School Administrative Unit (SAU) 16 consists of Brentwood, Exeter, East Kingston, Kensington, Newfields, and Stratham, New Hampshire. Using the SAU stationary they recently sent out a letter urging recipients to attend a meeting “in an attempt to increase dialog and share information.”
About what?
This reads like Democrat talking points. It mirrors issues they are running on for election. Almost to the letter. Drafted in a way that makes it sound like a call to a conversation in search of solutions.
Clever.
I wonder if they’ll consider dropping the red-flag and gun-free zone rhetoric that has turned schools in other states into soft targets?
Will the assembled ask why the cost per student has risen sharply while results and enrollment have remained flat or declined?
In any other situation, 80% of investors in that undertaking would demand new leadership and new direction. They’d want to know if their money would be better spent in other ventures like supporting education savings accounts, vouchers, or funding that allows students to attend private or charter schools that deliver better results at a fraction of the cost to taxpayers.
The savings could more than cover other costs, though it behooves the investors to ask the SAU’s about their mismanagement of these resources to date.
If the right people with the right information appeared to engage in an actual discussion of these issues with taxpayers some real solutions might emerge. The people paying the freight might learn about ways to receive genuine relief.
But more likely than not, this will be a meeting where “management” and the “workers” (who are both on the same side) deliver a unified message to the people about how the best solution to their local concerns is to abrogate local money and control to a room full of ‘experts’ in the State capital who know better how to manage these inadequate, dare I say meager resources.
They will spin the Secular/Statist parable of the Loaves and the Fishes.
“Five barley loaves and two small fish supplied by a boy were used by Jesus to feed a multitude.”
They will take your money, bless it with their infinite wisdom and superior management skills, and return it to your SAU and there will be more than they took. Not just to your district but to all of them. Every town will experience a funding miracle. More than enough with some left over.
And this introduction of hundreds of new hands in the Capital will magically solve all the misuse and mismanagement at the town (School board or SAU) that led to the previous issues with rising costs per student and stagnant academic results.
This miraculous transformation of resources will cost you less and provide more.
And town spending will never rise. And the state will never need to ask for more. And we will not end up like all the other states who tired this before us. Places that have bigger state budgets, higher taxes, more crime, lower average incomes, higher welfare, and a lower overall quality of life, and bloated state and local budgets that strain their taxpayer’s resources.
In New Hampshire, it will be different.
Or, maybe not.
