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Volume 53 Number 18
shelburnenews.com
May 2, 2024
Champlain Valley School District
Tapped in Shelburne
What do budget cuts mean for next year? HABIB SABET STAFF WRITER
COURTESY PHOTO
U.S. Senator Peter Welch visited Shelburne Farms April 24 to discuss Vermont’s maple industry and its many agricultural, cultural and economic benefits. He toured both the farm’s education sugarhouse and its production sugarhouse to hear about programs that are helping students learn about maple sugaring and how important healthy forest ecosystems are to the industry and our lives.
After voters approved the Champlain Valley School District’s revised budget this month, the district will have to grapple with staffing reductions and deferred facility maintenance going into the next school year. The revised $101.8 million budget, which passed by around 1,400 votes on April 16, represents about $5 million in spending cuts from the initial version voters rejected on Town Meeting Day, while still amounting to an almost 6 percent increase from this year’s budget. Despite that increase, the district will have to tighten its belt dramatically next year due to rising staffing and facility costs that have led to a chaotic budget year statewide. With the revised budget passed, the district has to scrap 42 full-time equivalent (FTE)
positions for next year, including about 18 paraprofessional positions and just under 15 teaching positions. The district will also be making reductions in a variety of teacher coaching roles, library staff, central administrative positions, as well as custodial and IT support positions. “Overall, 42 FTEs — it’s a big number. It’s certainly impactful for students and staff,” Gary Marckres, the district’s director of operations, said. Marckres emphasized that not all those positions necessarily represent layoffs, however. According to a breakdown of the positions shared on the district’s website, many of the reductions included in this year’s budget and in the first iteration of next year’s budget were never actually filled. Other reduced positions represent See BUDGET CUTS on page 16
Bike, ped group advocates for narrower lanes in Shelburne LIBERTY DARR STAFF WRITER
For years, Shelburne residents and officials have been asking themselves how to make roads safer for walkers and bikers. Now the town’s Village Pedes-
trian Safety Group is asking the selectboard to consider a uniform policy to narrow the lanes on any road with a speed limit of 35 mph or less to 10 feet. The group, although not an official town committee, has worked since 2016 with Local
Motion and town and regional partners to shape a village that accommodates the needs of all: pedestrians, bicyclists and vehicles. The petition, said member Tom Zenaty at a meeting last week, is also endorsed by the
town’s official Bike and Pedestrian Safety Group, along with other resident-led safety groups in town. “The foundation for this really lies in language put forward in a variety of town plans, and studies over literally the decades,”
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Zenaty said, adding that the idea dates back to the 1988 town plan. “Additionally, research supports the narrowing of travel lanes where speed limits are 35 See LANES on page 16