NEWPORT — About halfway through trying to cut another $1.2 million out of the Newport School District’s proposed budget, members of the district’s board had gotten the number down to $789,000.
The Newport School Board already had cut nearly $1 million at a previous meeting.
Board member Keith Sayer expressed some exasperation at how much more deeply the cuts would have to go.
“What if we can’t find it?” he asked at the Feb. 19 meeting.
The board and a small group of school administrators, teachers and citizens were by then about four hours into the Feb. 19 meeting at the Sugar River Valley Technical Center and were often stymied by proposed cuts that would end up costing the district more money or would result in the loss of critical staff.
“We’re battling for people’s jobs,” Sayer said.
Board Chairwoman Nikki Murphy chose that moment to call a five-minute recess to one in a series of long, dark nights for Newport’s schools.
The painful, protracted debate over how to cut $2.2 million from Newport’s budget, nearly 10% of the total, is an example of the kind of vise many New Hampshire public school districts find themselves in. Citizens facing a big tax increase voted to make a $1.2 million cut at the district’s deliberative session.
Newport officials are caught between unforgiving federal and state mandates on one side and a host of issues on the other, ranging from anemic state and federal funding to an increasingly difficult marketplace for educators to the complexity of running schools that must serve any child who enrolls.
New Hampshire’s property-poor school districts have been asking for more equitable funding for more than 40 years, and have seen a variety of funding schemes come and go, starting with the Augenblick formula, named for a 1984 consultant’s report.
Since then, multiple lawsuits have found that the state is responsible for adequate and equitable funding of public schools, but state legislators have set aid levels far below the per pupil cost of education. The most recent suit, filed by 20 school districts, including Newport’s, in 2019 and decided by the state Supreme Court last July, found that the state’s base adequacy aid is “unconstitutionally low.” The state moved this week to overturn the Claremont decisions from the 1990s, which said the state is responsible for funding education.
For next year, the base aid number is $4,351 per pupil, and the court said aid should be at least $7,356 per pupil. If funding was set at that higher level next year, Newport would get an additional $1.7 million in state aid, Kate O’Connor, the district’s business administrator, said in an interview.
Rather than increase state aid, the state Legislature’s Republican majority has tacked in the opposite direction, approving the growth of charter schools and “education freedom accounts” that allow public funding to go to private and religious schools. Newport’s enrollment has been declining steadily for over a decade.
“It’s frustrating, because honestly the state is not doing their job,” Murphy said in an interview.
Threats to public education
But the state’s anti-tax ethos is strong, even among parents of Newport schoolchildren.
“I don’t think any human being should be forced” to educate someone else’s children, Michael Leavitt, a 43-year-old machinist at Sturm, Ruger, said in an interview at a Richards School math night on Feb. 17. “Taxation is theft. We all have a gun to our heads, pretty much,” he said, adding that he supports any cut, “no matter what it does.”
“If they ever did send me a direct education bill for my son, I’d gladly pay it, just no one else’s,” he added.
That’s the direction school funding appears to be heading in New Hampshire. The state relies heavily on local property taxes to pay for schools. In districts with property wealth, the system works, but districts without it struggle to cover the basics, particularly when a higher concentration of poverty means education has to be more resource intensive.
Census data estimates that 11.8% of Newport residents live in poverty, but around 38% of students in the district qualify for free and reduced lunch.
State aid has risen far more slowly than the district’s costs, and Newport has less purchasing power than other nearby districts. In the competition to hire staff, it can offer $44,206 a year to a newly minted teacher, while Hanover pays $54,456.
Murphy has tried to bring this to the attention of Newport’s state representatives, but none has attended a budget meeting, she said.
In addition, Newport has seen a steady decline in enrollment, which has reduced how much state aid it receives. Where the district educated 958 students in fiscal year 2012, it has only 620 this year, and is projected to have 577 next year.
As a result, base adequacy aid has declined in that time period from $3.3 million to $2.5 million, even as the district’s budget has risen.
Newport officials look at other looming changes coming from the state Legislature with trepidation. Universal open enrollment, which would allow a public school student to attend another district while requiring her home district to pay 80% of the cost, could spell doom, officials warned. (An open enrollment article on the warrant would allow up to 5% of the district’s enrollment, around 30 students, to come to Newport from other districts, and allow no Newport students to leave, language similar to nearly every district deciding the question this year.)
“I fear that in the next five years, Newport will not have a public education system,” Murphy said.
‘A certain amount of money to cut’
Newport school officials first proposed a 2026-27 budget with a bottom line of $24.77 million.
That figure was 11.8% higher than the current year’s spending.
The higher costs were attributable to a 22% increase in health insurance costs (totaling $1.1 million); higher wages for faculty and staff; and higher expenses for special education and contracted services.
The higher costs were coupled with a decline in revenue from the state and other sources, including Medicaid reimbursement, tuition and available fund balance to offset taxes.
The budget as first proposed would have raised education property taxes by $4.05 per $1,000 of valuation, a 23% increase over the current year.
That would have taken the tax bill on a $400,000 home from just under $6,000 to over $7,500, according to the district’s initial budget presentation, on Jan. 8.
To ease the burden on taxpayers, the School Board voted in January to cut nearly $1 million from the budget.
Then voters approved another cut of $1.2 million at the deliberative session of the district’s annual meeting, on Feb. 14.
It isn’t unheard of for Newport to vote down its school budget. The budget figure on the annual meeting warrant up for consideration on March 10 is $22.7 million, with a default budget of $22.96 million.
