Concord Board Of Education Hosts Budget Hearings Monday, Wednesday

CONCORD, NH — Concord’s board of education will host two public hearings to discuss the 2024-2025 operating budget next week.

Terry Wolf, the district’s new director of communications, said one hearing will be held at 6 p.m. on Monday at the SAU 8 board room in the basement of the district office. She said the meeting would be broadcast live on Concord TV. On Wednesday, a second meeting will occur at the Beaver Meadow Elementary School gymnasium at 40 Sewalls Falls Road at 6 p.m. This meeting will not be live, she said. It will, however, be recorded and broadcast at a later date. Meetings will also be posted on YouTube.

The district proposes a $108,008,631 budget — an increase of around $1.8 million or 1.67 percent. Wolf said budget impacts included negotiated salaries, the HVAC bond, health care costs, and reductions in state adequacy funds. The board will discuss math interventionists, class sizes at the elementary level, changes to world language, and a school resource officer at the Rundlett Middle School. The SRO appropriation has been discussed for years but has not been funded despite support from the Concord Police Department and the general public. The city pays for a quarter of the salary of the SRO, as it does for the Merrimack Valley School District SROs.

According to the budget, the salary line item has increased year-over-year by 4.5 percent or nearly $2.36 million, primarily due to educator raises. Benefits have increased by 6.5 percent, about $1.75 million. Revenue from the state decreased by $1.8 million, or about 6 percent, despite the per-pupil adequacy aid increasing to $4,182, 4.6 percent higher than the 2023-2024 school year.

Last year, the district also received nearly $6 million in more state aid, which was to be earmarked as “property tax relief.” Only $500,000 was put toward lowering increases in property taxes — with about half the money budgeted before the state approved the increase. The rest of the money was put into the district’s trust fund. Technically, one could surmise the $2.5 million in excess state aid put toward the budget initially was property tax relief, keeping the tax rate lower than it would be. Concord School District taxes last year went up by 19 cents per thousand, to $13.61 per thousand, the highest rate in more than two decades.

Most of the increased taxes are not due to a reduction in state adequacy funds though.

Enrollment in the district has dropped, leading to less money coming from the state despite the increase in state adequacy per-pupil aid. The district is projecting 57 fewer students next year. However, that only amounts to around $238,000 less for the district, again due to fewer students.

Enrollments have plummeted in the district by 660 students — 4,610 for the 2014-2015 school year to 3,950 students for the current school year. At the same time, the budget has increased about $25 million during the same time period.

The budget proposes a $1.35 million increase in support services — nearly a 30 percent increase year-over-year. The buildings and grounds budget increased by nearly $2.1 million or 16.6 percent increase. Special education and pupil services also increased by $1.56 million or nearly 6 percent.

Kathleen Murphy, the superintendent of schools, said the increase in the SPED budget was due to a few new out-of-district placements, although most of the students in that sector are educated inside the school district. There have been no new hires in that department, she said. On the safety budget, the district received $600,000 in two grants to make one-time security and other school upgrades. A new position for the building department, budgeted last year, remains unfilled, Murphy said. A 200-day contract administrative services employee at the high school is not being replaced. Murphy said the district also hired no new tutors or paraprofessionals. The board, too, she said, is eyeing other positions in the district.

Salaries — including step and track increases and new hires are adding around $2.2 million to the new budget. Benefit costs are increasing by about $1.7 million. The debt service budget — which included new buses and HVAC repairs at Concord High School, and Beaver Meadow Elementary School will be about $6.2 million. HVAC replacements throughout the district will run around $20 million.

The district is also transferring $1.5 million — about $200,000 less than the budget increase proposed, to the facilities stabilization fund, as part of the “annual contribution into the fund to offset the impact of the middle school project.” The account has around $16.2 million projected for fiscal 2025.

Activists Against East Side Middle School To Attend

Residents of Concord who are concerned about a new middle school being built on the east side of the city are also expected to attend the hearings.

Concord Concerned Citizens (linked here) is attempting to organize residents to become involved in requesting transparency by the board and district. While motivated mainly by the vote in December 2023 to build a new middle school on the east side of the city, where most of the new population growth during the 2020 Census was recorded, some members are also wondering why the district has budgetary and borrowing autonomy, something that no other school district in the state or region has. Other members point to a need to merge the Merrimack Valley and Concord School districts to save money while paying the highest school property taxes in the history of the city and the highest rates in the last 25 years.

Concord Concerned Citizens has also pointed to infrastructure expenses by the city — potentially millions of dollars, if a large, new school is built in East Concord.

The group has been imploring its members to attend the hearings.

A petition to rescind the vote on the Broken Ground site and revisit rebuilding or renovating the middle school at the current site, which was started in February, has slightly less than 1,000 signatures.

Also Read

• Concord Resident: New Middle School Price Makes Me ‘Physically Ill’
• Walsh Elected New Concord School District Board Of Education President
• Concord School District Hosts Middle School Siting Hearing Wednesday
• Concord School District Hosts 2 Meetings Concerning New Middle School
• Concord Residents, Others Eye Design, Equity Of A New Middle School
• Concord's Rundlett Middle School 4th On NH School Building Aid List
• New Concord Middle School Costs? Around $176 Million, SAU 8 Docs Say
• CenterPoint Church Says No To Concord School District Land Sale
• Land Sale Negotiations For New Concord Middle School Reach An Impasse
• A Lot Of Unknowns With New Concord Middle School Project
• Concord's Middle School Could Be Sold After New Facility Built
• Concord School District To Buy Land For New Middle School
• Navigating The Sordid Past Of Concord's School District Charter

Administrative Merge Proposal Dropped

Murphy recently dropped a proposal to merge administration between the Broken Ground elementary and Mill Brook primary schools after public and union outcry, despite the idea being floated nearly two decades ago.

Due to a vacancy, Murphy proposed to save money. While the merged schools would have created a situation where administration costs were lower than all the other standalone elementary schools, as the budget currently stands, administration costs are much higher in the two separate schools than in all the other elementary schools.

After the proposal was floated and a meeting was booked to discuss it, the Concord Education Association and others proposed a vote of no confidence for Murphy. The superintendent, in reaction to the outcry, pulled the idea.

Having merged administration at both schools was initially proposed in 2006 during the elementary school consolidation process due to the small size of the then-Dame Elementary School (now a community center on Canterbury Road). Instead of adding an addition to the Broken Ground Elementary School, a separate school was built. At this point, the added administration costs — or the lack of savings of not merging the elementary and primary school, paying two principals instead of one during the past 12 years, is probably more than $2 million in salary and benefits.

Despite promises by school board members at the time of millions of dollars in savings due to consolidating the elementary schools, no savings occurred.

Two other administrators in the district have not been asked back and there is at least one retirement, too.

The proposed budget, presentation materials, and recordings of budget presentations are available on the district website at sau8.org. select the “Budget” icon or go to sau8.org/page/district-budget.

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