Finally, the School Budget Post

On Tuesday, we here in Burlington will be voting on the school budget.

If you want to listen to a really boring (unless you are into this stuff), but thorough presentation, I suggest you check out the Channel 17 podcast of it here. That will give you the specifics and you will get a little education about equalized pupils and common levels of appraisal.

If you have already been doing this crap for so many years that you can compute the common level of appraisal differentials in your sleep, you might find it a more efficient use of time to check out the school board budget information on their website.

See, I try to offer something for every level of knowledge here at She's Right.

If you want the easiest method of understanding the budget, read the next five sentences (with the dollar figures) then skip to the last paragraph.

Here's the bottom line.

The current budget is $38,113,325.

The proposed budget is $41,574,566.

That is an increase of 9.08%.

But, other sources of revenue are increasing for the school district this year to the tune of $41,135,677, so the portion we actually get to vote on is only $438,899.

About that, it used to be that the voters got to approve the entire spending. If a budget was not passed by a certain date, the school district had to make do with the previous year's budget amount.

Then someone cooked up a tasty little scheme to remove our local control. It was pitched as a "soft landing," which meant if voters did not approve the budget, the school board would fall back on last year's budget plus any increase in the per pupil money from the state. Supporters claimed that to revert to the previous year's budget would mean forgoing the increase in state money - which was an outright lie. The truth, which for some reason never had a good spokesman, was that in the case where we reject the budget, forcing the school budget to last year's number, and there is an increase in state money that year, our local portion of taxes would go down. In other words, we blew any chance to ever see a tax decrease on the local level.

Okay, so now that I am done ranting about the past, what does this have to do with this year's budget?

Well, if memory serves, when I was watching the school board meeting on RETN (channel 16), the finance committee came out with a budget that was within that "soft landing," the 7.93% increase to $41,135.677 that they will get no matter how we vote. The rest of the board proceeded to add in other things they wanted for the budget they are sending to the people.

That kind of ticks me off. I mean, there is this constant feeling by the people that the school spending is out of control and the school spenders don't give a rat's patootie. Given the serendipitous windfall that the school board found itself with this year, it seems like it would have been a great time to show the voters that it does understand our tax time woes.

Can you imagine if the school board came out and said, "Look, this year we are going to keep our budget increase within the limit of the revenue increase. We will not seek an increase in the local tax rate." Wow.

Back to reality, though. The budget is not really asking for anything way out there. They are actually filling the preventative maintenance budget like they are required to, but never do because they use the money for other stuff. They are spending $80,000 to pay the state for employees that are not covered with health insurance, per the Catamount Health Plan legislation. They are funding the after school program, which ran out of grant money. (Don't you just love how they do that? They propose a program and assure us that it will be paid for by grant. Then, when the grant runs out they tell us how much they need to keep this great program and we end up paying for it directly.)

I wish we had a line item budget vote, so they actually knew why we voted "no." That would be cool. They could itemize the increases and let us vote on each one. Or at least have a survey for "no" voters to fill out, so they could get some feedback.

Anyway, in case it is not obvious, I will be voting "no" because I think they should have stayed within that huge 7.93% increase they were gifted with. That's what we all have to do with our budgets.