There is no clean way to explain a $1.2 million special education increase at a school budget meeting.
You can bring charts. You can explain federal mandates, state formulas, out-of-district placements, transportation, therapists, aides, and the legal obligation to provide a child what the child is entitled to receive. You can remind the room that a school board does not get to vote away a disability. Then someone in the back will look at the tax impact and ask why the district cannot just spend less.
That is where the debate over local control actually lives. It does not live in the slogan. It lives in the room where the bill comes due.
Last year, Deerfield School Board chair Kendra Cohen told NHPR that her district had struggled to pass a budget after a $1.2 million increase in special education costs. The question in front of the district was painfully ordinary: keep the same roster of professionals, or return to taxpayers and explain again that the budget increase was driven by special education. “It’s incredibly hard just getting people to agree that special education is important,” Cohen said, “not even so much that we are mandated to provide it but that as a community this should be a priority.” (nhpr.org)
That is the part of school funding that never fits on a campaign mailer. Some school costs are choices. Some are bad habits. Some are contractual. Some are the price of heat, buses, and insurance. Special education is different because it comes with a child’s name attached. A district may argue over how to provide the service, where to provide it, and how to get reimbursed. The obligation itself stays.
Concord is now moving a school tax-cap bill that tells every town and city ward to vote on whether to cap school-related property taxes and limit central office administrative spending. Supporters call it taxpayer relief. They have a point. Property taxes are not an abstraction in New Hampshire.