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Kearsarge Regional School District, which comprises the seven New Hampshire towns of Bradford, Newbury, New London, Springfield, Sutton, Warner and Wilmot, merged in the 1960s.
Under the district’s articles of agreement, initially approved by voters in 1966, the towns agreed to educate all students in grades 1-12 (half-day kindergarten was added in 2001 and full-day kindergarten in 2013) under the direction of one school board composed of representatives from each town. The district was initially part of SAU 43 with Newport and Sunapee, but separated to become SAU 65, in 1990.
“It was chaotic,” said Paul Linehan, a former school administrator, of the district’s initial formation during a late November event to celebrate the anniversary at the old middle school in New London.
Linehan, now nearing 80, served as assistant principal at New London High School before the consolidation. He later served as principal of the regional high school and as assistant superintendent of SAU 43, before retiring in 1985 and operating a New London-based real estate office.
Kearsarge’s consolidation occurred during a statewide push to shrink the number of supervisory unions, improve educational quality and share resources among communities, according to a timeline compiled by the New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies. In 1919, the State Board of Education created 64 supervisory units and, at the peak of the state’s consolidation push in 1973, there were just 42 supervisory units in the state.
Community members and former administrators say a range of factors helped the Kearsarge towns come together and stay together: A large state grant to build a regional high school, the chance to expand course offerings to high school students and a central location for the shared high school and later, the middle school. Once unified, the district’s shared resources, assets and history have helped keep it together.
Prior to Kearsarge’s creation, each community had at least one elementary school. As part of the merger, Wilmot and Springfield closed their schools and the two towns sent elementary students to New London, Linehan said. The district built a new, shared elementary school for students from Newbury and Bradford in the 1980s, and maintains elementary schools in Sutton and Warner.
Before the merger, Newbury, Bradford, Springfield and Wilmot paid tuition for their older students to attend middle school and high school in New London, which was looking for more space and equipment at the time, Linehan said. Warner had its own high school.
With the new high school’s construction in North Sutton in 1970, New London and Warner closed their high schools and all students in grades 9-12 went to the new school. Middle school students stayed in New London until 2008, when the district built a regional middle school in North Sutton.
Today, Kearsarge includes the James House Preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds with special needs in New London; four K-5 elementary schools: Kearsarge Regional Elementary School at Bradford, Kearsarge Regional Elementary School at New London, Simonds Elementary School in Warner and Sutton Central School; Kearsarge Regional Middle School (grades 6-8) and Kearsarge Regional High School in North Sutton.
Many of the initial challenges to consolidation will sound familiar to those following ongoing consolidation discussions in Vermont. They included overcoming opposition from community members who liked having students attend school in their home communities, Linehan said.
Beforehand, “Nobody from New London went down to Warner,” Linehan said in a telephone interview last week. “We had to bring schools together. That was difficult.”
Defining the geographic outline of the new district also was tricky. Some communities that initially considered joining Kearsarge chose not to.
Sunapee voters said, “no way,” Linehan recalled. Sunapee now operates its own pre-K to 12 school district and its own supervisory union, SAU 85.
Neighboring Andover, which before Kearsarge was formed paid tuition for its students to attend New London’s high school, also opted out. Andover currently operates its own school district and is part of SAU 46 with five Merrimack Valley towns.
Towns that did agree to merge as Kearsarge were motivated, at least in part, by financial incentives from the state, Linehan recalled. State officials offered a sizeable carrot in the form of 55 percent of the cost to build the 80,000-square-foot new high school, he said. The school’s price tag was $26 per square foot — or $2.08 million — he said.
“That’s why people were willing to try it,” he said.
Voters were also motivated by the chance to offer students an expanded curriculum and more extracurricular activities and sports, he said.
Such offerings included Spanish, algebra-trigonometry, probability, statistics, drafting, electricity-electronics, fundamentals of music, U.S.-foreign relations; Asian, African and Latin American studies, advanced biology; space and earth science, psychology, anthropology, metalworking and woodworking, according to a description of the new school’s curriculum in the Aug. 27, 1970 edition of The Argus-Champion.
