Londonderry clip: "That instantly goes away"

Londonderry Board Member 0:00

Do we not want to have buses for anyone who lives within two miles of our schools? We might be making that choice. Do we want to pull back on the AP classes? We are literally, thanks to Mr. Barnes' leadership, along with Mr. Perrin and our curriculum coordinator… more AP exams happen in this high school than any other high school in the state. That instantly goes away. So these are kind of the really big choices we're gonna have to grapple with if 60% of Londonderry supports this on November 3rd.

What is Question 2?

Liz Canada 0:41

You're listening to New Hampshire Has Issues, and I am your host, Liz Canada. The clip you heard at the top of the episode is from the Londonderry School District's public hearing on Question 2. Sometimes it's referred to as House Bill 1300, or HB 1300. I am here to strongly encourage you to call it Question 2, or Ballot Question 2, as things like "House Bill" don't mean anything to regular people.

Liz Canada 1:07

So today's episode is all about Question 2. You've probably seen yard signs popping up on your commute, maybe in your own neighborhood. I had a longer episode back in August with Alex Tilsley about this very topic, with a lot of details. And so if you want to get into the full confusion of Question 2, go back and listen to that episode, definitely. But today I want to keep it super snappy.

Liz Canada 1:32

Now, to cover this information, I don't have a guest on this episode, but I did go back and listen to a few of the public hearings around the state, as well as some school board meetings. So I'm gonna play some clips. I also have the links to the recordings in the episode notes. I strongly encourage you: if your community is hosting a public hearing, please go to it. Ask questions, make comments. If your school board isn't holding a public hearing, reach out to them and ask them to.

Liz Canada 2:04

Let's start with: what is Question 2?

Liz Canada 2:06

On Tuesday, November 3rd, Election Day, you will have a ballot for your town or your city ward. And most likely, on the back of that ballot, we're gonna have two questions. The second of those questions, Question 2, is the question that asks if you want to limit your school district's ability to build a budget for the needs of your community.

Liz Canada 2:28

Question 2 requires a three-fifths majority vote to pass. A lot of people, including myself, find the wording on the ballot to be confusing and misleading, because it's framed as not having any impact on classrooms. But that's not how any of this works.

Londonderry clip: "Any normal person reading it..."

Londonderry Member of Public 2:48

I'd like to ask a couple of questions and then make some statements. And I really appreciate the reps showing up. But I guess my question to the reps would be: in looking at the legislation that is going to appear on the ballot, what were people thinking could be cut in school districts? Especially the way the ballot question is written, which any normal person reading it would say it's administrative cuts, and nothing is going to impact the classroom or services. So I don't understand what people were thinking, and I'd like to know what the legislators thought when they passed this bill and the wording was approved.

What school boards say they'd cut

Liz Canada 3:32

Based on what school boards have been sharing over the past few weeks, the cuts to budgets that could happen if Question 2 passes in a community include cutting things like AP courses, cutting athletic programs, cutting school buses. These are the areas school districts will likely need to cut, because there are budget obligations that cannot be cut. So, to keep it as short as possible: if you want your school district to have things like AP classes and school buses, you're gonna want to vote no on Question 2.

Liz Canada 4:05

School boards are gonna need to make difficult decisions if this passes in a community. And they're gonna need to make difficult decisions on the parts of their budget that they're actually able to change. There are obligations that cannot be cut from a budget.

Liz Canada 4:22

And I actually really hate making this type of comparison, but I can't think of a better one, so I'm just gonna go with it. Let's think about your own household budget. If you were forced to cut your expenses, you could cut how many groceries you buy. You could change where you buy your groceries. But what you couldn't do is suddenly change your rent or your mortgage. That's not a change you can make immediately. If you're like me, maybe you have a mortgage for years to come, and that's essentially a fixed cost for years and years, unless something changed dramatically and I moved, for example. It's not something I could change overnight.

Liz Canada 5:02

If you're looking to get a new vehicle, you could choose to buy a less expensive car. But if you already have a car payment, you can't suddenly decrease the car payment overnight. Those are simplistic examples of fixed costs in your life. School districts also have fixed costs. Fixed costs of a school district include contractual obligations. They include health insurance. In my episode with Alex, we mentioned a few times that health insurance costs have gone up, and that has impacted school budgets.

Alex Tilsley 5:35

I think

Alex Tilsley clip: Health insurance and school budgets

Alex Tilsley 5:36

the biggest example recently of budgets just getting totally thrown off by something that nobody anticipated, right? Suddenly School Care was millions more dollars than these districts had budgeted for. And so if that happens and you're limited to a 2% increase in your budget, and you're on the school board, well, you've got to find other line items to pull from. Otherwise, your budget is not going to be approved. And at that point, you may well have to cut into things that affect classroom instruction or school-based services, right?

Liz Canada 6:08

I really

Bedford clip: Health insurance, contractual obligations, and $1.4 million

Liz Canada 6:09

appreciated hearing the Bedford School Board lay out the realities of their school budget, including the cost of health insurance, and how that and other contractual obligations could not be changed. So let's take a listen to that.

Bedford Board Member 6:24

We just received last week our health insurance rate. And health insurance in the state of New Hampshire, at least through HealthTrust, ranged from negative 3% to 20-something percent, maybe 22, 23%, in terms of increases. The Bedford School District's increase was 7.9%. Now, in fairness, the taxpayers did not vote on that, because that's not something that the taxpayers set. It's something that the insurance company sets. And we just have a collective bargaining agreement that talks about what percentage the district pays and what percentage the teachers pay. So the teachers will see part of this, and so will the district. The district's share of that 7.9% increase is $1.2 million.

