ConVal voters turned out to learn more about how New Hampshire schools are funded at an event sponsored by the ConVal School Board and the New Hampshire Fair Funding Project Wednesday night at the Lucy Hurlin Theater.

“What I saw when I was a young father in Berlin is that our system pits the taxpayers against the schools,” said John Tobin, founder of the New Hampshire Fair Funding Project. “I saw people losing their homes because they can’t pay their property taxes, because the state does not fund education adequately, and the local taxpayers have to make up the difference.”

The Fair Funding Project was represented by Tobin and Noah Telerski, Communications Manager for the project.

Tobin outlined the history of the state’s school funding lawsuits, starting with the 1999 Claremont decision, and made a case for why New Hampshire’s current school funding process is inadequate and unconstitutional.

“The main issue is: how much does an adequate education cost?” Tobin said. “The state says it is $4,182, but this is 1/5 the actual cost of educating the average student.”

According to state and federal law, local school districts are required to provide an adequate and appropriate education for every child, which includes the cost of any special education services a student may need. According to the New Hampshire Department of Education, the average cost of educating a student in New Hampshire is $21,000.

Tobin said the property tax burden on New Hampshire residents is “aggravated” by wealth disparity in the state, with poorer towns having to raise tax rates to compensate for lower property values.

Telerski illustrated the inequity by comparing two actual properties, one in Meredith, one in Peterborough, pointing out that in Meredith, a wealthy town on Lake Winnepesaukee, has a tax rate of just $5.15 per thousand compared to Peterborough’s $11.86 per thousand.

“The state legislators blame the local school boards for spending too much,” Tobin said. “But the state is violating the constitutional requirement to fund an adequate education.”

According to Tobin, after the Claremont decision, the state began to provide more funding for school districts, but the funding has been “backsliding for the past 20 years.”

To illustrate the potential impacts of shortfall in state funding, Tobin described an exercise the Fair Funding Project did in Allentown, NH.

“We asked a group of parents to create a school budget based on what the state pays per student,” Tobin said. “To run a school on what the state pays per student, the parents went through the budget, and they had to eliminate all buses, all supplies, music, physical education, art, technology, ground maintenance, plumbing and heating repairs, all extra curricular, custodians, and the list goes on. The district also would have had to default on their bond.”

Telerski said that ConVal has high transportation costs due to the district’s wide geographic area. ConVal is the only school district in the state comprised of nine towns, with eight elementary schools, and encompasses 250 square miles.

In 2024, district voters rejected a proposal that could have led to the consolidation of ConVal’s eight elementary schools into four in 2024. The ConVal School Board has said it will consider other options to lower costs going forward, including possible reconfiguration of the middle schools and the high school.

Francestown resident Pat Troy asked which states have better school funding systems.

“If you guys were going to start all over and develop the most fair funding formula, how would you do it? What does your research indicate would be the most fair way to fund education, and what state is doing it best from a fair funding perspective?” Troy asked.

Tobin responded that “in 50 states, there are 50 different models, and 50 different education cultures.”

“What I would say is that in states with a successful funding model, they are not trying to raise all the funds from one revenue source. There’s an array of sources,” Tobin said. “What we have is a really out-of-whack tax portfolio. The taxes we raise from property taxes are higher than all of the other taxes we raise combined.”

According to the Fair Funding Project, alternative funding sources for New Hampshire schools could include reinstating the interest and dividend tax, re-instating business taxes that were cut in 2015, and instituting a capital gains tax.

Eleanor Ahlborn-Tsu, a teacher in the Jaffrey-Rindge school district, offered “a cautionary tale.”

“In Jaffrey, the voters slashed the budget by so much that we have to use our entire emergency fund to get through this year. We are functioning, but we are really in big trouble,” she said. “This is what happens when people are so stressed by property taxes.”

Tom Ahlborn-Tsu said that the current funding mechanism is hardest on small, rural schools such as in the Monadnock region.

“In places like Bedford, they have economy of scale,” he said. “But in our small towns, when the population drops, you can’t have half a school.”