Many of us believe that depending on the property tax to fund our schools helps us maintain local control. But any hard look at the full budget documents of our schools, something that I had to do as a member of our municipal budget committee, really raises a lot of questions about how much control we do have.
The Claremont decision effectively moved some of the funding for regular education to the state. Special education has long been separate from local control, with Federal mandates, state mandates, Medicaid mandates, etc., and the famous refusal of the federal government to fund the 40% that was their promised share for their mandates when the IDEA law passed. That’s the one Judd Gregg kept promising to fix but we never got over 20%.
As long as we accept funding from outside of our towns and cities for educational costs, or for that matter, any other local costs, we lose that complete local control that we apparently value so much. Also, NH law does not allow home rule, towns must abide by state law, and cannot do anything that is not explicitly allowed by state law.
There is a constant lament from the staff at school district meetings that whenever the voters decide to cut the school budget, so much of it is mandated by outside forces and contracts, that the only place they really can cut, after they go for the arts, in our town the fabled “science camp” (an opportunity for 6th graders to all go away for a several day stay at a camp to learn some hands-on science in the great outdoors), music, and seldom after school sports, all that is left to cut is regular education, reducing staff, reducing supplies (anyone who knows a teacher knows how much they spend out of their own pockets to provide enough classroom supplies to do an adequate job), and reducing support staff. Next step, larger classes, less instructional time, no programs for the gifted, on and on.
My grandchildren happen to have been educated in public schools in Maryland, where all the government services are provided at a county level. While there is not as much local control, there are definitely economies of scale, and the schools there provide a much wider range of learning experiences for their students. It might be argued that Maryland is a richer state than New Hampshire, but in 2008 there really wasn’t much difference in median per capita income. (There are some other interesting state rankings at this link.) As we move forward we might want to just take a look at this side of the education funding puzzle.
