Independent journalist Jennifer Berkshire traveled to New Hampshire to witness yet another example of voters showing up to defend public schools.
First of all, the Granite State is NOT Massachusetts. But while “don’t Mass it up” may have won over voters, sending yet another Republican to the governor’s office, NH’s aversion to taxes isn’t proving to be such a winner for its public schools. While the state may show up on the US map as purple-ish, NH’s Republican leaders have taken a sharp red turn against all things public education in recent years. There’s the state’s top education official, a Betsy Devos clone who homeschooled his seven children, and who views his mission as breaking up the public school monopoly, a favorite phrase of his, by any means necessary. Thanks to Frank Edelblut’s tireless work, New Hampshire now has vouchers, aka Education Freedom Accounts, a program that is proving to be vastly more expensive than promised.
Then there’s the Free State Project, the experiment in libertarian utopia that aimed to attract 10K anti-tax folks to New Hampshire. Well, they’re here now and have found juicy targets in local school budgets. Which is how residents of the seven communities that make up the Kearsarge Community School District found themselves packing the high school auditorium on a Saturday in early January. You see, last year, NH lawmakers passed a measure that allows local residents to ‘cap’ the school budget. It’s the latest in a long list of anti-public school initiatives, but this one is particularly nasty in that it taps in the inherent tension between the needs of students and economic anxiety of retirees and working and middle class voters. And the more that the state shifts the burden of paying for education onto local communities, the more tense this tension gets.
New Hampshire currently spends just $6,000 per student; locals must pony up the rest. Not only is that the least amount of public funds per student in the country but even that is too much according to the coalition of Republicans and Free Staters who run the state. This fall, schools were told that they’d be getting less aid for students with special needs. And in a school funding trial that has now dragged on for roughly 1,000 years, the state’s top lawyer recently argued that neither buildings, nor heat, nor nurses, nor principals, nor superintendents are necessary in order for New Hampshire to meet its constitutional obligation to ‘adequately’ educate its youngest residents. (He really did say this!)
Fortunately, an awful lot of those 1500 residents of Bradford through Wilmot seemed to understand this. “We have a tax system that pits seniors against kids, and people are understandably worried about property taxes,” parent Jenn Alford-Teaster, a parent of a nine year old in the district and one of the organizers of the Save Kearsarge campaign. “But I think people have a much better understanding now that the increases we’re seeing are because the state isn’t doing its job.”
This, of course, was not the outcome that the brains behind the new law were hoping for. After all, the ‘theory of change’ that animates the hostility to all-things-public-education in New Hampshire and beyond is that if you say enough bad stuff about the schools then at a certain point people will refuse to pay for them. That’s why NH’s chief education official has been a relentless culture warrior, going after library books, classroom materials, and individual teachers. Kearsarge put that strategy up for a vote–and it failed overwhelmingly.
