LEBANON — When voters in every New Hampshire city and town fill out their ballots Nov. 3, a question on capping school property taxes will tell them the caps “do not affect classroom instruction.”
School boards statewide, including Lebanon’s and Plainfield’s, say that sentence isn’t true.
The Lebanon School Board voted unanimously on Wednesday night to formally oppose the question, listed as Question 2 on Lebanon’s ballot and required statewide under a new state law, House Bill 1300. Board members said the wording misleads voters about what the caps would do.
Rep. Ross Berry, R-Weare, who chairs the House Election Law Committee and helped write the ballot question, said the wording is accurate and that school boards objecting to it simply don’t want a tax cap.
What the ballot says
The question asks whether Lebanon should limit property tax growth for the Lebanon School District. If adopted for two years, the local school tax levy could not grow beyond the prior year’s amount, adjusted for inflation and new construction. SAU central office spending could not exceed 6% of total district appropriations. Bond and capital costs are excluded from both limits.
Then comes the sentence at the center of the dispute: “These caps apply only to administrative operations of the SAU Central Office and do not affect classroom instruction, school-based services, or other municipal expenditures.”
The question needs a three-fifths majority to pass. State law sets the wording, so it is the same in every community, with only the town and district names changed.
The schools’ reading
“I think the most frustrating thing about this is just how inaccurate the language is in the ballot question,” said board member Richard Ford Burley, who attended remotely.
Speaking with the Valley News after the meeting, board Chair Lilian Maughan said most of a school budget can’t be touched in a single year.
“We cannot cut contracts that have salaries. We can’t cut health care costs. We can’t cut transportation costs. We can’t cut fixed costs,” she said. “So if this tax cap goes into effect and we are required to have cuts, then there’s only a few places where those cuts can come from.”
Those places, she said, are staff and student programming.
“There’s almost no way that cuts that would be within the tax cap would not end up affecting students,” she said.
Superintendent Amy Allen told the board the district is still waiting on guidance from the New Hampshire Department of Revenue Administration on how the cap would work.
“Based on the information available today, we do anticipate needing to reduce staffing and deferred maintenance projects to comply with the cap,” she said.
The Plainfield School Board, whose high school students attend Lebanon High School, also formally opposed Question 2. In a statement dated Oct. 15, the board called the classroom sentence “misleading.”
“A budget that is limited by this cap would most certainly require cuts that will adversely affect classroom instruction,” the statement says.
The lawmaker’s reading
In an interview Thursday, Berry said school boards objecting to the wording “don’t want a tax cap, so they’re throwing everything at the wall that they can think of.” He noted that a judge disagreed that the language was misleading.
Berry said the classroom sentence is accurate because the 6% limit on central office administration is “the only spending cap that exists.”
“I would love to know how a 3.9% property tax increase results in them having to cut anything,” Berry said.
Asked what he expects districts like Lebanon to cut, Berry said, “Nothing,” other than administration if it is “bloated.”
Asked what he wants voters to know when they read the question, Berry said, “I want them to know that they have the ability to finally put the brakes on these outrageous property tax increases.”
Sen. Dan Innis, R-Bradford, a co-sponsor, told the Valley News in July that the classroom sentence describes only the second cap, the limit on central office spending, and not the cap on property taxes. The sentence, however, refers to “these caps,” plural.
What the law says
If approved, the law would directly cap only one kind of spending: SAU central office administration. The law defines that category to include the superintendent’s office, business administration, human resources and similar district-level jobs. It excludes classroom instruction, special education, transportation and building maintenance.
The other cap would limit how much a district could raise in property taxes, not what it could spend. The most a district could levy would be the prior year’s school tax, increased by inflation plus growth from new construction and other new taxable property. Rising values from market appreciation or a revaluation don’t count.
If a budget would require more tax than that, the law says the governing body would have to reduce appropriations to fit, unless voters approved an override. The law does not say which parts of the budget those reductions must come from.
Berry’s 3.9% figure matches the August reading of the inflation index the law uses, the federal Consumer Price Index for the Northeast region. The newest figure, released Wednesday, is higher: prices rose 4.2% in the 12 months ending in September, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The cap would also add growth from new construction.
The court fight
Two plaintiffs, a Campton School Board member and a Warner taxpayer, sued in Merrimack County Superior Court in August to keep the question off the ballot, arguing in part that the classroom sentence is misleading. Judge Daniel St. Hilaire dismissed the suit in September, and the New Hampshire Supreme Court declined to step in.
The bigger argument over costs
Berry argued districts have room to cut because enrollment has fallen while staffing has grown.
“They have no explanation for why they have 50,000 fewer students statewide, and they’ve doubled the amount of staff in that same period of time,” he said.
State data support the enrollment figure. New Hampshire public schools enrolled 160,323 students in fall 2025, down from more than 205,000 in the 2005-06 school year, according to the New Hampshire Department of Education.
But available data do not support Berry’s claim that staffing doubled. Federal data compiled by the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank, show total public school staff in New Hampshire grew about 10% from 2002 to 2020, from 29,141 to 32,018, while enrollment fell 14%.
“We’re done allowing people’s taxes to be skyrocketed,” Berry said. “The voters feel totally helpless, and something had to be done.”
New Hampshire spends more per student than all but five states, according to a National Education Association report, but it contributes the smallest share of state dollars per student of any state. That leaves more of the cost to local property taxpayers.
The board’s statement
The Lebanon School Board’s statement, drafted by its Legislative Affairs Committee, was still being finalized as of Thursday. The board voted to add a point calling the ballot’s classroom language “inaccurate and misleading.”
The Lebanon Middle School PTO is holding an information night on the ballot question at 6 p.m. Thursday in the middle school cafeteria.