Having seen the numbers, dozens of Pittsfield residents at a school board meeting Thursday agreed that it likely wouldn’t save money and would hurt the community if their high school students were educated in a different district.
Superintendent John Freeman gathered information from six nearby school districts and found that only one could possibly beat the price of educating students in Pittsfield – and even those immediate savings would evaporate as soon as the next year, when the number of high schoolers is expected to increase significantly.
But more important than the numbers, residents said, is the effect that the school’s closure would have on the community.
“Don’t the people in town understand what it’s going to do to the whole community as a whole? There will be no community left. It will absolutely kill the whole town when a town thinks of oursourcing their children,” said resident Jodie Cunningham.
The meeting – attended by roughly 75 people at Pittsfield Middle-High School – was held in response to a suggestion by some in town that the high tax rate might be alleviated by paying to send the high schoolers to a different district and shuttering the upper school. Two nights before the meeting, the select board formed its own committee to study the idea, after suggesting that school officials couldn’t impartially do so themselves.
While some in the school board’s
audience reiterated the challenge that the tax burden presents to their families, they mostly agreed that the school district shouldn’t be targeted.
“It’s not the school that’s grown,” said budget committee Vice Chairman Louie Houle. “Our town budget has grown tremendously.”
The school district’s budget remained virtually flat with the most recent budget, although the amount required to be collected from taxpayers increased as two of the school’s major revenue sources declined.
Laura Bissonnette was one of the residents concerned about the town’s tax rate. She said she moved from Deerfield because that town didn’t have a high school and Pittsfield’s tax rate was cheaper at the time.
“You guys have totally convinced me. I came in here thinking close the school, the enrollment numbers are down, I can’t afford to pay anymore taxes,” she said. “You’ve proven that’s not really the case, which is great, but the taxes are the issue.”
Several residents said the schools are becoming leaders nationwide in innovation and should be supported, not targeted.
Molly Brooks, who said she works as a teacher in Gilford, said Pittsfield’s schools are respected by educators across the state and are “at the center of everywhere that every good school is moving to.”
“We just have a lot to be proud of. Our biggest task now is to educate ourselves, educate others and advocate for ourselves,” she said.
Freeman said in his presentation that out of the six districts he communicated with, only one showed potential savings. That district, which he didn’t identify by name, would reflect about $1 per $1,000 of assessed property value, he said.
Even then, he said, the school expects an increase of 41 high school students next year, which would surpass the projected savings through higher tuition costs.
(Nick Reid can be reached at 369-3325, nreid@cmonitor.com or on Twitter at @NickBReid.)