It was billed as a rare night of dialogue about an increasingly divisive issue. But as residents questioned the state lawmakers who attended a Monday night forum about public education, Republican Rep. Cyril Aures’ frustration mounted.
Aures, seated at the front of the Pembroke Academy auditorium with five other state legislators, rose from his seat and paced to a corner of the room, chuckling as a Pembroke resident criticized Republican support for the reduction of business taxes.
“I don’t think you should be laughing,” Pembroke school board member Kenneth Nivison said.
“I’m not laughing,” Aures responded. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
Aures, a Chichester resident, had already spoken but wanted to respond. The forum’s facilitator, Michele Holt-Shannon, said he would have to wait as more residents shared their perspectives first.
He walked back to his seat, grabbed his belongings, and began to exit the crowded auditorium, along with his friend and colleague, Republican Rep. Clayton Wood, of Pittsfield.
“You’re leaving, and we’re listening to the public talk? Can you stay?” Holt-Shannon urged.
But Aures and Wood did not want to wait.
“If you would like me to answer the question, I will, but I’m not going to sit here and listen to people who don’t know what they’re talking about,” Aures responded.
As they left, the room erupted in jeers.
“You’re a coward,” shouted the normally mild-mannered Mark LePage, who chairs Pembroke’s municipal budget committee.
The representatives’ walkout was a most glaring example of the challenges of open dialogue on an issue that’s become as polarized as public education.
Pembroke, Allenstown, Chichester, Epsom and Deerfield — the five towns that participated in the forum — are represented by an all-Republican delegation in the State House. Yet the vast majority of the dozens of residents who attended disagreed with many of the party’s educational priorities, including open enrollment, education freedom accounts, and its current funding model for public schools.
Melanie Camelo, the chair of Pembroke’s school board, organized the event because school boards across the state are increasingly grappling with the ramifications of policy changes at the state level. She believed such a meeting could serve as a much-needed avenue to engage in conversation across the local- and state-level divide.
Six of the 14 state lawmakers representing the district’s five towns attended the session, which started with small-group discussions between lawmakers and school board members and administrators, before opening to the public.
Holt-Shannon, the director and co-founder of the community engagement initiative New Hampshire Listens, said the goal was “humanizing each other.”
“Even when people wildly disagree, they realize that you can do it,” she said. “You can talk to each other; you can even solve a problem.”
Participants were split on whether they had accomplished that goal.
Aures and Wood said nothing they heard that night surprised them.
“They don’t want to pay for the schooling that they want to have in their town,” Wood said of the members of the public. “They want to have all the things — they want football teams, baseball teams, whatever the heck it is — and they want somebody else to pay for it.”
But Camelo said she believed the night had been productive.
“I found myself being able to relate and agree more than I thought I would with some of the reps,” she said.
Particularly in the large group discussion, residents offered sharp criticisms of their representatives.
“I think it would be in the interest of being honest for our representatives to say that they’ve made choices,” Nivison said. “And one of those choices is to fund education freedom accounts instead of to put that funding toward public schooling.”
The lawmakers argued that public schools currently have no incentive to minimize their costs and that more state money would just lead to higher overall spending. In a nod to open enrollment, lawmakers argued public schools should act more like businesses.
“For schools to become great — to become competitive — we have to break out of the paradigm that we’re in,” said Rep. Kevin Verville of Deerfield, who stayed for the entirety of the forum.
The costs of special education — and the state’s role in supporting local districts to provide those services — proved a hot topic throughout the night.
In a particularly testy exchange, Epsom resident Alison Schiederer, the mother of a child who receives special education services, pressed Rep. Peter Mehegan of Pembroke on his desire to place limits on costs that are partially reimbursed by the state.
“When special ed can’t be capped, you’ve got a cancer that you’re applying a band-aid to,” Mehegan said.
“What would you get rid of?” Schiederer yelled from the audience.
Mehegan did not answer directly.
Particularly at the small-group level, the conversation veered into less hot-button issues. Pembroke and Deerfield Superintendent Jessica Bickford discussed with Sen. Howard Pearl the necessity of revamping kindergarten through fourth-grade general education.
Pearl encouraged Bickford to keep him apprised of developments as she worked with the Department of Education.
“To have this in-depth discussion helps me to have a little bit better of an understanding of the impact of what we do,” Pearl said.
After the forum, attendees were somewhat mixed on how useful it had truly been.
“There’s a lot of people who share the same ideas on both sides,” said Deerfield school board chair Kendra Cohen, “and I’m not sure how to get those intertwined, because a lot of them are sort of very diametrically opposed.”
Camelo said that while she wished Aures and Wood had stayed, she felt the forum was productive nonetheless.
“The more we can come together as human beings — never mind party lines — and work together as a community, the better off the kids in our buildings are going to be,” she said.