Price hike
Pickleball, anyone?
Green Mountain Transit plans higher fares
POSTAL CUSTOMER
Sports catches on in Shelburne
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Volume 52 Number 36
shelburnenews.com
September 7, 2023
End of COVID-19 relief funds looms for school district $1.5 million in federal funds currently pays for 17 positions COREY MCDONALD STAFF WRITER
PHOTO BY DARIA BISHOP
Shelburne Craft School instructors Bradie Hansen and Luba Routsong work on a project as part of “Weaving Your Story,” a collaboration with Age Well.
Age Well, Shelburne Craft School bring classes to older demographic LIBERTY DARR STAFF WRITER
To increase student diversity, the Shelburne Craft School is partnering with Age Well to offer “Weaving Your Story,” a fibers class that allows older adults and caregivers a space to reflect and celebrate people, memories and specific key milestones that have shaped the course of their lives. “I’ve always been a huge fan of the work that Age Well does, and we were hoping to have courses filled with people of greater diversity than we typically pull at the school,” the school’s executive director, Heather Moore,
noting it has more than doubled its offerings and local partnerships in recent months. “We were looking to find students that had different socio-economic backgrounds.” Age Well is the leading local area agency that advocates for the aging population in Vermont and is responsible for providing free nutritional counseling, case management and Medicare counseling. “We’re tasked, in a very lovely way, with supporting older adults, 60 and over,” Tracey Shamberger, Age Well’s director of business development and communications, said. Age Well’s services are free
and its main focus is to keep older adult at home by providing nutritional counseling, case management and Meals on Wheels.
In the classroom Fiber arts teacher Bradie Hansen, a licensed therapist, guides participants in creating an individual time capsule that represents the different facets of each of their stories. “The idea here is that anybody coming to the class is invited to think about whatever it is that they are going through, what transition See CLASSES on page 16
The future of more than 15 positions in the Champlain Valley School District may be at risk as federal COVID-19 relief funds run out. About $1.5 million in ESSER funds, or Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funding, is set to expire in September 2024, presenting a challenge as the district begins work on its fiscal year 2025 budget in coming weeks. ESSER funds have supported approximately 17 additional school counselors, social workers and interventionists throughout the district’s five schools, and have funded new assessment systems and other education software and expanded summer programs. How and if the district can absorb those positions into its general operating budget for the 2024-2025 school year is still unclear. “We know that’s going to be a driver of difficult decisions, tough discussions, and it’s going to leave a mark,” Gary Marckres, the district’s chief operations officer, said. The Champlain Valley School District faces a daunting task in the next five years thanks mainly to the effects of Act 127 — but further exacerbated by the end of ESSER funds, as well as the increasingly immediate need to rehabilitate its aging buildings.
Act 127, Vermont’s new education formula signed into law last year, corrects what researchers at University of Vermont and Rutgers University showed was an insufficient pupil weighting system for low-income students or non-English speaking students. The new formula tries to correct that, but because of the shift, several districts that have historically benefited from the weighting — Champlain Valley, South Burlington, Essex and Mount Mansfield Unified Union among them — are now facing dwindling student counts, meaning those districts will eventually have to start raising taxes or cutting spending to fill in the gap. Because of this, the Champlain Valley School District, which includes Hinesburg, Charlotte, Shelburne, Williston and St. George, is facing a budget hole that will either need to be raised through a 16 percent homestead tax rate increase, or by dramatically cutting spending. Coupled with the ESSER funding, the district will face tough choices over whether to cut programs or institute a hefty tax increase for residents of the five Chittenden County towns. The new education formula provides for a cap of 5 percent per year through fiscal year 2029 to ensure tax increases are not overly onerous, giving the district some See RELIEF FUNDS on page 11