When I was first on a school board, I had no idea what my job actually was. I had been appointed, learned on the job, and remained on the board for over 12 years. A number of times over the years I had a question that the superintendent said he would run by a lawyer. When the answer came back, it had nothing to do with my question. I started to realize that I couldn’t really trust the lawyers (and maybe even the superintendents) whose livelihoods relied on schools keeping to the status quo.
This is, I think, common among many school board members. They listen to what administrators and lawyers tell them their job is. But the lawyers and admins won’t tell you the whole truth. So how do you find out? You can read all the RSAs and administrative rules and court cases, or you can join the School District Governance Association of New Hampshire (SDGA-NH).
I’m on the board of the SDGA. Our mission is to help school board members discover the powers that they actually have — as opposed to the powers they’re told that they have (and don’t have) by school administrators, teacher’s unions, and the NH School Board Association (NHSBA), all of whom share two common interests: To increase spending on schools; and to keep any substantive changes from occurring in how schools work. Or more precisely, how they fail to work.
As I watch the Claremont school board hold hearings about its current challenges, a few thoughts occur to me over and over again. First, it reminds me of the Croydon budget battle in 2022 in many ways. Part of that is the sense of entitlement displayed by students and parents.
But another is the sense of learned helplessness being displayed by the school board members. If their lawyer says that certain options are off the table — for example, “We can’t just fire teachers” because of their union contracts — they just go along with that. Have they consulted other lawyers? Have they looked at how other institutions have managed to get rid of tenured instructors? Because it can be done.
A few stories from Croydon might be instructive.
Story one: Two of the three members of our select board resigned on a single day. The lawyer for the board said that in order to appoint new members, he would have to petition the Superior Court, which would require a bunch of time-consuming (and therefore expensive) preparation.
Instead of just accepting that advice, the remaining board member asked the New Hampshire Municipal Association for a second opinion. They pointed out that this sort of thing happens all the time, and the law provides a clear and simple remedy: The remaining board member appoints a second member, and those two members appoint the third.
Story two: When it became clear that it was time to get rid of the town’s Chief of Police, the statutes providing protection for certain positions made it difficult to fire him. But if the entire department was eliminated, then he wasn’t being fired from an existing position. There was simply no longer a position for him to fill. So that’s how the select board handled it.
Where did they get that idea? It turns out that colleges and universities have used the same idea for quite some time to eliminate professors with tenure. They can’t fire a professor and then replace him with someone else; but they can eliminate an entire department. So that’s what they do.
Story three: Some people in town weren’t happy with the outcome of the budget vote at the town meeting. The Business Administrator and the district’s lawyer said the only way to have a “redo” vote of the district’s budget warrant article was to petition the Superior Court. (Sound familiar?) Those people decided to get a second opinion; someone actually read the RSA and learned that with a relatively small number of signatures, they could force a special meeting; and that with a larger number of attendees at that meeting, they could vote to appropriate extra money.
Which, for better or worse, they were able to do.
The point, of course, is that when your lawyer (or other member of the education establishment) tells you that you can’t do something, or that you have to do something, it’s wise to get a second opinion.
If Claremont needs to shed some teachers in order to align its expenditures with its resources, there is a way to do that. There are certainly several ways to do that. But the board won’t find them if it’s just going to be a rubber stamp for its lawyer.
I encourage all of the members of the Claremont school board to contact SDGA-NH, to help them get a better sense of the powers that they have, that the education establishment doesn’t want them to even know about, let alone exercise. And because of the experience of our membership, we’re a good source of ‘second opinions’.
Any school board member in New Hampshire is welcome, of course. And you don’t even need to wait for a crisis.