Retired health and physical education teacher and girls’ tennis coach Linda Tanner, now a Democratic state representative from Sunapee, joined the district the year before the regional high school opened. She stayed for 35 years, until her retirement in 2004, she said, in an interview at the celebration in November.
Fresh out of a master’s program at the University of Massachusetts, Tanner said the new high school appealed to her because it was to be faculty- and student-driven and afforded her the opportunity to build her own curriculum.
“I had just finished reading Teaching as a Subversive Activity and Title IX had just come in and I thought, ‘Oh wow. This is going to be really exciting,’ ” she said.
The new high school was open concept, meaning — aside from the science labs — there were no walls between classes, only low partitions. There were no lockers and the floors were carpeted, she said.
It was a whole new model, she said. “Avant-garde for the time.”
There was enthusiasm for the new configuration, but still disagreements arose about the location and even the appearance of the new high school, Linehan said. An initial proposal to construct it in New London was rejected by towns in the southern part of the district. And some community members disliked that the building’s exterior was two-toned — gray and red in color — rather than the more conventional brick red, he said.
The high school wasn’t the only place where tensions were apparent. Former middle school principal Dick Lizotte, who joined the district in 1969 and retired in 1994, remembered parents accusing school staff of treating children differently based on which town they lived in, he said.
The district includes children from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds. Annual median household incomes in the seven towns range now from $58,194 in Wilmot to $80,795 in Newbury, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2015 American Community Survey.
“It was very difficult those first few years to merge all the towns,” said Lizotte.
But, since then, relationships between people from the seven towns have evolved, he said.
“Part of it was communicating well with all the communities and the parents,” said Lizotte, a New London resident whose children went through the district’s schools.
“There’s been a lot of progress,” he said.
Over the years, the consolidation has been cemented by the district’s shared assets and new buildings, he said. It has become more difficult to break it apart, he said.
“Once you get committed, it’s more difficult to change,” he said.
Also contributing to the district’s success is the central location in North Sutton where the shared middle school and high school sit, which helps keep the time students spend on buses to a minimum. Alluding to ongoing consolidation talks in Vermont, under the education reform law Act 46, Lizotte said what has worked for Kearsarge might not necessarily work everywhere.
Since the merger push in the ’60s that led to Kearsarge’s creation, “the Yankee spirit of independence” has pulled apart other unions around the state, Lizotte said.
The New Hampshire Legislature repealed a law limiting the number of SAUs statewide to 50-60 annually in 1987, according to the New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies’ timeline. Then, a 1996 law eliminated the State Board of Education’s veto power over school districts seeking to leave their SAUs. There are now more than 100 SAUs in New Hampshire, according to the state Department of Education’s website.
“Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t,” Lizotte said of school consolidations. “Those (local) schools add a lot of life to their communities.”
One of the district’s successes is its ability to educate future employees. Several Kearsarge graduates have returned to work for and send their children to Kearsarge schools after starting their careers elsewhere.
One such person is the high school’s athletic director Scott Fitzgerald, a 1992 Kearsarge graduate.
“I remember life being very simple at the high school,” said Fitzgerald, during the November celebration. “I remember Kearsarge being a place where there were a lot of adults who really enjoyed working with kids.”
Fitzgerald now has a 5-year-old and a 7-year-old in Kearsarge schools. A good antidote for a bad day is to spend some time in the kindergarten wing of the elementary school, he said.
While some things may have changed — there are now walls between classrooms at the high school, for example — the “people are still great,” he said.
More information about the district’s 50th anniversary celebration this year can be found online at sites.google.com/a/kearsarge.org/krsd50.
A traveling exhibit of Kearsarge memorabilia is up at the Newbury town office through December and will be at the Springfield town office in January.
Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at ndoyleburr@vnews.com or 603-727-3213.
