After erasing deficit, union eyes boosting test scores

Windham Southwest Supervisory Union reports better financial position in fiscal 2026
WILMINGTON—Windham Southwest Supervisory Union will shift its focus to improving test scores starting in the new school year, after spending the last two years getting its financial house in order, officials said said Tuesday.
WSSU Superitendent Bill Bazyk told board members on August 5 that in fiscal year 2026, which ended on June 30, the union paid down part of an approximately $850,000 deficit run up by the last administration. The rest will be paid off in the current fiscal year, and the union will start fiscal 2028 with a surplus of $175,000.
The surplus was mostly driven by state reimbursement of special education expenses that have been vigorously pursued by the 14 people who work for the Wilmington-based supervisory union, which has been led by Bazyk since July 2024.
Now that the financial work is largely complete, the supervisory union will put more focus on improving its schools, which should be its real work, Bazyk told the board.
“We don’t get into education to be business people,” Bazyk said in an interview. “It worked out this time, but we get into education to teach children.
“I don’t want to say we have been neglecting schools because it’s not true but our focus for the last two years has been primarily on building a strong business foundation,” he said. “You have to have that to run. If teachers aren’t getting paid, you can’t help students.”
That will take the form of improving test scores, which are fine at Twin Valley Elementary School, but need improvement at the district’s high-school level, and there are plans in the works to do that, Bazyk said.
The superisory union’s schools are no exception to a national and statewide trend of declining test scores, a problem that Vermont Education Secretary Zoie Saunders is trying to fix with state guidelines, but which can also be addressed through local action, Bazyk said.
“There are some state guidelines coming out but we feel that we can work with a lot of our teachers and make in-house improvements,” he said.
At one point, the state was poised to take over WSSU because of the deficit and other issues left by the previous administration, until Bazyk was hired, he said.
At the board meeting, business manager Heather Tietgens said the supevisory union budgeted for revenue of $6.8 million in fiscal 2026 but brought in $7.1 million. After expenses, it ended up with a surplus of about $175,000, a result that Bazyk said was a pleasing result after two years of financial right-sizing.
“This is a very pleasurable report to give,” Bazyk told the board. “It’s hard to believe it’s been just two years. The worst is behind us. You’ve got the last of the deficits built into your budgets next year. We don’t expect meltdowns. People really should be proud; there were a lot of doubters.
“The bottom line is that nobody really likes doing the work we’ve been doing over the two years,” he told the board. “We want to improve our schools, and I wish we could have done that since the first day.” The surplus, he said, will “allow us to start focusing on the schools this year.”
Teachers now have a three-year contract in place, and the districts will be fully-staffed at the start of the school year for the first time since he was hired two years ago, Bazyk said.
Of the $175,000, about $10,000 came from the “conservative” management by the central office workforce, while the rest represents reimbursement from the state, Bazyk said. “It’s something we’ve gotten really good at,” he said. “It’s a way of making sure that you get all your grants and special ed costs reimbursed from the state.”
Asked to identify the main items that drove the surplus in the special-education budget, Tietgens said they include tuition at different schools, and transportation. Given a $68,000-per-child state allowance, any district spending over that gets reimbursed by the state, she said.
WSSU also serves schools in Halifax, Stamford, and, before it closed this summer, Readsboro.