School board to lawmakers: No spending caps

April 9, 2026

Editor’s note: The Harwood Unified Union School Board sent the letter below to state legislators, addressing this to state Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, D-Brattleboro, chair of the House Ways & Means Committee.

Dear Chair Kornheiser,

If your family healthcare bill went up 36% in three years, you wouldn’t just slash your family grocery budget to pay for it. But that’s exactly what S.220 asks school boards to do: cut classroom costs to cover costs that we school boards don’t control. It caps our budget while ignoring the very cost drivers pushing them up: health care, special education, benefits, heating costs, and transportation.

Our board directly controls only about 25 cents of every education dollar. The other 75 cents, made up of health care premiums, special education costs and benefits obligations, is set by the state, by federal law, or by hospital pricing over which we have no control. This year, those fixed costs rose faster than our entire budget. S.220 caps our 25% without touching the rest. That’s not a spending cap – it’s a cost shift onto our kids.

The Harwood Unified Union School District community is doing our part. This year, we started with last year’s budget and found another million dollars to cut from the quarter we control. Over just a three-year period, we’re down $7.2 million, which is about 37% of the budget we control. It’s not pretty: the board gets regular photo updates on the root balls growing in our high school’s septic system. The state found PCBs in Warren Elementary, and then gave up on testing the rest. That’s the view from our board meetings in Duxbury.

Now let’s check in on the Legislature in Montpelier and the 75% of HUUSD’s budget it controls. Healthcare costs: up 36% in three years. Special education: up 21% this year alone. These structural costs are skyrocketing and get worse every year. Proposals like CESAs and shared services offer real ways to bring them down. S.220 doesn’t even try.

Even the one bright spot – removing voter-approved debt from per-pupil calculations – is a step forward before taking two steps back: S.220’s lower spending threshold penalizes HUUSD far more than the debt adjustment helps.

Our ask is simple: Stop shifting costs to school boards that you haven’t been able to fix. Today’s kindergartners deserve real policy that will make sure there’s a high school waiting for them.

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Sincerely,

The Harwood Unified Union School Board

(Including our Student representatives)

Submitted by HUUSD School Board Chair Ashley Woods.