OPINION: Stop the runaway school budget train

February 11, 2026  |  By Frank Provato



Unless you want to open your property tax bill for the coming year and find yourself shocked and dismayed, please read this. 

The proposed 5.44% increase in the school budget is not how much your property taxes will increase. Your taxes will be higher. Perhaps way higher than the Consumer Price Index (CPI - currently under 3%) or the increase in your income, and you will once again be figuring out how to eliminate or reduce other items in your household budget.  The situation will not improve so long as taxpayers continue to fuel the inflationary fire by approving school budget increases that exceed the CPI. 

It may eventually bankrupt the state, drive residents out of Vermont (further reducing the tax base), and make it harder for all of us to make ends meet.

Here’s the bottom line: you can only stop this runaway train at the voting booth on Town Meeting Day, so consider voting “NO” on the school budget proposal, repeatedly, if that is what it takes to get a budget increase at or below the CPI.  

Under state law, if taxpayers do not approve the school budget by July 1, the school system may only borrow up to 87% of its current operating expenses (an actual budget reduction) to fund operations next year, until there is a taxpayer-approved budget. If that happens in enough school districts across the state, I expect that school boards, administrators, state legislators, and the governor will finally have the incentive to reduce expenses and will rush to find a sustainable solution acceptable to taxpayers before the start of the school year in September. 

Folks, they have been “kicking the can down the road” too long!  Don’t accept excuses, delays, or worse, the promise of more studies and work groups. They know what to do. If you want to know why, please read on.

A few years ago, a report was published by the Vermont Government Legislative Joint Fiscal Office entitled “The 2023 Report on Vermont’s Education Financing.” It is the most comprehensive, evidence-based document I have seen on this subject in Vermont. However, I suspect it did not get widespread distribution because it was very critical of our state’s handling of school financing. It said:

1.  Vermont has a 20+ year history of multiple “studies and work groups” which produced recommendations that were never implemented, because Vermonters won’t make the hard choices necessary to control school costs.

2.  Vermont has the most complicated and poorly understood system of education financing in the country, based on statewide funding, local decisions on spending, property values/taxes for payment, and incomprehensible formulas designed so that school districts with higher property values (like HUUSD) subsidize less affluent and/or more culturally diverse districts elsewhere in the state.

3.  Vermont consistently ranks number one or two highest in the nation in per-pupil education expenses. And we are not getting the value for our money.

4.  The performance of Vermont students on standardized testing has actually been declining compared to national averages, despite big annual increases in our per-pupil expenses.

5.  Education expenses in Vermont continue to rise in excess of the CPI, despite a significant drop in the number of school-age children.

6.  The current system provides few incentives for school boards to control expenses.

7.  The report makes numerous recommendations for controlling costs, but it highlights that there has been little progress in actually implementing them. These include: Mandate consolidation of school districts, schools, and supervisory unions (Vermont, a very small state, has 120 school districts and 52 basically autonomous supervisory unions); increase class sizes; use the collective power of the school districts to fight unnecessary government program mandates; eliminate programs that do not support the core education mission (e.g., As a retired physician, I have to ask why we provide “mental health services” in our schools that are duplicative of what is available in the healthcare delivery system?); negotiate union contracts that do not inflate salaries and employee benefits faster than the CPI; negotiate all vendor contracts at a statewide level, not just health insurance, to leverage cost increases no higher than the CPI; sell facilities that are not optimally used or in disrepair, or pay for such repairs through long-term bonds (when interest rates are lowest), not through current taxes; strengthen and enforce spending caps on school budgets based on the CPI; and, most importantly, consider a less complicated system of school financing, preferably pushing decision-making to the state level, pushing funding to the local district level, and considering alternatives to property tax funding of schools to more broadly and equitably spread the cost to all Vermonters.

Frank Provato is retired and lives in Waterbury Center.