There’s a dangerous petition warrant article that will appear before ConVal voters on March 11 that shortchanges the proposed school budget and aims to cap spending per pupil.
Article 9 only took 25 signatures to get on the ballot (a subject for a future letter). It’s a bad idea for the region and students. It will lead to cutting teachers, other staff and valuable programs and will simply lead to a compromised quality of education and a decline in property values.
The region’s students deserve the best education we can give them. Capping education expenditure with a short-sighted per-student cap isn’t the way to go, and if passed would require a three-fifths vote to undo.
The ConVal School Board – and especially its budget committee – labors for hours, days and weeks in an open process to design a workable budget with an eye on keeping resident tax bills under control. The school budget on the warrant represents an increase of just 3.13% over this year’s approved budget, and consider that test scores placed ConVal 17th out of 85 New Hampshire high schools in U.S. News and World Report’s 2024 Best High Schools ranking. That puts our students in the top 20th percentile among students across the country.
It seems to me the ConVal approach is working Let’s keep giving our students a leg up by approving the budget and killing this injudicious petition article. If you want to improve the way we fund our schools, take your argument to Concord, where the state is holding back money rightfully owed to the state’s public school students.
Jonathan Gourlay
Peterborough