The Health Insurance Fund

One line among seventy: how the school health-insurance reserve draw-down looked in the budget books

What happened, in brief

Colchester's Board of Education self-insures employee health coverage: instead of paying fixed premiums to an insurer, the district pays claims as they come, and keeps a health insurance reserve fund as the cushion. Each year's budget puts money into that arrangement through a single line — Employee Related Insurance (account 41210).

Starting in FY 2022-23 the adopted budget for that line stepped down from about $5.2M to $3.8M and stayed near that level for three more budgets, with the budget books citing use of the accumulated "health reserve balance." Over the same years, claims rose — from roughly $3.6M (2022-23) to about $6M (2024-25), per figures the district later reported publicly. By FY 2024-25 the reserve, which had held about $3.7M in 2022, was reported to have fallen to roughly $854K.

The FY 2026-27 education budget then raised the Employee Related Insurance line from $4.19M to $7.42M — a $3.2M one-year increase the budget book attributes to the "increase[d] cost of Health Insurance and restoring reserve." That budget was defeated at referendum in May and July 2026 and passed on September 1, 2026.

This page asks one narrow question: what would a resident reading the adopted budget books have had to notice, and when? It is a page about visibility, not blame — the numbers below are shown so readers can judge for themselves how detectable the pattern was.

Every Line in the Budget, Drawn the Same Way

Each tile is one line of the adopted budgets, FY 2010-11 → FY 2022-23 — the eleven budget years digitized line-by-line (the FY 11-12 and FY 20-21 books are not in the line-item dataset, so the x-axis skips those two years in every tile equally). Town government is shown at department level; the Board of Education is shown at full line-item detail. Each tile is scaled to its own range, the way a table reader compares each line only against itself — use the buttons to switch scales or to highlight the health insurance line.

Show: Years:

Town government — department totals (plus the town-side health line)

Board of Education — all 66 budget lines

Tiles are sorted by size (largest budget line first). Hover a tile for its dollar range. On the one-dollar-scale view, tiles are drawn from $0 to the largest line in the budget (certified salaries, ~$20.8M) so relative size is visible; on the own-scale view every line's movement fills its tile, which is why every line appears to "wiggle" equally. The size-by-share view redraws the grid as a treemap: each tile's area is that line's share of the FY 2022-23 adopted budgets (~$55.3M of lines shown; town-side tiles tinted blue), so a $5M line occupies about 9% of the picture and the smallest lines all but disappear. In that view, lines with no FY 2022-23 amount (discontinued or renamed by then) are omitted, and the town health line's dollars are carved out of the General Government tile so no money is counted twice. The Show control narrows the picture to the town side or the education side — shares are always relative to the lines currently shown, so switching to Education re-tiles the ~$39.7M school budget on its own (where the health insurance line is about 9.6% of the area). The Years control switches every tile between the full history and the last five budget years in the dataset (FY 2017-18 → FY 2022-23), the window in which the health line's step down actually happened; a tile that goes blank in the five-year view is a line that had ended by then.

What this shows: the Board of Education budget alone has 66 line items; with town departments the grid holds 73 trends. On its own scale, the Employee Related Insurance line's FY 2022-23 step down looks like one wiggle among dozens — several other lines (tuition, heating fuel, capital outlay) moved as sharply in various years for routine reasons. On the common dollar scale, it is one of only three lines big enough to move the total budget by more than a million dollars. Both readings are accurate; the grid lets you hold them side by side.

What has the Employee Related Insurance line done over time?

The Line Itself: Employee Related Insurance, FY 2010-11 → FY 2026-27

$3.9M to $5.6M for twelve budget years, $3.6M–$4.0M for FY 2022-23 through FY 2024-25, then $7.4M in the FY 2026-27 adopted budget, a $3.2M (77%) one-year increase.

