Eustacia Chassion, a 2003 Franklin schools graduate, remembered having to fight for band, choir and drama to stay in the school budget while she was a student.
More than two decades later, she once again voiced her support to keep those same programs and others for the upcoming school year. But this time, she had her three children in tow, advocating for their school and their teachers.
“The extra activities I do are drama, band, chorus, drum line and, for the first year being a sixth grader, I did softball,” said Chaisson’s daughter McKenna told Franklin City Councilors. “I look forward to going to all the activities I signed up for, and please don’t take away our chance to do these things.”
Tensions surrounding the Franklin school budget and the city’s tax cap are common, but this year the numbers are stark.
The school board proposed a budget that exceeds the cap by $2.25 million, the first time the board has approved such an increase over the capped budget. As a result, extracurricular activities and staff positions are on the chopping block.
School officials said breaking the tax cap is necessary to maintain services already offered in the district, with no luxuries added into the budget.
“We in Franklin get rewarded for doing more with less, a lot. We hear it as a good thing. It’s even been a motto: we do hard better,” said school board chair Liz Cote, in part referencing how Franklin High School recently won N.H. School of the Year. “But at this point … we are at a breaking point. We’re at a crossroads of having to do less with less, which does not work out.”
Budget decisions
Originally, the school board was presented with a $24 million budget back in January, $5.25 million over the tax cap budget calculation, said Superintendent Daniel LeGallo. Over several working sessions, the school board trimmed and approved a $21.5 million budget, still exceeding the cap.
Some of the largest drivers behind the 10% proposed budget increase include $500,000 more in health insurance, a city council-approved teachers contract of over $600,000 and nearly $1 million in additional special education costs. At the same time, the district lost close to $500,000 in state adequacy revenue due to fewer students enrolled for free and reduced lunch.
In the tax cap-calculated budget, over 16 staff positions across the district would be eliminated, including an art teacher, a music teacher and a computer teacher. Additional cuts include reductions to the athletic programs, adult education and facility repairs.
“That budget, that’s $2.25 million higher, really keeps the status quo in the district,” LeGallo said. “It would pretty much maintain just about the same services that we have this year.”
The last time the city overrode the tax cap, which was implemented some 30 years ago, was in 2018 when the city council consented to give $708,623 to the school district, which reinstated most of the 14 terminated positions.
LeGallo said he had faith in leadership to make the best decisions for not only the schools but the city as well.
“I think the city just has to have a real hard conversation at this point to figure out what their priorities are going to be and to figure out what they can do to move forward, but I think the time is right for Franklin to have this conversation,” he said.
Impact of cuts through the years
Kate Rose grew up in Franklin and went through its school system, as her three children are doing now. She stayed in the district as an educator — just like her mother, a paraprofessional in Franklin — to be a Title One math interventionist at Paul Smith Elementary.
She said she saw how dedicated the teachers were in Franklin while growing up, which motivated her to come back to the district, where she’s worked for 14 years. She still sees the dedication, but the need has become greater.
“I remember my first year teaching, I had one massive behavior problem, and he was a really basic behavior student and he was one out of the whole school,” Rose said. “And now, there are behavior kids in almost every classroom. And that’s not just Franklin, that’s across America. There are kids who are struggling more.”
Class sizes have also increased. Rose said 22 kids per classroom was typical before COVID, and in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, that number shrank to between 15 and 18 kids, which “helped tremendously.” But budget cuts and staff reductions in the last few years have caused class sizes to swell, going as high as 25 kids in an elementary classroom, Rose said.
The Franklin School District has seen a quarter of its teachers leave the district in the last three years.
Charlie Chapple, an English teacher at the high school for 11 years, said he and several other colleagues were pink slipped in 2016 because of budget shortfalls. He was one of the 12 positions saved by additional money above the cap.
“There was a lot of chaos my very first year here,” Chapple said. “We got involved in the community, got involved with city politics, basically a crash course immediately because [it was] directly related to my job.”
While the number of total positions decreases through budget cuts, many educators also leave the district to seek out higher-paid positions in neighboring towns and cities. The city council ratified an agreement in April to raise teacher salaries between 8.5% to 13% to make its wages more competitive.
Rose said that was the largest increase she’s seen during her time in Franklin and she felt “valued with this raise.”
“I know it’s not quite what they wanted it to be, especially when you can literally go five minutes down the road and get paid more … [but] it feels like there’s hope now that we’re going to continue in the right direction,” she said.
Upcoming budget discussions
The city scheduled workshops for every Monday in June to finalize the city and school budgets. The school budget meeting was set for June 8.
LeGallo said there are currently about 805 students in the Franklin School District, compared to 942 students in the 2019-20 school year and 1,139 students in 2015-16. While reducing staff is natural for a shrinking district, LeGallo said Franklin has the “most thinly staffed” schools compared to others.
“Over the last 11 years that I’ve been here, we have consistently reduced staff with the reduction of students, and I agree with that methodology, that you only need as much staff as you have as students,” he said. “But what we’re being asked goes way beyond that.”
Many teachers at the meeting expressed how potentially losing art programs and extracurricular activities could impact Franklin children’s creative and social development.
“This is not just a budget decision. It’s a decision about what we value as a community,” said Frank Sharlow, an art teacher at Franklin Middle School, during the meeting. “We are working incredibly hard every day to give our students the opportunities they deserve and to build a strong foundation for their future. The proposed cuts represent a significant setback to the work and a real loss for our students.”
