The August 25 school budget vote

This is the fourth vote on the same school year's budget. Here is what is on the ballot, who can vote, where to vote, and what state law says happens next.

Page last updated 2026-08-16. Every figure on this page was checked against its source document on that date. The small numbers in brackets link to the source for the sentence they follow.

Who is allowed to vote

Two groups can vote, and the second one surprises people.

• Anyone registered to vote in Haddam or Killingworth.
• Anyone who owes the town tax on property assessed at $1,000 or more on the town's last completed grand list. 6

The property does not have to be where you live

This is the part most people miss. You do not have to live in town. You do not have to be a registered voter anywhere in the district. What matters is that the town taxes you on property assessed at $1,000 or more. 6

So this can include a second home, a weekend or summer place, undeveloped land, a rental property you own but do not live in, or property held for a business. If the town sends you a tax bill on an assessment of $1,000 or more, you may vote on this budget in that town. 6

And yes, this works the same way in both towns. It is state law, not a town rule, so Haddam and Killingworth cannot differ on it. The Haddam notice only says “Haddam” because Haddam wrote it. 1

Two pieces of law connect to make that true. The law on regional school district budgets says the people who may accept or reject the budget are those eligible under the town meeting voting law. 5 That town meeting law is written to cover any “town, district or subdivision,” and it names school district meetings directly. Each person is measured against the grand list of the town where the property is. 6

“any citizen of the United States of the age of eighteen years or more who, jointly or severally, is liable to the town, district or subdivision for taxes assessed against him on an assessment of not less than one thousand dollars on the last-completed grand list of such town, district or subdivision … may vote”

Connecticut General Statutes Sec. 7-6, Eligibility to vote 6

If you own property in both towns, you still only get one vote

The law says so directly, and it puts teeth behind it. Casting more than one vote on the same question carries a fine of up to $3,500, up to two years in prison, and loss of the right to vote. 5

What has already happened

The school board has put a budget for this school year in front of voters four times. It has been lowered each time. Here is the record.

The budget on the August ballot is $1,581,475 lower than the one voters saw in May, and $755,052 lower than the one they saw in July. Compared with the budget the district is spending this year, $52,884,118 is about 3.0% higher. 10

Those three comparisons are our arithmetic on the sourced figures, not numbers anyone published.

Why there keeps being another vote

This is the question we hear most, and it has a plain answer written in state law.

When voters reject a regional school district budget, the board does not get to give up, and it does not get to wait. The law says it must call another meeting within four weeks, with at least a week's notice, to consider the same budget or a changed one. Then it says those meetings keep happening until a budget is approved. 5

“If a majority of such persons voting reject the budget, the board shall, within four weeks thereafter and upon notice of not less than one week, call a district meeting to consider the same or an amended budget. Such meetings shall be convened at such intervals until a budget is approved.”

Connecticut General Statutes Sec. 10-51(a) 5

So the repeated votes are not the board ignoring the result. The board is required to keep asking. There is no legal option to run the schools on no budget at all.

What happens while there is no approved budget

The school year started without an approved budget. The law covers that too. Each town keeps paying the district at last year's level, plus its share of any increase in debt payments, until a budget passes. Once it passes, the town gets credit for what it already paid. 5

In plain terms: the schools do not close, and the money does not stop. The district operates on last year's amount until the question is settled.

The “too high or too low” question

The law lets the board put an extra question on the ballot for people voting no, asking whether they think the budget is too high or too low. Those answers are advisory only. The board does not have to follow them. 5

How the bill is split between the two towns

The two towns split the district's bill. The split is not based on population, and it is not based on property values. It is based on how many students each town sent to the district on October 1 of the year before. The district publishes this history itself. 10

What this looks like from Killingworth

Killingworth's share rose from 38.60% in 2020–21 to 40.84% in 2025–26. Over the same years its student count barely moved, going from 757 to 702. 10 Its bill went from $15,738,563 to $20,064,705.

What this looks like from Haddam

Haddam's share fell over those same years, from 61.40% to 59.16%. Its student count dropped much faster, from 1,204 to 1,017. 10 Haddam still pays the larger bill by a wide margin, and that bill also grew, from $25,034,916 to $29,065,326.

The most recent year shows the mechanism clearly

Between 2024–25 and 2025–26, Haddam's assessment went down $213,269 while Killingworth's went up $810,399. The total the district charged the two towns went up in that year. Killingworth's own student count moved by one, from 703 to 702. 10

Those two changes are our subtraction from the table above, not published figures.

Neither town is doing anything to the other. The formula divides the bill by students, so when one town's share of the students falls, the other town's share of the bill rises even if nothing changed in that town. It is a real answer to “why does my bill keep going up,” and it does not belong to either side of the argument.

Where the outside money went

State education aid stopped growing

The state's main school grant is called Education Cost Sharing. It is paid to the two towns, not to the district. 11

For both towns, the figure for next year is identical to this year's, to the dollar. 11

What “the formula” means

The grant is set by a formula written in state law. It multiplies three things: 12

• Need students — the town's student count, with extra weight added for students from low income families and for students learning English.
• The foundation — a dollar amount per student, written into the statute itself. The law sets it at $11,525 for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2014 “and each fiscal year thereafter,” so it has not changed in more than a decade. 12
• The base aid ratio — a measure of the town's wealth, built from property values per person and household income. A wealthier town gets a smaller ratio. 12

Special education reimbursement is short, for every district in the state

When one student's special education costs run past a set level, the state pays back part of the extra cost. It is called the Excess Cost grant, and it pays at one of three rates depending on the district. 13

The rates are set in law. Districts are supposed to be reimbursed for between 85% and 91% of their eligible costs. The legislature did not put enough money in the account to do that, so every district's grant is scaled down. For the 2025–26 year, districts are projected to be reimbursed for between 66.8% and 71.5% instead. 13

“due to the underfunding of the Excess Cost grant, districts are projected to be reimbursed for between 66.8% and 71.5% of their eligible costs — far beneath the statutory tiers”

School and State Finance Project, 2025–26 Excess Cost Grant analysis 13

Closing that gap for the whole state would take about $60.1 million more in the appropriation. 13 Here is where Region 17 sits in that statewide table.

This is not the district being singled out, and it is not something the district or either town decided. Every district in Connecticut appears in the same table with the same kind of gap. It is one line in the state budget being funded below what state law sets, and the effect lands on all 169 towns at once. 13

The figures above are labelled estimates in the source. They are projections for the year, not a final accounting. 13

What we do not know

This section exists on purpose. It is how you can tell what the rest of the page is worth.

• The vote counts from the July 15, 2026 referendum.
• Whether Killingworth's polls open at 6:00 a.m. We have that time from Haddam and from the district calendar, but not from a Killingworth notice.
• The street address of the Killingworth polling place. The school is named in the town's notice, but that notice gives no address, and we would rather point you at the town than print an address from an older page.
• The district's October 2025 student counts. The budget book still shows the 2024 numbers.
• How the state's education aid formula reached its answer for either town. We know what Haddam and Killingworth are set to receive, because the state publishes the totals. We do not know the town-level workings behind them, because the state does not publish them. We had a figure describing what the formula produced for Killingworth. We could not stand it up in the source we were citing, so we removed it rather than leave it up.
• Any referendum history before 2025.

Where every number on this page comes from

If a fact on this page does not have a bracketed number after it, that is a mistake and we want to know. Tell us.