A new governor sets her agenda.

Sort of.

New governor and former US senator Kelly Ayotte was sworn in for her two-year term last week. With all of the uncertainty swirling about education in NH as a result of school funding lawsuits and cretinous efforts to micro-manage what is taught in schools and who can use which bathroom, Governor Ayotte’s leading new policy announcement was (drumroll) to ban cellphones in schools. Republicans cheered. Democrats sat quietly. A new era begins. Ayotte also swore fealty to vouchers. More hoots from Republicans who hold majorities in both legislative chambers and on the Executive Council.

Now, I don’t have strong feelings about cellphones, others may, but this seems an odd policy to call out in an inaugural speech.

I do, however, have some thoughts on local control and hypocrisy. Seems you can either trust the locals to make good decisions for the children in their schools or you can dictate policy to them. Republican leadership appears to want to do the latter.

A Good News Story from Kearsarge

Another example of Republican hypocrisy is RSA 32:5-e, which became effective last October. Under this new law, a handful of residents can sign a petition that, if passed, requires their school district to adopt a budget cap requiring a super-majority vote to increase a school budget year over year. The Kearsarge School District comprised of seven districts around New London was the first targeted by this law. Thirty-five residents signed the petition but the effort backfired. Attendance at the school district meeting was higher than ever and 92 percent of the voters, 1400 residents, rejected the spending cap. They trusted the people they elected to their school board to fairly balance school spending needs with taxpayer concerns, all of course limited by our crazy quilt of paltry state spending contributions.

Franklin is the prototype for municipalities with spending caps. It was one of our clients in the Claremont case and was the only one from which an official, Mayor Ken Merrifield, testified against the school district petitioners. Franklin was the first municipality in NH to adopt a spending cap that requires a super-majority to increase real spending. At one point after the litigation, there was a change in leadership of the Franklin city council and the new council decided that a school building bond that was adopted outside of the capped budget should be included within the budget. This resulted in a half million dollar shortfall and massive layoffs.

Franklin is a high needs school district. Sixty-one percent of its students are classified as economically disadvantaged. Thirty-five percent qualify for special ed. These factors indicate a need for substantial spending yet Franklin spends below the state average cost per pupil. According to the NH Department of Education, student achievement in reading, math and science is in the lowest quarter as compared to other schools in the state. Franklin’s average teacher salary is $50,000 per year while the state’s average is $68,000.

It’s hard to overcome the disadvantages that Franklin faces with a limited tax base and without overwhelming help from the state. Knee capping your own school board with an artificial spending cap makes things even worse.

Who else has this self-imposed limitation that undermines the local part of school funding? Manchester, the lowest spending school district in the state, where achievement levels rival Franklin’s (but where teacher salaries are at the state average) and the majority of students qualify as economically disadvantaged.

I should add that I am not demeaning Franklin and Manchester. We need to do better for them and they need to elect leaders who will demand change.

Way to go Republican leadership! Rather than sending help, you provided the means to better self-destruct.

In NH, DOGE is spelled with a “C.”

Ayotte’s other big announcement was the formation of a government efficiency commission, referred to as the “COGE,” to be led by former one-term governor Craig Benson and former car dealer Andy Crews. Being charitable, one could construe this effort as a formality that bends the knee to the more rabid MAGA elected officials. Government efficiency is too easy a punching bag. Let’s see how open the work of this commission is, who else joins the former governor and car dealer and whether their recommendations are in the form of legislation subject to public hearings or behind closed door executive branch actions.

Announcing a MAGA inspired COGE strikes me as a backwards looking policy initiative and using state employees as a punching bag is par for the course. Another Republican governor with Washington experience once took a broader approach. Governor Judd Gregg (1989-93) formed the Governor’s Commission on New Hampshire in the 21st Century in 1990. Gregg appointed a broad array of NH’s leading citizens to the commission. Unfortunately, as with many of Judd’s initiatives, this one was a dud. The reason can be found in this passage from the commission’s report: “A good idea that can be accomplished is worth a dozen that can’t.” Of course, nothing happens without leadership, and Gregg and his commission members squandered their opportunity to provide leadership on education reform and taxation.

To be clear that I am not unfairly picking on the Republicans, the 2018 School Funding Commission similarly muzzled itself and did not include a broad array of revenue raising alternatives in its considerations. Two Dems chaired the Commission.

Stopping the Downshift

The current leadership of the House under ranking member Rep. Alexis Simpson (D-Exeter) also held its pre-session press conference to announce the Dem’s policy initiatives related to housing, stopping the downshifting of state expenses to local property taxes and reigning in vouchers. “Stopping downshifting” is the Dem’s framing of the school funding issue. It’s not a bad way to think about the problems presented by NH’s worst in the nation reliance on regressive local property taxes to fund public schools. Unfortunately, the Dems aren’t offering any solutions. As they have in the past, Dems claim they can solve school funding inequities without a new source of revenues. It’s hard to find them credible.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Pennsylvania Republicans provided the example by accepting a court ruling and working to resolve inequities without further appeals.

On February 7, 2023, in the case of William Penn School District v. the Pennsylvania Department of Education, the trial court issued a more than seven-hundred-page order finding the Pennsylvania school system unconstitutional for insufficient and inequitable funding.

Pennsylvania funded 38 percent of the cost of K–12 public education with state money. Only six states have a smaller state share—New Hampshire is the lowest funding of the six at about 20 percent state funding. (It was about 8 percent at the time of the Claremont case.) The national average is about 50 percent state funding.

The Pennsylvania legislature had until July 2023 to appeal and chose not to. Instead, the Republican-majority legislature adopted a new education funding package in January 2024. The school funding changes were the subject of advocacy in the legislature. Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro wasn’t a major player in the effort.

Although NH Dem leaders were apprised of the Pennsylvania legislature’s effort in early 2024, they’ve never raised it or called out the Republicans for showing no leadership after the state lost three different funding cases at the trial court level. All three are now on appeal. Too many Dems take the same position as the Republicans; that is, to do as little as possible until absolutely forced to make changes.

Mea culpa. Last week I wrote about the Frances Perkins national monument in Maine. Many have pointed out that I misspelled Secretary Perkins’ first name. My apologies. Here are two photos from the site that Amy and I visited last week. The homestead was a national landmark before it was designated a national monument.

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