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Kass Ardinger was a member of the Concord School Board for nine years, five of which she spent as its leader. During that time, Concord built three new elementary schools and sold and demolished others. -
Somayeh Kashi, an art and technology teacher who started at Rundlett in 2014, has to use a stepstool to open and close the windows in her room daily. As a teacher, mother, and voter, Kashi wants the new middle school to be built near Broken Ground as soon as possible. -
Somayeh Kashi, an art and technology teacher who started at Rundlett in 2014, has to get up on a table to open and close the windows in her room daily. As a teacher, mother, and voter, Kashi wants the new middle school to be built near Broken Ground as soon as possible.
Kass Ardinger saw this coming.
Last December, when the Concord School Board seemed poised to relocate the middle school across the river, she issued a warning.
More than 100 people had turned out to the meeting, urging the board to rebuild Rundlett Middle School where it currently is. While the board had held hearings over the last few months, it was clear to Ardinger that the public didn’t understand the opinion of the board, that the Broken Ground location in East Concord would be better.
If the board moved forward, she knew people would respond by trying to change the school board’s autonomous power. She knew this because she’d seen it before. Now, her prediction is playing out.
“History will always repeat itself,” she said. “It’s like Groundhog Day.”
Ardinger chaired the school board throughout the elementary school consolidation just over a decade ago. A group of opponents tried unsuccessfully to get the Legislature — at the time the only group that could amend the district charter — to step in and override the board. That project certainly was divisive, just like the current one.
“There were some really hard meetings,” she said. At the same time, “your goal as a school board member should be to get as much consensus as you can.”
As its leader, she had tried to make sure that the school board brought its constituents into discussions: explaining decisions well in advance of making them, being upfront about what board members were thinking and why, and not being afraid to engage with people — either to correct them or to apologize.
In less than two weeks, voters will find two proposed changes to the school district charter on their Nov. 5 ballots.
Ardinger doesn’t have an opinion on which school location would be better — and she does worry that reversing the vote will mean expensive delays. But if people in Concord want to revisit the Rundlett location decision, she said, the way to do that is by voting out members of the board, not by supporting the charter amendments.
By passing the amendments, “You’re not taking it out on the board,” she said. “It would have major consequences for the whole city.”
Concord School Board’s charter, its governing document, lays out its unique autonomy. No other school board in the state has the final say over its budget and other major decisions like union contracts without any oversight — all others must pass through a city council or voters at town meeting. These amendments, if approved and added to the charter, would modify that total independence for the first time since autonomy was implemented in 1961.
The first amendment would require the board to get majority voter approval to relocate a school. The second would require voter approval for the district to sell property.
Not only does Ardinger worry that putting voters in charge of these decisions will leave them open to special interests at times when there is less controversy — and therefore less attention on them — but she believes they will cost taxpayers money on future projects: The added variable of a constituent vote means the district won’t get as good bond ratings, and the board won’t have the same leverage to negotiate better prices when it does sell land, Ardinger said.
Like many of her neighbors and fellow district parents, Reagan Bissonnette wanted Concord’s new middle school to be rebuilt on its current site.
In January, when an online petition circulated demanding that board reconsider its decision to move it, a lot of people sent her a copy and urged her to sign. She didn’t.
“I can understand why so many people were shocked and upset over the decision,” Bissonnette said. “I was disappointed myself.”
Despite thinking that the new school should remain on South Street — a belief she still holds — Bissonnette supports the project moving forward as planned.
Whether or not to support these amendments is not the same question as whether the school board chose the right location for the school. They are not a referendum on the location, she said.
They are, however, written with the intention of undoing the location vote and forcing the board to put that question to the voters. Whether that would actually happen, though, is disputed — both by the school district and by those in the ‘vote no’ group who argue they would not be legally binding to the current project.
“It’s very clear that many of the people who have heard about the amendments or support the amendments, support them because they want to undo the decision,” Bissonnette said. “But the amendments as written wouldn’t clearly undo that.”
The school board’s attorney has argued that applying the first of the amendments to the middle school vote would be a retroactive application of a rule, which is illegal in New Hampshire.
When the Attorney General’s Office reviewed the language in the amendments, the state gave no opinion about whether they would actually legally apply to this project.
A court battle is the biggest worry of Somayeh Kashi, an art and technology teacher who started at Rundlett in 2014.
“When I got the job, they told me, ‘We’re getting a new building in three years,’” she said. “Every time we’ve had a new teacher for the last two years, they’re like, ‘oh, my God, I heard we’re going to get new building!’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, you’re so sweet, so new. I thought that too, ten years ago.’”
Kashi echoed the concerns of other teachers about the safety of the building.
Her first-floor classroom has reached 99 degrees on the warmest days. A fuse box located in her classroom, part of its outdated design, recently fell from the wall. She and other teachers, she said, have to take allergy medicine to make it through the school year when in the summer they’re perfectly healthy.
“It cannot happen fast enough. That building is a health hazard,” she said. “We cannot keep playing this game for another ten years.”
Kashi isn’t just a teacher at Rundlett. She’s also a parent of a current eighth grader and a Concord taxpayer.
“Every time they delay this, this is just going to cost us more money to us taxpayers,” she said. “We’ve spent millions of dollars already here with the architect, all the planning. We would actually have to throw millions of our tax dollars away. And for what?”
According to HMFH, the architectural firm hired by the district, the current school design would have to be altered to fit on the Rundlett site. If the school district reversed course, they have estimated that it would cost $2.85 million to reconfigure the design and add two years to the project timeline. As discussed earlier in this series, the district has estimated other additional costs tied to building at Rundlett as well, totaling millions of dollars.
Elizabeth Lahey’s home was one of the first in the city to have a blue and green “Vote ‘No’” sign on its lawn.
She agreed with the board’s choice to put the new school near Broken Ground: It’s where her daughter currently goes to school, and she thinks a great place to build a new one.
“They spend a lot of time out on the trails, a lot of time out in those woods, and I think it’s just a real asset,” she said.
But that preference isn’t what’s driving her opposition to the charter amendments.
Lahey worries that people will see voting for the amendments as a vote to rebuilt at Rundlett when, regardless of the current dispute, they will have a much broader impact.
“What we’re talking about is changing our structure of government,” she said. “I think it’s just bad precedent and bad practice to haphazardly amend a governing document because you’re mad about one thing, or because something didn’t turn out the way you thought that it should.”
Ardinger echoed this sentiment.
She understands why people are frustrated with how the location decision was handled.
The charter is essentially the school board’s version of a constitution. Ardinger fears that making even limited, but complicated, changes to it because of a specific project would have unintended consequences.
“It’s just not the answer,” she said.
