GMUSD Board hears need for deep cuts to avoid penalties

By Shawn Cunningham
© 2026 Telegraph Publishing LLC

After many months of wrangling over various aspects of policy governance — a method of assigning roles of the board and the administration — the Green Mountain Unified School District voted to consign it to the ash heap and move to another model. But that sense of relief felt by many board members did not last long as the board focused on the state’s plan to financially penalize districts that don’t stay under a spending cap that will be decreasing each year through 2032, squeezing schools even more.

The “excess spending threshold” is currently set at $16,470 per student, while GM spends $16,060 per student. Next year, the threshold drops to $16,121. But increases in salaries and health care, among others, will push the district over that. When that happens, the state taxes the district double for the amount spent over the threshold.

Some of the increases are negotiated but others are unexpected. TRSU Business Manager Cheryl Hammond gave the example that the lowest bid for heating oil was $4.78 per gallon up $2.24 per gallon over last year. The district uses 65,000 gallons to heat some of its schools so that’s an additional unbudgeted $145,600, some of which will be spent in the 2028 budget year. She estimates that, to cover the increased costs, the district would need to cut $493,385 from the current budget and that every increase or new expense would need to be offset by a cut.

In other words, as Hammond begins to build next year’s budget, right from the start it has to be at least half a million dollars less than this year’s. And, as the threshold continues to decrease, each year there will have to be another budget cut to keep from incurring the penalty. TRSU Superintendent Layne Millington called that cut “a minimum.”

Hammond also pointed to the decrease in the number of students: As the number of students declines, the cost per student increases.  Millington told the board that the anticipation of cuts can “destroy morale every year for five years” and that there’s something to be said for just ripping off the Band Aid by bringing spending down to the 2032 goal.

Board member Shayna Kalnitsky asked if the administrative teams in the school were looking at strategies for cutting costs. Millington said that with the size of the cuts this large, the answer is cutting staff. He also pointed to the Act 73 mandate for increasing class sizes. That would reduce the number of faculty and staff needed for a decreasing population of students.

Millington said there could be other cuts, but referred to them as “ugly.”  “Transportation is expensive especially with the cost of fuel,” he said, noting that the district could cut busing but then attendance rates would drop.

He said that pre-school is expensive, and while the state has said it would pay for full-day classes, in reality it only pays for  10 hours per week. But he worried that the benefits of pre-school — kids starting school prepared —  would be lost.

Millington also said the administration had presented the board with an attrition plan for reducing staff, but that wasn’t “widely accepted” by the board. He asked if the board was now changing its mind about attrition.

In the end, Millington said that the Act 73 minimum class size would reduce staff. He said that information developed last year indicate that increasing class sizes and instituting the cuts could be done pretty seamlessly.