Epsom voters will decide in March whether to approve a proposed cap that would likely reduce the school district’s budget by about 10%.

The Suncook Valley town is the second community in the capital region to face such a choice, following the Kearsarge Regional School District, where voters overwhelmingly rejected a similar proposal earlier this month.

The proposal – filed with the school administrative unit on Tuesday and brought under a new law passed last year – was spearheaded by State Reps. Dan and Carol McGuire. The couple also both sponsored the new law in the legislature.

“Our school costs have risen dramatically over the years, and as consequence, our property taxes have  gone through the roof,” Dan McGuire said Wednesday.

Driven primarily by the rising costs of special education, Epsom’s budget has grown by 22% from the 2020-21 school year to this year. The school board is proposing another 5% budget increase for next year, according to a list of town meeting warrant articles.

The proposal brought by the McGuires and other Epsom residents would cap district spending at $25,000 per student. This year, Epsom will spend $25,783 per student and next year it is poised to spend roughly $27,800, though the enrollment figure used to calculate the cost per student has yet to be released by the state. 

These numbers are higher than the average cost-per-pupil figures reported by the state because they also include a range of additional expenses school districts incur, including operating costs, equipment, construction, and interest.

In 2023-24, Epsom spent roughly $3,000 more per student than the state average, according to data from the state Department of Education.

Superintendent Jack Finley and School Board Chair Michael Wiggett did not respond to questions about how a 10% budget reduction would affect students. The signatures submitted for the petition have yet to be verified, Wiggett said in a brief email.

“You’re absolutely talking about teachers, programs, class size, materials, building maintenance,” budget committee member Linda Hodgdon said.

In Pembroke, which is in the same school administrative unit and where Epsom students attend high school, a similarly-sized reduction passed at town meeting last year led to the elimination of 27 positions from its three schools.

In Kearsarge, where 92% of voters rejected a proposed cap that would have forced the district to reduce its budget by 17%, leaders had warned that the cap would have led to the elimination of at least 85 positions and the closure of school buildings.

The deadline in SB2 towns like Epsom for petitions to be submitted was Tuesday if the annual meeting voting occurs in March, while residents in towns with traditional meetings have until Feb. 10.

In addition to Epsom, the towns of Weare, Pelham, Windham, and Timberlane all potentially had petitions in the works as of last week, according to Barrett Christina, the executive director of the state’s School Board Association.

The petitions – which require signatures from the lessor of either 25 people or 2% of voters to be placed on a district ballot – have been framed by proponents as a method to get school budgets that have steadily been growing. 

Donna Green, the former president of the conservative School District Governance Association of New Hampshire, which has championed the new budget cap law, described it in a letter as a way to ensure “prudent and prioritized spending.”

School districts “operate without any constraints,” McGuire said. “Their expenses just get paid. Whatever gets voted on for the budget, that’s the amount that gets raised, so there’s no incentive for them to try to operate with less.”

The forces that have driven Epsom’s budget growth are the same that are being felt by districts across the state.

This school year, the district is spending about twice as much as it did the previous year on both out-of-district special education programs and on the transportation that gets students to those programs, services that the district is required by law to provide. Those two line items alone accounted for about three-quarters of the year-over-year budget increase. 

Though these costs have risen significantly, the state has declined to chip in additional money for the highest-cost special education services, which are often over $100,000 per year for certain students.

Epsom voters can weigh in on the proposal at a hearing on Feb. 18 and the vote will occur on Election Day, March 11.

Jeremy Margolis can be contacted at jmargolis@cmonitor.com.