Claire Ketteler was growing frustrated. 

It had been nearly a year since the longtime Newbury resident had won election to the Kearsarge Regional School District’s budget oversight body, a post she had thought would allow her to exercise control over a budget she believed was growing too rapidly.

However, an effort last fall to shrink the recommended budget increase by about a percentage point had failed to garner any support from the other members of the committee, according to Ketteler.

“I didn’t feel as an elected member I could make any difference,” she said earlier this month.

So Ketteler decided to pursue a more drastic option. If she couldn’t get her fellow budget committee members on board with a 1% reduction, why not propose a cap on school spending and let the entire seven-town district vote on it directly, she figured.

The proposal she spearheaded harnesses a new law passed last year that allows a relatively small number of residents in a community to place on their ballots a per-pupil school spending limit.

Though the cap Ketteler proposed in her district was soundly rejected in part because it would have meant a 17% budget cut, that opposition has done little to dissuade tax-weary residents in other school districts in the region from bringing forward their own proposals.

Locally, Epsom and Weare recently joined the list. The towns of Pelham, Windham, and Timberlane also potentially had  petitions in the works as of earlier this month, according to Barrett Christina, the executive director of the state’s School Board Association.

Though voters have always had the power to propose amendments and cuts to the upcoming year’s budget at their annual meetings, the new school cap law would lead to more lasting change, because the per-pupil maximums remain on the books year after year unless they are rescinded by a supermajority vote.

As the rising costs of operating schools outpace meager to non-existent growth in state and federal funding for education, the budget cap proposals and the votes they trigger could increasingly pit neighbors against each other as they weigh crippling local property taxes against the value of public education.

They could also spur action in a variety of directions at the state level.

The proposal Ketteler and 34 other residents brought in Kearsarge had a galvanizing effect, mobilizing more than 1,500 people to show up to the high school gymnasium amid subfreezing temperatures on the first Saturday of the year.

Many who testified that morning called on the state to send more money to local school districts.

Zandra Rice Hawkins, the executive director of the policy organization Granite State Progress, thinks these attempts to pare back budgets will galvanize support for public schools.

“What we’re seeing coming out of some of these community organizing situations is that people start to realize that public education is really under threat in their community,” Rice Hawkins said in an interview following the 92%-7% vote. “And it’s not just these one-off situations, but it’s part of an overall attempt at the state level to really undermine public education and the downshifting that happens.”

The public comment period of the Kearsarge meeting included calls to channel local organizing energy generated by the vote into statewide advocacy surrounding school funding. Multiple bills have been proposed this legislative session to boost state funding for schools, and testimony so far has been light.

“We have a really large legislature that meets during the work week and so it is hard for people to engage,” Rice Hawkins said. “Also, having a lot of representation is great in some ways, but on the other hand, it makes it harder for constituents to know how their specific state legislator has been voting or speaking on issues.”

Dan Innis – the Republican state senator for most of the towns in the Kearsarge school district and a sponsor of the spending cap bill – warned that the resounding opposition to reining in spending on public education at the local level could prompt a backlash at the state level.

“I think what happened in Kearsarge assured” the passage of a universal education freedom account program, Innis said in an interview, referring to the state’s school voucher program, which currently has an income qualification limit. “Because the state is looking at these schools and saying, ‘You guys need to shape up, so we’re going to put pressure on you by taking kids out.’”

“And by the way,” he added, “don’t be surprised if you see something that says: When you lose a kid, you lose all the money immediately.”

Innis dismissed the idea that the 85-point margin in Kearsarge served as much of a referendum on school spending.

“The vote was very lopsided, but I don’t think we can read a whole lot into this,” Innis said. “You had parents and teachers there and of course everyone would expect that they’re going to support whatever budget the board puts forward and they did. But there were 1,600 people there and a lot of people couldn’t even get there because [the roads were] so backed up.”

Innis said that if the state were to pay more for local education – as many in Kearsarge asked and as a pair of pending state Supreme Court cases  to be decided in the coming months may force state leaders to do – more money would come with more state-level requirements.

“If the state pays more, the state’s going to take more control,” Innis said. “We are.”

Regardless of what happens in the State House, the effect of the budget caps – whether or not any pass – could also play out during the budget-making processes of local school boards, though opinions vary on exactly what that effect would be. 

On one hand, the specter of a resident-prompted vote could motivate boards to preemptively tighten their budgets. On the other, the widespread opposition seen in Kearsarge could be a sign of implicit support for what proponents of public education argue is the necessary cost of an investment in their communities’ future.

Public school advocates said districts are already trying to find ways to cut and save taxpayer money, but sometimes that’s not possible wuith mandated expenses, like special education.

“Every school district in the state that’s spending more than $5,000 per student – which, spoiler alert, is everyone – is already being creative,” said Zack Sheehan, the executive director of the NH School Funding Fairness Project, referring to the statewide adequacy payments local districts get from the state. “They’re already cutting things or looking for partnerships with philanthropic organizations or colleges.”

For Ketteler, regardless of the ultimate outcomes of the trend she started, the experience of calling for a 17% cut on her school district’s budget felt worth it, despite the fact that it overwhelmingly failed and made her a pariah in certain pockets of the Kearsarge community.

“I wanted people to participate,” she said. “I want people to care about the school and about the outcomes and about the cost. It’s all important.”

But despite the petition’s astonishing success in turning a meeting typically attended by 30 people into a standing-room only affair, Ketteler declined to commit to bringing forward another iteration of the same proposal next year.

“I don’t know,” she said. “We’ll have to see what happens.”

 

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