.
According to data provided by Ford on Monday and reiterated in a phone conversation with the Standard on Tuesday morning, the percentage change in the 2026 education property tax rate is projected to decline from .02% in Killington to 10.99% in Reading from the fiscal year 2025 rate when communities statewide saw a tax hike of nearly 14% on average. Ford said Barnard, with an estimated 9.48% decrease, Bridgewater (3.51%), Pomfret (4.75%), and Woodstock (3.05%) will also see their education tax rates drop for fiscal year 2026 if the proposed MVSD budget is okayed by voters in March. Among the seven district towns, only Plymouth is expected to see another jump in its education tax rate, estimated at just over 10% for the coming year.
“Some of the tax rates are going to go down pretty significantly,” Ford said on Tuesday. “Our communities that are seeing close to 10% decreases is because they reappraised. Those taxpayers will see a significant difference from last year’s tax bill because, on last year’s tax bill, they got hit with the reappraisal number as their home value spiked on them,” Ford continued. “That reappraisal figure, the home value, is far more significant to the amount of money that people pay than whatever the school district decides to spend money on. We’re talking pennies for hundreds of thousands of dollars on our end. In Plymouth, what you’re seeing is that their common level of appraisal — the equalizing factor on home values — is lagging a bit behind the other communities because the municipality has not yet completed a townwide reappraisal.”
The proposed MVSD budget for 2025-26 will be formally put before voters when Town Meeting warnings are released on or about Jan. 18, as required by statute. The warning will also include details about a statutorily required public information session that the MVSD administration will host for voters in late February.