The dollars speak for themselves.
Last year, after a flush year of revenue, Democratic legislative leaders and Gov. Chris Sununu agreed to send over $130 million additional dollars back to schools – boosting the balance sheets of hundreds of schools.
The Merrimack Valley School District was no exception. More than $1.5 million in additional state aid came back to the school district this year, allowing officials to reduce the property tax burden by 5.72% for the next year – a first in the last decade.
But even as the extra money allowed school budget writers for the district to pull back on local spending, many officials – and voters – are skeptical it can last.
In comment after comment at the school district’s annual school meeting at Merrimack Valley High School in Penacook Friday night, residents and board members said they have doubts the Legislature can keep the funds going.
And they came together to vote for a conservative budget built on the assumption that it can’t.
“There are no guarantees that this increase in adequacy will exist … into the next year after this biennium,” said Tracy Bricchi, chairwoman of the budget committee for the district, which encompasses Boscawen, Loudon, Penacook, Salisbury, and Webster. “The state does have a long history of grappling with that concept. We’re optimistic though.”
By a nearly unanimous voice vote, the more than 200 attendees approved a budget of $41,442,059, a reduction of $11,740 from last year’s budget – or 0.3%.
Some of that spending reduction came from creativity on the part of school officials. While voters passed a three-year $833,843 increase in teacher salaries worked out via negotiations with the Merrimack Valley Education Association in recent months, the board was also able to find cost savings in health care expenses to bring the increase down by $417,381.
But large parts of it could be boiled down to a philosophy surrounding the $1.5 million additional adequacy aid the district received from the state through September’s budget: Take nothing for granted in the future and keep the budget steady.
“Some districts are getting more aggressive with one-time expenses,” said Mark MacLean, the district’s superintendent, in an interview. Merrimack Valley, in contrast, decided to give the money back to taxpayers.
New Hampshire lawmakers have been wrestling with how much state funding to send to its schools for more than 20 years – deliberations that have been exacerbated by Supreme Court decisions that have found the state failing to provide equal opportunities to some districts.
And in the wake of the 2009 recession, lawmakers slashed state funding significantly for years, a trend the Legislature has only recently begun to reverse.
The historical dynamic was not lost on many voters in the auditorium Friday. To Mark Jette of Webster, it’s a cautionary tale for the district.
“I support this, but I want to make sure the taxpayers are voting knowing that you’re using one-time money that’s available to offset that and that it will result in some sort of a spike next year, unless there’s other cost savings the board comes up with.”
MacLean accepted the premise. “Right now there are certainly some unknowns on that,” he responded.
But others said the school board had missed an opportunity by playing their cards conservatively.
By not moving to put more of the funding boost into capital reserve funds and giving much of it back to taxpayers, the board had deprived the school of future funds for unforeseen expenses, argued Bruce Johnson, of Webster.
“If we are lucky enough next year, I would recommend to the school board that we split money: half to tax payers, and half (to capital expenditures),” he said.
The school district voters rejected an effort to transition the school budget process to an “SB 2” process.
That change would have required voters to cast ballots on the budget at the polling booth rather than at a nightly meeting.
Under the process, the district would hold a deliberative session at which voters could debate provisions in the budget – but the actual decisions would be made at a later day through a ballot.
Proponents said it would modernize the process, allowing for voters to make their voice heard without being penned into a nightly meeting that not all can ge t to.
But opponents said it would allow for groups of voters to game the system at the deliberative session, adding provisions to the budget that would be hard to reverse at the ballot box.
In the end, the vote failed overwhelmingly, 30-178. The effort was even less successful than last year, when the SB 2 attempt fell 147-315.
Meanwhile, in the district’s one contested candidate race, David Farr bested Louise Andrus for the floaterial school board seat, 205-64.
The four candidates who ran in uncontested races, including school board candidates Lorrie Carey, Sally Hirsh-Dickinson, and Brad Kulacz, and moderator Charles Niebling, all won re-election nearly unanimously.
(Ethan DeWitt can be reached at edewitt@cmonitor.com, at (603) 369-3307, or on Twitter at @edewittNH.)