School board candidates hope to guide district through turmoil

Perhaps no issue has caused as much turbulence in the brief history of the consolidated Champlain Valley School District as the current budget dilemma facing the school board and administration.

The loss of federal COVID-19 funds has put pressure on the district to retain critical support positions, the absence of state funding is forcing the district to spend millions on aging building and infrastructure upgrades, and — the cherry on top — a new state education formula, passed in 2022, has left the district with decreased pupil weights and decreased funding as a result.

New developments in the Statehouse in the past three weeks have only complicated that. Now, candidates running for Town Meeting Day elections for the district’s five member towns — Shelburne, Hinesburg, Charlotte, Williston and St. George — will be faced with the tremendous financial challenges present for the district.

In Williston, newcomer Sarah Showalter-Feuillette is running unopposed to represent Williston, while incumbent Brendan McMahon is running for reelection.

The two candidates running for election and reelection from Charlotte and Shelburne are both running unopposed, and they’ve both seen the development of Act 127 from opposite vantage points.

Meghan Metzler, the current vice chair on the school board and a member of the finance committee, has spent the better part of two years learning the ins and outs of Act 127, and has been a part of devising a way to “land the plane in a spot that’s comfortable for everyone, so that we don’t fall of the fiscal cliff.”

From Charlotte, she’s running unopposed for reelection to her second term.

In an interview, she said she decided to run for reelection to finish that work of guiding the plane, and says she has the right skillset to do it. She is a certified public accountatnt “and I bring a lot of that that perspective to the board.”

“Education finance is a top priority for me and one of the reasons why I’ve decided to stay on the board and figure out how we implement that throughout CVSD,” she said. “I really believe in the work that this district is doing.”

The district had been preparing for Act 127’s implementation for the past two years but that work has been tossed out the window in a matter of weeks, as the Legislature, in the 11th hour, moved to rework the education formula.

Act 127 and its current iteration — which allowed a 5 percent tax rate cap for all districts in the state — remains the law as of press deadline. But a new law being fast-tracked through Statehouse committees would replace the 5 percent cap with a one-cent tax rate discount for every percent decrease loss in the district’s taxing capacity since Act 127’s implementation.

The new law would only apply to districts, like Champlain Valley, that are negatively affected by Act 127’s new pupil weighting.

“Once Act 127 was passed, we, including the finance committee, made that a board priority. The district had a five-year strategy that we were starting to implement. Everything that’s happened in the past few weeks has really upended it in many ways,” Metzler said. “We thought we had a five-year cap, we thought we had all these other things, and that has been upended.”

For Metzler, the new formula, if passed into law, will “have to become the new priority.”

“We are going to have to look at everything,” she said. “Everything’s on the table about how we educate our students.”

Meanwhile, Kate Webb is running for election from Shelburne. After spending 14 years as the state representative for the Chittenden-5-1 legislative district, she has seen the flip side of Act 127 — the process of moving it into law, a process which she feels was implemented far too quickly without taking a harder look at the consequences.

“We went quickly to implementation without looking at some of the unintended consequences,” Webb said. “We’re living with the unintended consequences now.”

Webb says she’s running for election to the school board to address those consequences. “I feel like I kind of owe it to the district,” she said.

On top of her time in the Legislature, Webb also has 25 years of experience working in the schools that now make up the Champlain Valley School District. She worked as a special education case manager and speech language pathologist, primarily in Williston, with stops in Charlotte and Shelburne, until her retirement in 2013.

“I thought that perhaps my four years chairing the education committee in the Vermont House, as well as my 25 years working in the district might be helpful as we navigate some of these challenges,” she said.

If the fast-tracked law, titled H.850, gets passed into law, the district would likely end up having a higher tax rate than the original 18 percent that was first proposed. But officials say it remains difficult to pinpoint what the exact tax rate would be because, if H.850 passes and school districts are allowed re-warn their budgets, district officials won’t know what the final yield will be.

According to Metzler, the finance committee has recommended staying the course with a Town Meeting Day vote, and keeping the current budget as is, but that will have to be approved by the school board at their meeting Tuesday night held after press deadline.

For Webb, the question for the district is what sort of effects their financial decisions will have on students’ education.

“What is the impact of reducing support for children? What are the long-term implications of that? What are some of the short-term implications of our funding challenges? How can we address those funding challenges over the next five years, which needs to happen and really needs to happen at the level of the state,” Webb said. “I would hope that I would be working with, and be in contact with, some of my colleagues in the state to help answer some of those questions.”