It’s axiomatic that the lowest rungs on the ladder are the ones that get stepped on the most. In New Hampshire, those rungs, for local taxpayers and schoolchildren, are and have been labeled Allenstown, Claremont, Franklin, Lisbon, and Pittsfield.
In the three decades since the first of the Claremont school funding Supreme Court rulings, other communities have joined or perhaps even replaced some of those on the bottom. The pain of escalating and inequitable property taxes and underfunded schools is widespread.
The communities at the top of the ladder, most of them Lakes Region and Seacoast towns or mountain redoubts, are unchanged.
Any day now, the New Hampshire Supreme Court could rule yet again on the constitutionality, or lack thereof, of the state’s scheme for funding public education. The decision will be made by the four sitting Supreme Court justices, two appointed by then Gov. John Lynch and two appointed by Gov. Chris Sununu. The tie-breaking vote, if the justices split along the party lines of the governors who appointed them, will be cast by retired Hillsborough County Superior Court Judge Kenneth C. Brown.
We live in a fuzz of words and fog of facts. Separating, in baseball parlance, fastball from slider from knuckleball or curve isn’t easy. That’s the point in pitching and politics.
So it’s one, two, three, and what were we hoping for with the report of yet the latest commission to study New Hampshire’s system of funding public schools? An answer? A hit? A home run? A walk?
What we got was a whiff, a swing and a miss. A half-million dollars of public money spent to prove what everyone already knew. To quote American Institutes for Research, the school funding experts contracted to assess the situation: “New Hampshire’s current system of funding is not working for large segments of New Hampshire’s students and taxpayers. Specifically, communities with higher poverty rates and lower property wealth are doubly penalized under New Hampshire’s current system. Students in these communities, on average, receive fewer resources in the form of funding than students in wealthier communities. Taxpayers in these communities do their best to provide for their children, often levying higher local education property taxes than residents of wealthier communities.”
Solid evidence. Great stats and graphs, but nothing every school district superintendent and business manager, teacher, and taxpayer hasn’t known forever. The bottom line, as commission member and former Berlin school district superintendent Corinne Cascadden, and the group’s only Republican member, and Republican Rep. Rick Ladd of Grafton pointed out, the commission, despite a year of very serious effort, failed to address the core issue with school funding. Who pays and with what tax?
The consultants, whether expressly, indirectly, or intuitively, declined to consider any revenue option other than local and statewide property taxes. In other words, the pledge to prohibit any broad-based tax other than that on property was respected. That doomed the effort to find a solution.
AIR and the commission did agree that the Legislature’s decision, when Lynch was governor, not to force property-rich towns to pay to educate kids in property-poor communities, should end. The scheme is, and always has been, unconstitutional and it would be stunning should the current Supreme Court rule otherwise.
So where, as the state awaits the court’s decision, do things stand? The court, as it always has, I predict, will rule that the system is unconstitutional but funding decisions, who pays how much with what tax, is a decision for the Legislature.
The 70 or so property-rich communities, so-called donor towns, will whine, scream, threaten, and say that local control means that your town pays for your kids and our town pays for ours. So much for education being a state responsibility.
Gov. Chris Sununu’s role will matter. Should a bill pass ending the policy of kicking back statewide education money to property-rich towns, he could support it, take a pass, or veto it. Overriding a Sununu veto would be exceedingly difficult.
Republicans, who have thwarted every serious effort to comply with the court’s Claremont rulings, now controls the Legislature, governor’s office, and the Executive Council. If nothing happens that remedies the current gross inequities, which is the most likely outcome, what then. Courts can rule but they don’t have armies.
The 2020 total property tax rate in Claremont, most of it to pay for schools, was $40.76 per thousand dollars of valuation. That’s the highest in the state and its schools are struggling. The tax rate 25 miles away in property-rich New London was $14.94. The rate in Moultonborough was $7.13 and on the coast in New Castle, $6.30.
To quote the AIR report again, “Inequities also manifest themselves in outcomes. The negative relationship between districts’ aggregated student outcomes and student poverty is clear and strikingly linear. As district poverty rates increase, student outcomes decrease.”
We could say it in two words but for politeness sake will use three: You don’t say.
(Ralph Jimenez of Concord is a member of the Monitor’s editorial board.)