Annual School District Meetings: The Basics
In New Hampshire, many communities hold annual school district meetings where voters get the final say on school budgets, educator contracts, and more issues that impact the delivering of public education. The future of our public schools relies on the outcomes of these meetings. As we approach March, NEA-New Hampshire encourages our members and members of the public to make a plan to vote in your annual school district meeting. Here's what you need to know to do that:
- Does your School District operate within a traditional meeting framework or SB 2?
- If you are in an SB 2 community, mark your calendar for the deliberative session date and March 10 for ballot voting
- If you are in a traditional meeting community, mark your calendar for the Annual School District Meeting date and March 10 for voting on school district officers
- For all voters, review your school district's warrant to ensure you are familiar with what will be discussed and voted on
Not sure where to find this information, contact your local school board and/or SAU office!
REMINDER: To participate in and vote in your annual school district meeting, you must be a registered voter! Please visit the NH Secretary of State's Office to find out what you need to register to vote; then, contact your local Town Clerk's office to find out when you can register to vote.
Annual School District Meetings: Petition Warrant Article Budget Caps
Recent legislation has enabled a small group of voters to "petition" the addition of school budget caps to the warrant. These budget caps seek to implement often arbitrary and restrictive funding limitations on local schools that fail to take into account possible budget drivers.
As taxpayers, educators understand the frustration with rising property taxes. The way to deal with that is not, however, putting arbitrary spending caps on our elected school board. Instead, our state lawmakers should be working to fund our public schools better at the state level to reduce the pressures on local property taxes.
While New Hampshire ranks in the Top 10 for public education funding nationwide, we are 50th - dead last - when it comes to state funding for public education. That means we, the property taxpayers, are being forced to cover the balance because the state will not pay its fair share. It is not our students’ fault, the teachers' fault, or our administration’s fault that educating students is expensive.
Our public schools are working to meet today’s challenges for tomorrow’s generation. Arbitrarily limiting local school budgets could have a catastrophic impact on communities that restricts schools' ability to make sure every student reaches their full potential.
If you have a petition warrant article budget cap on your school district warrant, please contact your local union leader, UniServ Director, or NEA-NH's Government Relations Director Brian Hawkins for more information.
Annual School District Meetings: Open Enrollment Warrant Articles
In an effort to navigate the current open enrollment law in New Hampshire, school boards and administrators across the state have crafted warrant articles that allow them to meet the needs of their schools and their students. NEA-New Hampshire has not taken a position on these warrant articles. If you have questions about them, please contact your local union leader or UniServ Director.
Annual School District Meetings: Accountability Work
Annual School District (and Town) Meetings can be an important opportunity to hold your elected state officials accountable to voters for rising property taxes. Current legislative leadership in Concord has voted repeatedly to downshift costs onto local property taxpayers through votes to siphon state education funding away from public schools to fund a second, unaccountable private school system through vouchers, reduce state revenues, and to block court-mandated adequate state aid for education. Most Granite Staters are unaware of the connection between these votes from their state representatives and the resulting impact on their property taxes.
At your annual school or town meeting (or deliberative session), it's important to speak up to help your neighbors connect the dots between the state's failures to fully and fairly fund public schools and rising property taxes. Here are some talking points you can use:
- I rise to make sure everyone is aware that last summer New Hampshire's Supreme Court ruled the State of New Hampshire should be contributing about $3,000 more per student to our community to support public education. If the state were meeting that obligation, we'd be seeing our property taxes dramatically decreasing--not considering cuts to our classrooms because we rely almost entirely on property taxes to fund our local schools.
- Instead of fulfilling their constitutional obligation to adequately fund public schools, politicians in Concord are cutting statewide taxes that only big businesses and people with investment income pay. That's one of the major reasons we're all here stressed out about how we're going to afford next year's property tax bill.
- While we're discussing how much we need to raise from property taxes to pay for our schools, I hope we're all keeping in mind that even though the State Supreme Court decided again last summer that New Hampshire needs to be covering more of our local education costs, the state keeps voting to avoid paying the state's share of the cost of an adequate education, and at the same time is making the problem worse by diverting the meager state funding that should benefit public schools.
- I hear my neighbors' worries about their ability to pay future property taxes and I think it's important to acknowledge that much of that pressure we're feeling is due to the continued downshifting of costs from lawmakers in Concord and a failure of the people we keep electing statewide to prioritize lowering our reliance on property taxes to fund our schools.
- While New Hampshire ranks in the Top 10 for public education funding, nationwide we are 50th - dead last - when it comes to state funding for public education. That means we, the property taxpayers, are being forced to cover the balance because the state will not pay its fair share. It is not our students’ fault, the teachers' fault, or our administration’s fault that educating students is expensive.
- Our public schools are working to meet today’s challenges for tomorrow’s generation.
- The world is different than when we went to school. We are giving our kids a better education than ever before and meeting our kids' needs better than ever before.
- We want to do better for our kids to make sure every student reaches their full potential—that’s an investment we should all believe is worthwhile.
