LETTER: Recapping legislative session impacts to public education
June 26, 2026To the Harwood Community,
A lot has happened recently in the Legislature and the governor’s office that affects the school budget, your property taxes for the next fiscal year, and the push for school district consolidation. As we wind down the school year, we want to give you our quick take on all of these complex issues.
To set the stage, school budgets across the state are under pressure from rising health care costs (up 35% in just three years!), special education, mental health costs, and transportation/utility costs. If we just added these increased costs to our school budgets, you would have seen your property taxes go up much more than they already have. In fact, we’ve cut the school budget by 15% over the past three years. There’s no sugarcoating the fact that these cuts hurt our kids’ education, although we’ve tried to make cuts that do the least damage. The Harwood School Board continually deals with the difficult task of trying to balance our educational needs against homeowners’ ability to pay for them.
With these pressures in mind, we are distinctly unhappy with this year’s “yield bill” (H.949), which lowers how much we can increase our budget before we face a steep penalty. We had already foreseen the need for more budget cuts this year to avoid the penalty, but this new cap will force us to cut an additional $625,000 next year. So as we enter the fourth year of cuts, we are now facing a very scary year where there is nothing left to cut.
At the same time, the Legislature recognized that just cutting school budgets wouldn’t solve our budget crisis in the long run. They passed S.190, which would have capped medical expenses charged to school districts and small employers’ health care plans. This would have been a strong step towards curbing our health care costs, and we’re extremely disappointed that Gov. Scott vetoed this bill. The governor said that S.190 was unfair because it would “[direct] savings to some payers while excluding others.” To us, that’s like saying the fire department shouldn’t put out house fires because it’s unfair to people whose houses are not on fire.
On the controversial topic of school district consolidation, the Legislature took some cautious steps. First, it grouped school districts into Cooperative Educational Service Areas, called “CESAs” for short, with the idea that districts in a group will look for ways to share costs in areas like special ed, business services, IT, transportation, etc. – all of our big cost drivers. Our school board elected our Superintendent, Dr. Mike Leichliter, to be our district’s representative on the Winooski Valley CESA, based on his years of experience with a similar structure when he was a superintendent in Pennsylvania. Our CESA will begin meeting this summer. In our view, time will tell if CESAs lead to substantial savings, but they are definitely worth trying.
The Legislature has also created a second, different grouping of school districts, and we are mandated to study merging with other districts in our “Merger Group.” It’s important to state that nothing is written in stone – we’re not forced to merge, and we can (if we wish) merge with a district outside our group. The school board will elect a representative to send to this merger study group, and we’ll take it from there.
We’re very mindful that the legislative Commission on the Future of Public Education in Vermont’s final report in 2025 found no solid evidence that district consolidation would save money, so we’re withholding judgment on this process for now.
And – please keep in mind that this study of merging districts is independent of the difficult question of consolidating schools within the Harwood Unified Union School District.
A good summary of CESA and the Merger Groups is here. As always, we welcome your input on all these issues. These are tough, tough issues, and we listen to what our community has to say.
Ashley Woods, chair
Cindy Senning, vice chair
HUUSD School Board