Mon. Feb 3rd, 2025
Letters to the editor.

Dear Editor,

I do not support the governor’s plan to consolidate school districts. I grew up outside of Denver Colorado, in a district roughly as populous as Vermont. And do you know what that school district is grappling with today?

How to plug holes in its $1 billion budget without increasing property taxes for struggling families, despite consolidating schools and using a funding formula similar to the governor’s.

In my small local school district here in Vermont, the yearly cost of benefits (driven by health insurance) has risen by $1.4 million over the last 3 years. So we consolidated, closing an elementary school in a rural community for yearly savings of $1 million.

Closing that school has plugged part of the health insurance budget hole for two years, at significant human cost to the families who cherished and relied on it. But it couldn’t address the root cause of our rising budget, and it’s not hard to imagine where we’ll be two years from now.

Any savings from consolidation and closings will disappear rapidly if health insurance costs keep rising. There is no point in dismantling our school districts until we fix our broken health care system. The schools are not the problem, and their budgets will just keep rising until they overwhelm us again.

Jeff Seymour

Montpelier

Read the story on VTDigger here: Jeff Seymour: School district consolidation is barking up the wrong tree.