In a final vote Wednesday, Concord’s school board members unanimously decided the district won’t offer full-day kindergarten for all students in the fall.
But in another unanimous vote, they resolved to begin working right away to ensure they’re better prepared come the next budget season to soundly implement an expanded program for kindergartners.
“This is my ninth year (on the board), and this was the hardest decision I had to make,” President Clint Cogswell said, reflecting on the vote.
After months of consideration, the board’s nine members came together at the last minute, saying they didn’t want to rush the expansion at a time of significant financial difficulty for the district. Even without the $1.2 million full-day kindergarten expansion, the impact of the $85 million budget on the local school district’s portion of the tax rate will be an increase of almost 6 percent.
In seven of the past eight years, that segment of the tax rate has increased by 4 percent or more, and the district’s mandatory expenses for special education and employees’ pensions are consistently trending upward.
Additionally, the impending closure of Concord Steam unexpectedly forced the district into an ongoing $9 million heat source conversion, all while an overhaul of the neglected middle school is also looming.
But the prospect of offering a full-day kindergarten program for all students became a deciding issue in the board’s November elections and never left the stage. It was just before the election that a subcommittee – after a year of study – asked district administrators to include full-day kindergarten in their preliminary budget to weigh whether it was too costly.
The local school district’s plans became politicized in recent weeks, when first a Washington, D.C.-based political advocacy organization held a pro-kindergarten phone bank event featuring the former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Colin Van Ostern. Then the sitting governor, Republican Chris Sununu, said last week he was “quite surprised” that it seemed to him Concord was “not interested” in full-day kindergarten.
When it came to the vote Wednesday, Cogswell said he didn’t think it would be unanimous.
“I never thought we were going to come up with any sort of compromise, and we did,” the board president said.
In their discussion, board members took a sharp tone responding to Sununu, saying downshifted costs from the state government – which stopped contributing to retirement expenses and halted a school building aid program – have put so much pressure on local taxpayers that it’s difficult to expand programming.
“This might be flippant of me to say, but I’m really, really ticked off that the governor of our state blasted us on the (radio),” said board member Pam Wicks. “I invite him to come here and hear from us. We would vote for this in a heartbeat – a heartbeat – if we weren’t paying for the pension, paying for the steam.”
She added: “Of course we want full-day kindergarten.”
Even in the board’s final discussions this week, members began to give new consideration to a formerly discarded idea to implement free full-day kindergarten for the neediest students and charge others tuition. This concept proved controversial, board members said, but it showed the lingering desire to offer something more this fall.
Ultimately, they said they’d soon form concrete milestones for various subcommittees to report back – earlier on in the process next year – with fully considered recommendations on the specifics of implementing full-day kindergarten.
But it remains to be seen whether the fiscal climate will be more conducive. One emphasis that arose during recent public hearings on the budget was that residents balked at the idea that they’d give a little in the form of class sizes to get a little in the form of kindergarten programming.
“Our budget is dramatically driven by staff, and we stick with our class size guidelines. The only way we’re going to save money for all-day kindergarten is increased class size,” Cogswell said. “And if we heard nothing else: Don’t increase class sizes.”
He added: “I want you to know … next year, when we consider all-day kindergarten, the budget may be 6.8 percent (increase to the local school district tax rate). That’s the same increase that’s troubling everybody this year. We just have to understand that.”
(Nick Reid can be reached at 369-3325, nreid@cmonitor.com or on Twitter at
@NickBReid.)