It falls to the five members of the Newport School Board to make the cuts, in consultation with district staff. Newport School District comprises around 580 students between Richards, Newport Middle High School and Sugar River Valley Regional Technical Center. The offices of SAU 43 occupy the former Towle Elementary School.
The menu of proposed cuts the board considered at recent meetings spans the district’s operations, but has to fall heavily on staff, which numbers around 200 faculty and staff between the schools and the SAU office.
“We have a certain amount of money to cut,” board member Melissa Mitchler said at the Feb. 19 meeting. “If 75% of our budget is made up of salaries (and benefits), then 75% of our cuts will come from salaries.”
So far, that’s been the case. Even before finalizing a budget proposal in January, the board cut three positions in the middle school: the principal, an administrative assistant and a teacher.
In a series of votes on Feb. 12 and 19, the board cut 12 positions across the district. These include two teachers at Richards, one for core subjects and one for pre-kindergarten; at the high school, a math teacher, a Spanish teacher and a health and family and consumer science teacher; a middle and high school music teacher; a bus driver; two custodians, one part-time and one full-time; a district-wide library media specialist; two student support specialists; the district’s assistant transportation coordinator; and a reduction in the director of curriculum position.
Other reductions included across-the-board cuts to facilities ($52,000), supplies ($56,000) and athletics ($34,000).
On Feb. 19, the board made an across-the-board cut in health insurance funding of $171,450, which reduces the cushion built into the budget for mid-year changes in insurance status, such as when an employee gets married or has a child.
Another proposal to reconfigure administration that would have reduced assistant principal positions at Richards and the middle school found less favor with the board. Both schools have made strides in improving student behavior, in part thanks to the assistant principals’ work, supporters said.
Instead, the board considered cuts to the district’s SOAR program, an off-site middle and high school. The name stands for Student Organized Alternative Resource. It’s divided into two programs, one for students with autism and other developmental and learning disabilities, and a less-intensive one for students with anxiety and behavioral diagnoses.
To end even the less intensive part of the program would result in enough costly out-of-district placements that it would cost more money to close it than to keep the students in the program, Darlene Ayotte, SAU 43’s director of student services, told the board.
“It’s just blowing my mind that we’re paying a teacher and two paras for five kids,” board member Jessica Packard said.
One of the student support positions the board cut was from the SOAR program.
The district also runs a program at the high school in an effort to keep students from needing the SOAR program, and employ staff who monitor in-school suspensions. The amount of personnel focused on behavior raised questions about whether some of it might be redundant.
In the end, cuts to the leadership positions that address behavior were a bridge too far, in part because of the potential costs of sending students out of the district and of losing the ground the district’s schools have gained in improving student behavior.
“We are not, in any way, shape or form, removing the assistant principals,” Packard said.
“I’m going to bring up a touchy subject,” Mitchler said. “There was a thought that we not provide transportation for sports.” Families could sign waivers that would allow them to transport other students to games, she suggested.
The district would need to get legal advice on what kind of insurance drivers would need to carry, Forrest Ransdell, the district’s interim superintendent, said. Such a change might also make it harder to hire bus drivers.
The board then reduced the number of portable toilets at the athletic fields, on the grounds that finding small places to save is better than taking people’s jobs.
“What does the application coordinator do?” board member Paul Brown asked district staff.
The district has a person who manages software licenses, data reporting to the state through ALMA (a grade-tracking program the state uses and which school districts have had to adopt), the student database and other computer applications in use in the district’s schools, Business Administrator Kate O’Connor said.
Can the district go back to an 8 a.m. to noon schedule for summer school, from the current full day, Murphy asked.
That’s already in the budget, Ayotte said.
The district is losing a speech and language pathologist, but the attrition won’t save any money, Ayotte said. Rather, if the district can’t hire someone else, it will have to pay an agency to provide the services at a higher cost, she said.
The privatization of special education services is part of what has made it so difficult for school districts to hire people to provide those services within the district, Newport officials said. Private companies pay more, then charge school districts far above and beyond the higher wages for the special services.
“At Richards, if I could get one speech and language pathologist and two assistants,” that would cover the school’s needs, Ayotte said. But she can’t find them.
The same is true of BCBAs, or Board Certified Behavior Analysts, whom districts try to hire to help manage students with disruptive behaviors. BCBAs provide a service school districts must offer, when needed.
“In seven years, I’ve been able to hire a BCBA for one year, and then they went to work for one of the big companies,” Ayotte told the board.
The board considered cutting athletics entirely and making it a pay-to-play system, with safeguards for students who qualify for free and reduced lunch, but the district needs to retain staff to organize sports schedules.
“You cut sports and you’re going to wake up a whole bunch of people who suddenly care about education,” Kathryn Boutin, a former School Board member sitting in the audience, said.
In addition to these proposals, the board has put several items onto the annual meeting warrant, giving voters the option to accept or reject them. Those measures include $100,000 for a new school bus, $53,600 for playground equipment for Richards School (reduced from $300,000 at the deliberative session), $32,000 to repave the entry to the Richards parking lot, and $104,000 to start a public safety program at the technical center, which officials expect will bring in some revenue from other districts.
The Newport School Board is scheduled to meet again on March 5 to renew its budget cutting efforts. Members need to find another $546,000 to get to the $2.2 million total. Newport residents will vote on the budget and other spending articles by ballot on March 10.