Jonathan Weinberg was elected in 2020 to represent District B (Wards 5, 6 and 7) on the Concord School Board. His opinion is his own and does not necessarily represent the views of the entire school board.
I have been honored to be an elected member of the Concord School Board for the past two years. My time on the Board has given me first-hand experience with, and deep appreciation for, the complex process of school district budgeting.
From the months of January to March, I spend three days a week examining, questioning and refining a $94 million budget. As budget decisions are made, we must balance our fiduciary responsibility to taxpayers and constitutional responsibility to students to provide an adequate education for our community’s children.
Like school board members across the state, I don’t take these responsibilities lightly. That’s why it was alarming to see state representatives pass HB 1393, an irresponsible bill that would create chaos for communities by disregarding the work of school boards, and allowing for permanent arbitrary budget caps to be established dictating how much a community could spend on education.
HB 1393 would enable 25 individuals in a town to put an arbitrary per pupil spending cap on the ballot by petition. If passed, the per pupil rate would, except for some possible adjustments for inflation, remain in place until a community could muster a three-fifths vote to overturn the budget cap, setting a higher bar to get rid of the cap than to adopt it in the first place.
Furthermore, there is not even a requirement in the bill that the arbitrary budget cap be sufficient for meeting the educational needs of the community and most importantly, the students.
We don’t have to imagine what could happen, we just need to look at what is happening in Croydon, a small western New Hampshire town bordering Vermont, which is reeling from a low turnout town meeting a few weeks ago, in which 20 of the 34 residents in attendance voted to slash their school district budget by more than half from $1.7 million to $800,000.
They threw out the budget the school board developed and now the community is scrambling to figure out how to ensure the town’s children can still get an education.
Unsurprisingly, proponents of the slashed budget are suggesting homeschool pods to replace teachers, a familiar approach taken by the anti-public school movement.
There is no plan. After fourth grade, the town sends its children to schools in nearby towns under contract for tuition rates of about $16,000 per kid, plus transportation costs. It will now only have $10,000 per child to spend.
Neighboring communities are not under any obligation to accept below the contracted amount for kids from Croydon. Will these kids have a school to go to next year? The school budget vote has thrown the community into chaos.
With HB 1393, that one year budget vote could be in place permanently until they could manage a super majority vote to overturn it.
The Croydon budget chaos was orchestrated by a right-wing political activist in town, Free State Project member Ian Underwood. His goal is to completely dismantle public education, suggesting the new Croydon budget will force the town to get rid of teachers and adopt “creative solutions, many of which may involve residents volunteering to help out with younger kids.”
Underwood celebrates that HB 1393 could spread the chaos of the Croydon budget to other New Hampshire towns. In a recent blog post, he writes “what HB 1393 can do — and this is something that’s been needed for a long time — is to stop pitting parents against the voters in their districts, and start pitting the parents against each other instead.”
He suggests HB 1393 will make parents realize that “spending more on some kids will require spending less on others,” pointing directly at children requiring special education services or extra support in certain coursework. This logic is fundamentally wrong, one student’s education should not come at the expense of another.
Each student’s education is valuable and while it may cost districts more money to provide accommodations to specific students, we cannot do this by taking away funds allocated for their peers, or conversely by neglecting to provide special education services. All of our children deserve an opportunity to succeed, and no parent knows when it is their child who may struggle in an issue area.
We also have a constitutional obligation to provide an “adequate” education for all students. It’s not unusual for the education of one student with individual needs to cost differently than another student in the class. Yet, if a district adopted an HB 1393 enabled tax cap and a student requiring additional accommodations moved to town, the only way to accommodate that student would be to decrease the amount available to educate the other students.
This cannot be an either-or decision, just as the amount to educate each student would also be impacted when, for example, fuel prices spike. What are schools supposed to do in that situation, lay off teachers and custodial staff to keep the school heated and the buses fueled within the arbitrary allotted cap? Moreover, a district’s hands would be tied because of the budgetary constraints from per pupil spending caps created by HB 1393.
We will fail our students if we do not respect young Granite Staters’ right to an adequate and quality education. We fall short of fiscal responsibility if we fail to budget for the actual costs of educating the children of our community.
The recent chaos in Croydon is a warning of what is to come if we fail to recognize it as part of a concerted effort of those with a political agenda seeking to destabilize and dismantle public services.
Let’s stop this reckless legislation. I encourage you to contact your state senator and urge them to oppose HB 1393.