GREENSBORO – Town select boards pore over municipal budgets line by line for weeks. The town budget process is difficult and time-consuming, but it isn’t complicated. There are revenues and there are expenses. School budgets are different. Vermont’s Education Funding Formula has become so complex that most school board members can’t understand it, much less explain it. Multi-million dollar school budgets are drafted primarily in a supervisory union’s central office by a financial manager. They are approved by school boards after being considered for a handful of hours while board members’ eyes glaze over.
That complexity has led to a myriad of problems. It has minimized actual oversight by the people who are paying the bill. It also leaves towns and taxpayers subject to one-size-fits-all formulas. And sometimes taxpayers fall through the cracks in those formulas.
In 1997 Vermont passed Act 60, creating a statewide education property tax hoping to equalize spending among school districts (it didn’t, but that’s another story for another time). This year Greensboro is falling through the cracks in Vermont’s Education Funding Formula. Because we have a Statewide property tax, it’s important that the value of the property that is taxed be measured by the same standard. That standard is the Common Level of Appraisal (CLA).
Applying the CLA calculation rules rigidly to every town statewide does not result in equitable outcomes in small, rural towns with very few property sales. In a town like Greensboro with two very different types of properties, a small number of sales in a single year can dramatically skew the results. When that happens there should be a “circuit breaker” that reviews the outcome and applies some common sense. Best practices in financial modeling do not include the real-world application of a model that is wildly sensitive to small changes in inputs.
Greensboro’s CLA has plummeted from 63.35% in 2024 to 49.33% in 2025. From 2019 to 2024, Greensboro’s CLA had moved in tandem with Hardwick’s CLA and Woodbury’s CLA, the two other major towns in our school districts. However, for 2025, Greensboro’s CLA plunged much more than the CLAs of the other two towns. The question is why, and two reasons are described below. Greensboro’s plunging CLA has made Greensboro’s homestead education taxes skyrocket and are currently (as of February 21, 2026) projected to increase 29.0%, while Hardwick’s are projected to increase 7.4% and Woodbury’s are projected to increase 11.9%. If the two problems described below were fixed, Greensboro’s CLA would instead be 55.25% and its education taxes would instead be projected to increase 15.2%, which is much more in line with the increases in the two other towns.
The first problem is that eight sales of camps and lake houses around Caspian Lake spread over a three-year period barely squeaked in below the seemingly arbitrary sampling error cutoff; this will result in a projected increase in Greensboro’s total homestead education taxes of 8.07% above what they otherwise would have been. This issue alone causes an increase of $195 per $100,000 of assessed value, represents 33.2% of the total increase in projected homestead education taxes to be paid in 2026, and results in Greensboro paying an additional $477,700 into the Education Fund.
The second problem is that seven sales of residential property with six or more acres, spread over a three-year period, slightly exceeded the seemingly arbitrary sampling error cutoff; this will result in a projected increase in Greensboro’s total homestead education taxes of 3.35% above what they otherwise would have been. This issue alone causes an increase of $85 per $100,000 of assessed value, represents 14.4% of the total increase in projected homestead education taxes to be paid in 2026, and results in Greensboro paying an additional $207,500 into the Education Fund.
No matter what happens in the future with school budgets, the state spending tens of millions of dollars to buy down education tax rates, etc., Greensboro’s education tax rates will be around 11% higher than they would otherwise be solely due to rigid rules within the CLA formula.
In total, these two wrinkles in the funding formula are projected to result in an unbelievable increase of $280 per $100,000 of assessed value, represent 47.7% of the total increase in projected homestead education taxes to be paid by Greensboro’s taxpayers in 2026, and are projected to result in Greensboro paying an additional $685,200 into the Education Fund. This seems completely inequitable.
At a press conference on February 25, Governor Scott said he was planning to vote no on his local school budget because the increases in “other counties are significant. It’s like $250 per $100,000 [of assessed value] of increase based on their projections.” Greensboro could only dream of an increase of $250 per $100,000 of assessed value. Heck, the wrinkles in the CLA formula alone are causing an increase of $280 per $100,000. As of February 21, Greensboro’s total projected increase in homestead education taxes is an eye-watering $586 per $100,000 of assessed value. Greensboro has 48 students in Orleans Southwest Supervisory Union. If nothing changes, Greensboro’s taxpayers are projected to pay more than $130,000 per student.
Ultimately Vermont has to get its spending under control. The foundation formula, contemplated by Act 73, caps spending and can save money. However the state legislature has spent the last decade, including this year, working on the equivalent of shotgun marriages with school district consolidation and forced mergers. There is almost no evidence that forced district consolidation or mergers save any money. The way to stop spending money is to stop spending money. The legislature needs to move forward with the foundation formula.
David Kelley is a Vermont attorney. He lives in Greensboro and is a former chair of the Hazen Union School Board. He was part of the legal team that represented more than two dozen rural elementary school districts that appealed forced mergers under Act 46.
