Harwood officials brace for state education legislation's impact

June 6, 2026  |  By Claire Pomer  |  Correspondent

At the end of the legislative session, the Vermont House of Representatives passed two bills crucial to future education funding. The bills H.955 and H.949 both await signatures from Gov. Phil Scott, and local school district leaders are bracing for the impacts.

Harwood Unified Union School District Superintendent Mike Leichliter and Finance Director Lisa Estler followed the legislation closely and they share their understanding of how the measures will affect the district once they become law. 

H.955 creates Cooperative Educational Service Areas, or CESAs: regional educational task forces to pool resources such as special education services. Washington County’s three state senators voted for the bill, as did three of the four Democratic House members representing the towns in the school district: Rep. Candice White from Waitsfield and Waterbury Reps. Theresa Wood and Tom Stevens. Rep. Dara Torre, from Moretown, was absent and did not vote on the legislation.

The bill does not require which services the special service areas must provide, so each task force will decide which services they pool, also determining the immediate effects on students. The Harwood district has been grouped with other Washington County school districts, Lamoille North and Lamoille South schools, and the White River Valley Supervisory Union.

Legislating collaboration

Superintendent Leichiter said that, with regional service agencies, the size of the district doesn’t matter. “If you can purchase regional services, and it’s a group purchase, you can take advantage of them,” he said. 

When it comes to special education, for example, it would ease budget costs on school districts to borrow special educators from another district rather than hiring one for their own, he explained.

Leichliter, who arrived four years ago from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, has experience with regional educational task forces: Pennsylvania has Intermediate Units that pool services such as curricular services – something Leichliter said Vermont lacks. However, those units in Pennsylvania function by county, and Lancaster County has the same population as the entire state of Vermont. 

The service areas envisioned in Vermont won’t function the same way that the units do in Pennsylvania due to differences in school sizes, population, and geographical features. “I don’t think that the implementation [of H.955] was as well thought through in the legislature as it could have been, and I don’t think it will work as well as it’s written,” Leichliter said.

Size, capacity and distance

H.955 aims to create “voluntary, incentivized” mergers among school districts. The bill claims that larger supervisory unions “reduce per-pupil costs” and “maintain or improve student performance,” yet Leichliter said that he “has not seen strong hard evidence” to bolster those claims. Those effects also may not be due to school districts being larger, he pointed out. 

The bill lays out suggestions for potential mergers, grouping districts based on size, capacity, and distance. HUUSD’s suggested merger group also contains the Barre Unified School District, the Twinfield Unified School District, and the Washington Central School District – grouping Harwood with Spaulding, Twinfield and U-32 high schools. 

If school districts determine mergers are necessary, they will occur within the next few years. The Weighted Student Funding Formula, encoded by Act 73 that was passed in 2025, takes effect on July 1, 2029. Given that timing, any merger decided upon by its Cooperative Educational Service Areas would require voter approval in March 2028. 

The first steps for the Harwood School Board, assuming that H.955 is signed into law by Gov. Scott, would be to appoint a representative to the cooperative service area and Leichliter said he will ask to be appointed. Each service area will need to consider the types of services that they can share, and they will need some administrators to participate.

Lowering the excess spending limit

The other bill that the legislature passed, H.949, aims to reduce the amount per pupil that districts may spend in relation to the state’s excess spending threshold. Currently, that threshold is 118% of the statewide average of per-pupil spending. Districts spending over that amount are penalized with a higher tax rate.  

Of the Washington County senators, Sens. Ann Cummings and Andrew Perchlik voted for the bill; Sen. Anne Watson voted against it. House Reps. White, Wood and Stevens voted for it; Torre was absent. 

“This is the bill that will keep me awake at night,” Leichliter wrote in a message to district staff and school board members and shared with local news media after the bill cleared its final legislative vote. In the past few years, Harwood’s per-pupil spending has hovered just a few hundred dollars below the annual excess spending threshold. 

H.949 sets out a new five-year schedule to reduce that threshold, starting with a drop to 115.5% for fiscal year 2028, the next budget year that districts will need to prepare for in January. The schedule then drops the threshold by 1% each year until it reaches 112.5% for fiscal year 2032. 

Just looking out three years, Leichliter said the Harwood district would need to curb its current level of spending by approximately $625,000, which is about 12% of the current $51.9 million annual budget. That does not factor in mandated and contractual increases such as the cost of health insurance for employees, scheduled pay increases, heating fuel and transportation. 

Many of those increases are not known for next year yet, but Estler will be working on rough estimates to present to the school board. 

In his analysis shared with staff and board members, Leichliter pointed out that the district over the past three budget years has cut spending by approximately $7.5 million by eliminating more than 50 administrative, teaching and support staff positions. “We worked hard to accomplish those reductions thoughtfully and humanely, minimizing impacts on students and classrooms whenever possible, primarily through retirements, resignations, and transfers,” he said.

Cuts equal to six teachers

Steve Rosenberg, who represents Moretown on the Harwood School Board, wrote in a social media post recently that a cut of $625,000 is “roughly equivalent to salaries and benefits for six teachers – not that we will lay off teachers, but we have to cut these funds from academics and extracurriculars that form the core of our kids’ education.” 

Following its summer break, the school board’s first meeting of the 2026-27 school year will be in late August, and the biggest question, according to Leichliter, will be “Do we want to be below the excess spending threshold?” for the fiscal year 2028 budget. 

Given the district’s deep reductions over the past three years, the superintendent points out that, “there’s not much to hit without looking at structural changes.” Reductions will have to come from programming, such as the cut made to eliminate the elementary foreign language program, which was cut from the budget in 2024.

Is merging the answer?

“For a district like ours, we’ve talked about mergers for a long time. With our numbers, there’s no way to make reductions without capital investment,” Leichliter said. 

The Harwood district also faces challenges from its geography: it is a very “long, skinny district” made up of six towns and “bordered by the Green Mountains,” Leichliter points out. It faces significant transportation costs that more condensed districts do not, and it needs to factor those into budget considerations.

Gov. Scott has been a vocal proponent of education reform. And while H.955 does not force school mergers, it sets up districts to explore them. The governor said he would veto any bill lacking that element.

Leichliter is wary of the approach ahead. “The savings aren’t in mergers of districts; they’re in increased efficiency,” he said. “They [proponents of consolidation] keep talking about this ‘future state,’ but the efficiencies they're envisioning are several years out, and in the meantime, we need to provide ample education for students.”

Claire Pomer is a senior from Waterbury at Harwood Union High School.