By GARRY RAYNO. Distant Dome
The Ayotte administration believes it would be best for New Hampshire not to guarantee its children receive a worthwhile education.
Instead the Republican leadership proposes that no “qualitative standard of education must be met,” and no legal requirement to pay for whatever education is offered.
And the current administration tells the court it has no say in the executive branch and the legislature’s education decisions or its funding.
That is what the Ayotte administration is saying when the Attorney General’s Office asks the current state Supreme Court to overturn an earlier landmark court decision that has been the foundation of educational policy and funding for more than 30 years.
The propositions come in the state’s notice of appeal to the Supreme Court for the Rand case, the latest education funding lawsuit finding the state failed to meet its constitutional obligation to give each child an opportunity for an adequate education, to define it and to pay for it.
Why the state still has — three decades later — an inequitable school system and funding formula for both children and property taxpayers is not the court’s fault.
The court has said time and time again the state has not met its constitutional obligations and needs to fix the system.
However, since the Supreme Court’s original Claremont education decision was issued in 1993, the legislative and executive branches have worked diligently to retain the inequitable and unfair arrangements that reward property wealthy communities while punishing property poor communities, not just their taxpayers, but their children as well.
For years after the two seminal Claremont decisions, politicians from both parties tried to craft constitutional amendments that would end the court’s constitutional oversight and calling it judicial overreach or legislating from the bench, although the courts, until the recent ConVal and Rand decisions never set a foundation for state support, never told lawmakers what to do.
They told lawmakers to fix the problem, but left it to them to decide the specifics of a solution, but no lasting solutions have emerged.
It is not as if the court has given lawmakers an impossible task, but as Rockingham Superior Court David Ruoff insinuated in his ConVal ruling, the culprit is a lack of political will.
Yes it would take political courage, you might not be reelected, but you would do what you believe is best for the state to solve the problem.
It is not a secret what it would take to correct the ills of the current system: more state money instead of the paltry 20 percent the state antes up while property taxpayers cover 70 percent of the cost of public education.
The national average for state contributions is just under 50 percent putting New Hampshire at the bottom of the list and way below the 49th state.
The GOP propaganda is and has always been it requires an income or a general sales tax — the third rail of New Hampshire politics — but there are many more options available including the European value added tax, greater contributions from businesses who truly benefit from the state’s education system or even a billionaire’s tax as more and more buy homes along the state’s shorelines.
Those methods may not ensure your reelection, but they would put an end to the discussion for at least as long as the non-solutions have been in place.
Over the years, lawmakers have done things to make the system more equitable like the Statewide Education Property Tax. When it was instituted in 1999, the rate was $6.60 per $1,000 of valuation and it was collected and the “excess money” raised by property wealthy communities was sent around the state to the property poor communities.
However the “outrage” over donor towns having to send some of their property tax dollars to another town worked to sabotage the equity it produced, and the rate drifted down to today’s rate of about $1 per thousand. There are still donor towns, but they keep the excess money and do not have to give it to their poorer neighbors in the next town over.
Since the Legislature’s first attempt to address the rulings lawmakers tilted the formula to larger school districts, i.e. the cities and larger towns such as Salem and Derry, by including differential aid for students from low-income families determined by the number of free and reduced lunch, special education aid and English language learners all determined by the number of kids.
Additional money known as disparity aid also tends to flatten the curve a little as well, but the driving factor in the inequity is the measly share the state contributes and until lawmakers do something about upping the state’s share there will be no end to the inequities.
And to date, neither party has come to the table with a solution outside of a statewide property tax, which is like giving more poison to a person dying by poisoning.
The state has also downshifted hundreds of millions of dollars to the local level like doing away with the 35 percent it used to pay into the retirement system for municipal, school and county workers, and ending school building aid for a decade or more and then not restoring it to its earlier level, and ending it again in the current budget,
Read today’s headlines to see how the current lawmakers view the problem including the governor who chastised local elected officials for increasing property taxes, attempts to have a statewide cap on school budgets, and creating programs like the Education Freedom Account program that siphons money from the Education Trust Fund that could be going to public schools.
The House and Senate also have nearly identical bills that would view education as a shared endeavor between the state and school districts, would remove a student’s “guarantee” for an opportunity for an adequate education and declare funding determinations are a political matter and the purview of the legislature and executive branches.
The quest to overturn the Claremont decisions began almost as soon as the opinions were issued, but recently it has been more prevalent with the attorney general’s office raising the possibility of the court revisiting the decision in its appeal of the ConVal decision and House Speaker Sherm Packard and much of the Republican House leader signed on to a brief written by former Rep. Gregory Sorg which claims the 1993 Supreme Court decision misinterpreted the sections of the constitution that formed the foundation for the rulings.
The question is what will the Supreme Court do when it takes up the Rand repeal?
This is a very different Supreme Court than the one making the original decisions, all Republicans and much more conservative.
Chief Justice’s Gordon MacDonald’s opinion overturning Ruoff’s ruling on the SWEPT declaring it unconstitutional in its current form was a convoluted exercise to reach what appeared to be a foregone conclusion without a solid argument to ground it.
You could say it was a more political decision than past court’s on education funding cases.
And the ruling favored property wealthier communities, allowing them to retain their excess revenue collected under the SWEPT, which should not be a surprise in New Hampshire whose politicians tend to do that.
What happens if the court overturns Claremont?
The state will claim it is meeting its obligations without making any changes in the system, even less state money will go to public education, your property taxes will go up, the state will march toward eliminating public education and no company of any size that depends on an educated workforce will come near the state.
The upper 1 or 2 percenters won’t be touched, but the rest of the population will be as young people leave to find opportunities elsewhere, working families can no longer afford to live here and the rapidly growing older population will fill county nursing homes because there will be no one to assist them.
That doesn’t sound much like a New Hampshire advantage when the surrounding states do a far better job funding public education than this state does.
Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.
istant Dome by veteran journalist Garry Rayno explores a broader perspective on the State House and state happenings for InDepthNH.org. Over his three-decade career, Rayno covered the NH State House for the New Hampshire Union Leader and Foster’s Daily Democrat. During his career, his coverage spanned the news spectrum, from local planning, school and select boards, to national issues such as electric industry deregulation and Presidential primaries. Rayno lives with his wife Carolyn in New London.