Just a few hours after submitting my previous article, I happened to see a post by commie NPR complaining about Cornerstone inciting litigation, in which Attorney Ian Huyett replied. I recognized a window of opportunity to call attention to my issues with Epsom’s data reporting and jumped on it by replying to Ian. My goal was to attract more attention from legal minds and inspire others to serve as school watchdogs in their own towns.
As noted in my earlier article, my complaint was focused on the lower-right part of the graphic, which is a list titled “Top Administrator Salaries(2024-2025),” but Ian noticed something I had overlooked in the graph above it, titled “Administrator Salaries.” The x-axis is the progression of time, year by year, and the y-axis is the total payroll cost, but the graphic artist manipulated the y-axis, funhouse-mirror style, to draw less attention to the nonlinear changes over the years. Ian called it out in a separate tweet.
“Attention New Hampshire education activists: NH school districts are illegally cheating on their mandatory report to voters in violation of the Students First Act, RSA 189:75-78.
If you act now, you can force the school budget vote to be postponed until the reports are corrected. The Students First Act states that, seven days before the voters adopt a school budget, districts must post line graphs showing 10-year changes in their cost-per-pupil, average teacher pay, and administrator salaries.
But school districts are cynically distorting the y-axis of their graphs to downplay the increase in administrator pay and per-pupil cost.
In this graph from Epsom, the district jacked up the y-axis to an arbitrarily large number. This creates the false impression that administrator costs have not increased significantly.
Epsom also used this trick to downplay increases in per-pupil cost while placing a greater relative emphasis on increased teacher pay.
Senator Keith Murphy, who sponsored the Students First Act, anticipated that schools would do exactly this. The law says clearly that, for administrator salaries, “The upper and lower boundaries of the y-axis must be capped at the nearest hundred thousand dollars.” 189:76, IV.
Under 189:77, you may go into court and seek an injunction blocking the budget meeting until the district posts a candid, unmanipulated report for the mandatory seven days.
You are entitled to have your attorney’s fees paid by the school district under 189:77, III.”
As noted in my previous article, I would prefer on-time compliance over litigation, so I emailed the superintendent and the school board chair this afternoon, putting them on notice. Here’s what I said in an email titled “Please fix the RSA 189:76 data report by Monday.”
Mr. Chair & Mr. Finley:
Please note Attorney Ian Huyett’s tweet and make the necessary repairs to the presentations at the town offices back vestibule, the school gym entrance, the school website and in the Concord Monitor.
(address of Ian’s tweet)
Thanks,
Julie
Let’s see what happens. Meanwhile, be on the lookout for such shenanigans in YOUR town.
