Paying for Schools Isn’t Going to Get Any Easier

For decades, public school spending in New Hampshire increased at the rate of 9 percent per year. Against that backdrop, the budget Concord School District Superintendent Chris Rath submitted to the school board this month is lean. Its 5 percent increase is close to the 4 percent average increase in school spending during the real estate collapse and recession of the late 1980s and early ’90s.

That doesn’t mean that taxpayers can breathe easy. Many households are seeing their income decline in real terms. Pay increases for those who get them are often not enough to offset increased prices for food, fuel, health insurance and property taxes.

The budget would have been much larger had school enrollment declines not made it possible to eliminate teaching jobs and other positions. Rath’s budget calls for cutting the equivalent of six teachers next year. The effects of declining enrollments are being offset, at least in part, by increasing special education costs. Two factors, the dramatic national increase in the number of children diagnosed with autism and the need to tailor education to the needs of the children of immigrants and refugees, play a large role.

Next year, at Conant School alone, the number of children with autism will increase from five to nine. Concord’s teachers are being trained to effectively educate autistic children in inclusive classrooms. The training appears to be paying off. Children are making faster progress and the district is saving money that would have been spent on consultants.

The 5 percent increase – assuming the school board accepts the budget without significant additions or subtractions – means an increase of 87 cents on the school portion of the tax rate. That’s an increase of just under 8 percent on the tax rate over last year, but much of the difference can be attributed to declining property values.

Even when spending stays flat, which rarely happens, the tax rate goes up in direct proportion to how much property values go down. It’s a wash, or would be, if the ability of taxpayers to pay their bills stayed the same or increased. But it hasn’t, and signs are that the economy will continue to turn for the worse.

The job market is flat. New Hampshire’s unemployment rate is up, though only slightly. What’s worse, however, are the job sectors that are growing the fastest. Topping the state labor department’s list of occupations adding the most jobs are cashiers, followed by retail clerks, waiters and waitresses, food preparation workers, registered nurses, stock clerks and teacher assistants. Of those, only registered nurses earn good wages.

Quality education is labor intensive. Salaries and benefits for employees account for 80 percent of the district’s school budget, a figure more or less true of all districts. Society is recognizing that education is crucial, so teachers are paid far better than they once were. And if reforms are made to increase accountability and outcomes, they should be paid much more.

The problem lies with the ability of property taxpayers to grant raises that are bigger and far more reliable than the ones they receive themselves and to pay for health care and other benefits they no longer have for themselves and their families.

There is no easy answer to this problem. But it’s an issue that will have to be on the table when both sides begin negotiating the next Concord teacher contract.

Originally published by Monitor staff.

(c) 2008 Concord Monitor. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.