Twenty-eight Republican state reps and two Republican state senators jointly filed a friend of the court, amicus, brief last week directly asking the NH Supreme Court to reverse the Claremont cases and to relieve the state of the constitutional duty to fund public education. Claremont I, the first case to recognize the right to a state-funded public education as a duty of the state, was decided in December 1993. Four years later, in December 1997, the court struck down NH’s system of school funding as unconstitutional as it did not provide an adequate education to all its students and unfairly taxed the state’s poorest communities at much higher rates than wealthy communities to pay for what is a shared state responsibility.
As support for their arguments, these extremist Republicans cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. In Dobbs, the US Supreme Court reversed the 50-year-old Roe v. Wade decision that established the right to abortion simply because they could. These justices showed no respect for precedent, which is the foundation for our system of justice. The reference to Dobbs may have simply been a ham-handed approach that said, “see, you can do this, too.” That’s bad enough. The Dobbs reference may also have been a way for these extremists to say we’re on the same team as you as the Chief Justice has a long history of political support for efforts to ban abortion rights. His efforts ranged from his work as chief of staff to Senator Gordon Humphrey when Humphrey proposed a constitutional amendment to reverse Roe in the 1980s to his being a Republican delegate for presidential candidate Marco Rubio, who also ran against abortion rights, in 2016.
I wondered how far the ideology of these Republicans stretched. Was it merely extreme? Or did it find its way to the level of crackpot—willing to work against the interests of their own constituents?
Well, ding, ding, ding. We have some real crackpots in this group.
School funding systems that rely on local property taxes to raise revenue create obvious winners and losers. NH is the state that relies most on this single method of funding schools, almost to the exclusion of all other taxes. It’s why NH has earned an “F” in terms of the inequity of its school funding system from the Education Law Center. In this property tax focused system, communities with the most valuable property (think lakes and ski areas) can raise public school funds with low taxes. Communities with less valuable properties struggle and they often must educate children with much higher needs.
Moultonborough is a community with high property values because it is on NH’s big lake, Lake Winnipesaukee. I’ve met some fine people from Moultonborough. They’re community-minded and forward thinking and care about what happens to the children in all parts of NH.
Moultonborough Rep. Glen Cordelli, however, is not one of these people. He, no doubt, signed the extremist brief because he wants to protect his wealthy constituents from having to contribute their fair share of taxes to support schools in New Hampshire. I don’t like the mindset. It’s shortsighted and miserly, especially since a decent chunk of the beautiful second homes in his community are owned by people from out of state. But, I get it. Cordelli is an extremist Republican.
What I don’t understand is the mindset of the Republicans who signed this brief and who are from towns with below average property values. Not only do they support extremist ideals, but they also vote against the interests of the very people who elected them to serve. Rep. Jose Cambrils , Rep. Alvin See and Sen. Howard Pearl, all from Loudon, are in this category.
Cambrils and Pearl represent Loudon. See represents a floterial district that includes Loudon. Loudon has property values that are 15% less than the state average on a per pupil basis. Their education taxes are about 14% higher than the state average as a result and they spend $2,000 less than the average per child on each of the children in their schools. Go here if you want to check my math.
Rep. Will Infantine of Manchester is a similar signatory who works hard against the needs of his constituents. Manchester is the lowest spending school district on a per pupil basis in the state and it shows in all the measures you’d expect: high dropout rates, poor achievement scores, difficulty of employers to attract employees to live in Manchester. Manchester’s equalized property values per pupil are two-thirds of the state average, yet Infantine wants to destroy the only guardrails on the system by urging the reversal of Claremont.
Here's a chart by hometown of each of the thirty extremist Republicans who signed the amicus brief with an indication of whether their town has above or below average property values and what their town receives in adequacy funding. Oh, let’s not kid ourselves, no constitutional right to an adequate education means not even a pretense of the state paying the cost. All of these lost payments shift more burden to the local property tax. Thank you, very much, Mr. or Ms. Elected Representative who puts their personal ideology over the needs of their constituents and who will cause property taxes to increase.
Hometown//Rep or Senator//Above or Below Aver. Fin, Strength// Adeq $$ at Risk
Auburn Edwards below $4.1 million
Auburn Osborne below “
Barrington Turcotte below $6.6 million
Bristol Sellers above $1.8 million
Danville Wallace below $2.8 million
Epping Vose below $4.2 million
Epsom C. McGuire below $2.7 million
Epsom D. McGuire below “
Gilford Bean above $4.4 million
Haverhill Ladd below $2.9 million
Hooksett Walsh below $9.2 million
Hudson Renzullo below $14.3 million
Kingston Weyler above $3.1 million
Londonderry Packard below $18.2 million
Londonderry Perez below “
Londonderry MacDonald below “
Loudon Pearl below $3.1 million
Loudon Cambrils below “
Loudon. See below “
Manchester Infantine below $69.3 million
Milford Sheehan below $9.8 million
Moultonborough Cordelli above $2.1 million
New Boston Ammon below $4.5 million
Northfield Hill below $2.8 million
Salem Sweeney above $16.7 million
Sanbornton Lang above $1.4 million
Sandown True below $4.4 million
Tilton Harvey-Bolia above $2.3 million
Weare Erf below $6.4 million
Wilton Kofalt below $2.1 million
Wolfeboro Peternel above $3.0 million
Total 8 above, 23 below $202.2 million
$202 million is about one quarter of all adequacy funds and these reps say they don’t want it. Except for a few of the above average wealth towns, reversing Claremont means the loss of real state dollars for the schools in these communities. Perhaps we should do something about these extremists and crackpots in November’s election.
On another front, we had our trial management conference before Judge Ruoff in the Rand school funding case. It looks like we’ll finally get a trial and it will begin on September 30th. Even though they’re not part of our case, the ConVal lawyers came to the hearing in order to prevent us from calling any of the witnesses who previously testified in the ConVal case as witnesses in our case. They were just so angry. How dare we think superintendents and business managers from the thirty or so ConVal districts might have something to say about the costs of special ed, for example. Their opposition is despite the fact that they refused to tackle the difficult issues around differentiated aid that we have taken on (and about which we could use some help). Differentiated aid is the extra increment of adequacy aid that the state provides to school districts for children who live in poverty, are learning English or who qualify for special education.
At one point, Judge Ruoff asked one of the ConVal lawyers, “Don’t you understand. If you lose and they win, you still win?” By this he meant he was surprised they were so vehement in their opposition to us because we were all fighting for better school funding. At least we thought we were on the same team.
Stay tuned. More on the trial and the pending appeals as we move forward.