Notes

The BOE's adopted budget line for employee health/dental/vision insurance (account 41210), extended through the FY 2025-26 and FY 2026-27 adopted budgets. The FY 2026-27 budget passed at referendum on September 1, 2026, after defeats in May and July. The dashed line shows FY 2010-11 grown with CPI inflation, through FY 2024-25 — the last complete published CPI year.

What the step down and the step back up are attributed to

The line stepped down for FY 2022-23 through FY 2024-25 while budgets drew on the health reserve balance. The budget book attributes the FY 2026-27 increase to higher health insurance costs plus restoring the reserve.

How the FY 2026-27 figure compares with CPI growth from FY 2010-11

Had the line instead simply grown with CPI from FY 2010-11, it would have reached about $6.0M by FY 2024-25 — so roughly speaking, the FY 2026-27 figure is in the neighborhood of what steady inflation-rate growth would have produced, plus catch-up funding for the drawn-down reserve, arriving all at once instead of gradually.

The Fund Behind the Line — Reported Balances

The reserve balance itself is not printed in the adopted budget books; these figures were reported publicly by district officials in 2026 (see sources below). They are shown as reported figures, not audited year-end numbers.

Reserve balance, 2022

≈ $3.7M

as reported, 2026

Reserve low point, FY 2024-25

≈ $854K

as reported, 2026

Reserve balance, FY 2025-26

≈ $1.1M

as reported, 2026

Annual claims, FY 2022-23 → FY 2024-25

$3.6M → $6M

as reported, 2026

Why the budget line alone couldn't show this: a self-insured plan's true cost is its claims, and the budget book prints only the budgeted contribution. When the contribution is set below claims, the gap comes out of the reserve — invisibly, as far as the budget book is concerned. The district has attributed the shortfall to rising claims combined with a funding methodology, dating to around 2019, that understated what the line needed; a forensic audit was commissioned in 2026. This page reports those characterizations without evaluating them.

So what would a reader have had to notice?

Working only from the public adopted budget books, a resident tracking the school budget line-by-line would have needed to notice all three of the following, together:

The step down itself. In FY 2022-23 the Employee Related Insurance line fell about 27% ($5.2M → $3.8M) in a year when health insurance costs nationally were rising. A falling line usually reads as good news; here it was the reserve absorbing the difference.
The stated reason. The budget book's rationale line for the account cited drawing on a "health reserve balance" — a phrase that discloses the mechanism, but not the balance, the claims trend, or how many years the draw could continue.
That it kept happening. One year of drawing on a healthy reserve is unremarkable — reserves exist to smooth costs. The signal was the line staying at $3.6–4.2M for four consecutive budgets while claims (not printed anywhere in the book) climbed past $5M.

The haystack grid above is the honest version of that reading environment: dozens of lines, each with its own routine ups and downs, and no line in the book for the number that mattered most — the reserve balance. Reasonable people can disagree about whether this was findable; the data needed to find it conclusively (claims and reserve balances) was not in the budget books residents vote on.

Sources

Adopted budget books, Town of Colchester, FY 2007-08 → FY 2024-25 (line items digitized from the books in this project's BudgetPdfs/ and EduBudgetPdfs/ folders; see METHODOLOGY.md).
Town of Colchester — Budget Information (FY 2025-26 adopted budget book, FY 2026-27 referendum schedule).
Colchester Public Schools, Board of Education Adopted Budget 2026-2027, from the district’s education budget page (Employee Related Insurance, line 41210: FY 2025-26 $4,193,786; FY 2026-27 adopted $7,415,907, +$3,222,121; rationale "Increase cost of Health Insurance and restoring reserve"; PDF p. 8). The adjusted July 2026 proposal had carried $7,416,405.
Unofficial Budget Referendum #2 Results, July 28, 2026 (both budgets defeated) and Budget Referendum Official Results, September 1, 2026 (both budgets passed).
Connecticut Inside Investigator, 2026 (reported reserve balances ≈$3.7M → $854K → $1.1M; claims ≈$3.6M → $6M; funding-methodology characterization; forensic audit).