I have been a representative to the ConVal School Board for almost 10 years now. As we struggle through the process of right-sizing a district configuration that can accommodate both students and taxpayers, it is important to recognize the politics in Concord that are impacting public schools in New Hampshire.
When trying to puzzle my way through why things are the way they are, I find it helpful to take the long view before looking more closely at individual pieces of a problem. What has been happening to public schools in New Hampshire for the last 10 years is one of those long-view problems. Every recent legislative session has been like standing in front of a fire hose and getting hit with one House or Senate bill, or action from the commissioner of education, after another.
A Feb. 19 column by Leonard Witt (indepthnh.org) has verified what we suspected – the attacks on public schools are an outside job being supported by dark money based on the interests and beliefs of a small number of people who have determined New Hampshire is a state that is possible to “take over” and institute their vision of no government. There is a reason school budgets are shrinking, that teachers are walking away, that parents are alarmed by “trans” policies and “woke curriculums.”
Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) is a Koch-funded, right-wing advocacy group aimed at defunding and restricting public education in every recent legislative session. YAL is one of several groups of right-wing ideologies (chronicled in Jeanne Dietsch’s book “New Hampshire: Battleground in the Fight to Dismantle Democracy”) who see private education as a cheaper alternative to public schools and are willing – because they have very deep pockets – to fund the effort.
Defunding public education is seen as a spearhead to eventually defunding Medicare and Social Security. State Commissioner of Education Frank Edelblut has championed the New Hampshire voucher program, supported many pieces of legislation detrimental to teachers and public schools in the name of “protecting parents,” developed, supported and pushed through a weakened set administrative regulations undermining the quality standards that govern public schools, and slow-walked any federal funds that support public schools.
The commissioner is supported by our governor, Chris Sununu, who has frequently aligned himself with anti-democracy elements when useful to himself. There are at least 100 members of the New Hampshire House who are aligned with the YAL and a number of them are seated on the House Education Committee. According to “New Hampshire: Battleground in the Fight to Dismantle Democracy,” there may be many more aligned with these ideologies in the Legislature, on school boards, on select boards, on budget committees and on county boards. Thirty-five years of disinvestment in public education has left schools running on empty.
Public schools have been around for a long time, since at least the mid-1700s. Once we established ourselves as a democracy, it became clear to our founders that citizens needed education to be able to participate in their governance, and legislatures established the first provisions for public schools in cities, then states. Unfortunately, there is a movement afoot in our country now to reverse education back to the private sector. The “parent choice” and charter school initiatives have been funded and moved by right-wing ideology, ignoring every common-sense understanding of the economy of scale needed to achieve the best outcomes for all.
When the state can’t adequately fund its public schools, why would you add the ballooning expense of vouchers for families who have their children enrolled in private schools, or are home-schooling? The natural progression is to limit the majority population’s access to quality while allowing resources to migrate to those who can afford any education they choose. Keeping the attention on “woke” policies in the Legislature and having 10 members of the Education Committee vote reliably as YAL allows the Legislature to steadily erode education funding for public schools while keeping public attention on fake outrage over bathrooms and banned books.
Citizens have pushed back against these pieces of legislation, with some success, but the voucher program continues to grow and eat more of state funding resources, dimming prospects for public schools.
The lack of state funding for public schools in New Hampshire is only part of the problem underlying the need for reconfiguration in the ConVal district. There is a demographic shift that is happening in the United States, especially in older states like New Hampshire. Looking closely at who is moving to New Hampshire will clarify it is not young families, but retirees, drawn by the lack of state income tax and sales tax. Young families need living-wage jobs and affordable housing. We have some of the first very little of the second.
New Hampshire is 50th in state investment in public education in the United States, resting the great majority of the cost of our schools on local taxpayers. Taxpayers willingly shouldered this responsibility because they believed in their local public schools and trusted the ability of local and state government to ensure the quality met their high standards, and the cost was appropriately monitored. Unfortunately, 35 years and successive lawsuits have not changed our Legislature’s mind about investing in public education.
The reality is that the ConVal district must face the fact that it must ensure its own efficiency of operation. The district has too many school buildings. The budget is trying to cover the cost of running and staffing buildings that are serving a very small number of families, and this strain is affecting the quality of education we are providing for all of our children. My hope is that when we weather the original controversy created by the Prismatic report, we will be able to model a future that can work for all of us, and most of all for the children and families in our K-12 ConVal district.
We are much better served by charting a clear course to our future than by deliberately mischaracterizing the reality that has been taking shape for the past 20 years.
Janine Lesser is a ConVal School Board member from Peterborough.