Bedford Board Member 7:07

So before we even start talking about the budget, meaning before any department has come to the school board and talked about what their needs are, we are at $3.8 million in previous obligations that we have said yes, we will fund. So when you take a look at those and you say, okay, that's $3.8 million, the tax cap capacity is 2.4, all of a sudden you're like, wait a minute, there's not enough money to cover what it is we said we were going to cover. And so we end up in a position where we need to start right out of the gate saying, okay, if this passes, we need to start off by finding $1.4 million. How are we going to do that? Right? So that's where we're going to start.

Fixed costs, variable costs

Liz Canada 7:48

So the fixed costs can't be touched. So a school district is going to need to make cuts to other parts of the budget, and that's where you get into the variable costs in a budget. In your household budget, it might be the difference between a streaming service without ads or, for less money, one with ads, or canceling it altogether. It could be buying new clothes for your kids as soon as they start growing. Or, as is the case for Molly and me, with a 13-year-old who is literally six foot five, it's waiting as long as possible to buy him pants, because he keeps growing.

Liz Canada 8:25

In a school district budget, the variable costs are things like offering Advanced Placement courses or not; having freshman teams in the athletic program; having an athletic program; offering theater, music, art, a variety of languages; having or reducing career and vocational education; cutting field trips; deferring critical building upgrades, which, by the way, is gonna make those upgrades more expensive down the line; whether or not you are going to have school buses for your elementary and middle school; whether you're gonna have school buses for your after-school programs at all. Those are examples of the variable costs that school boards are saying pretty explicitly are the ones in jeopardy if Question 2 passes.

Liz Canada 9:14

In the Londonderry public hearing, one person pointed out that the claim in the question about it not impacting classrooms is, I guess in my words, questionable.

Londonderry Board Member 9:28

The particular

Londonderry clip: "It's a school budget cap"

Londonderry Board Member 9:29

language that you're gonna see on the ballot in November for this question, I'm still shocked that it was allowed to go through as is, but it is on there. And the specific line that I'm referencing is that these caps "do not affect classroom instruction, school-based services, or other municipal expenditures." And I have no idea how that can possibly be stated as fact. Even if, when we went through this slide about the potential cuts that would need to take place, even if you're skeptical about these, the bottom line is we have all those fixed obligations that we have in our budget. The only other place, even if we weren't to touch these, would be to cut staff. And if you cut staff, it means increasing the classroom size. And you can ask any of the educators around this district: if you increase that classroom size, it has a direct impact on the quality of the education that those students are receiving. So again, I don't know how that line can get through there stated as fact, but that's where I disagree with it.

Londonderry Board Member 10:37

And one other thing that has nothing to do with the language in there, but something that I've just seen around town and in ads around the state on television: when they're stating that this is a property tax cap, that is a misnomer as well. Because this is a school budget cap. What happens across the street with their budget is not affected by this particular proposal in HB 1300. They could still be blowing out their budgets across the street, and that affects every taxpayer in Londonderry, regardless of what happens with this. So again, it's advertised that this is a property tax cap. That's way too simplistic. It's a school budget cap.

ConVal clip: Experience working in Franklin

Liz Canada 11:20

I want to play one more clip for you from a ConVal board meeting, because there was an individual there who talked about how he has worked in a community that had a tax cap.

ConVal Speaker 11:32

And I've shared with people all the time that I spent working for the Franklin School District, they had a tax cap. And we actually ended up closing down an elementary school, because that's the only way that we could afford to keep going with our budget, because of the tax cap. So I obviously have a lot of opinions on it, because I've lived through it.

The short version, and how to show up

Liz Canada 12:09

Let me sum this all up. On Tuesday, November 3rd, there's an election, and there's a question on the ballot. It's at the very end of your ballot. For most of us, it's gonna be on the back of our ballot. And it asks about our local schools, and whether we wanna restrict the ability to build a budget that is in the best interests of the students and the community.

Liz Canada 12:31

It makes a claim in the question that it won't affect classrooms, and that is just not possible when looking at a school budget, because there are costs that cannot be changed and cannot be reduced. And what's remaining are the things that impact students and classrooms. And honestly, what's remaining are the things that the students love the most. The things that make a school really shine, and what a community loves about it.

Liz Canada 12:59

If you haven't registered to vote yet, remember, in New Hampshire you still can. You can register on Election Day at your polling location. And if your community is having a public hearing on Question 2, or they might call it House Bill 1300, try to be there. Give a comment. Ask a question. Listen in. Let other folks know what's going on.

Londonderry Member 13:23

I am gonna

Londonderry clip: Why it's schools only

Londonderry Member 13:24

add one thing. Sorry. This is just me, pretty upset about what's going on and what we're trying to defend. I never dreamed that we would be in this situation with the school district and what the school board and administration has done over the last four or five years. But when this bill started out last fall, it was a committee put together for a municipality and school tax cap. And they worked weeks on it, only for it to get squashed and be schools only. And you know what the reason was? Because they were afraid that they wouldn't be able to service their town, because firemen, police, and DPW would probably have to be laid off to meet budget, because that's where it affects any budget. 80% of most budgets are personnel. So they took municipalities out and they left schools, because it's the biggest budget. So they didn't want to affect services in town, but it comes across as they didn't think much about the education of students.