Judith Ackerson, a Franklin resident, thinks the idea of electing rather than appointing New Hampshire’s school superintendents is a “recipe for disaster.”

Debra Green, from Greenville, doesn’t think selecting the person who will lead local schools should be a political process, and Linda Morehouse, who lives in Antrim, believes in the value of having school board oversight over superintendents. If a superintendent doesn’t do a good job, there are mechanisms to remove them.

These are just three of hundreds of online comments opposing a bill from Epsom Rep. Dan McGuire that would restructure school administrative units, or SAUs, throughout the state and make the office of superintendent an elected position.

Currently, McGuire said, superintendents are one step removed from voter oversight. Superintendents are appointed by school boards and are directly accountable to them, not to the public.

“I think that we’ve made the superintendent just too powerful with too little direct control by the voters,” McGuire told the House Education Policy & Administration Committee on Monday.

When faced with questions from the committee over whether elected superintendents would be truly qualified to run New Hampshire’s schools, McGuire said he trusts voters to pick the right person for the job.

In her online testimony, Ackerson said a superintendent’s experience and qualifications are important when developing, evaluating and enacting curriculum.

Electing superintendents would be “like expecting a carpenter to be able to do brain surgery,” she said. “This position requires a deep knowledge of how educational systems work.”

House Bill 765 would also consolidate the state’s 100-plus SAUs into 12: one for each county, one for Manchester and another for Nashua. McGuire said school districts would be unaffected.

He said a new structure might be warranted in light of the steady slip of New Hampshire’s math and reading scores in the past decade and the rising cost of education costs.

“What we have now is not working, and more money isn’t solving the problem,” McGuire said.

With more centralization could come more economies of scale. If larger areas combined finances and structure, McGuire said, they might be able to land better contracts and slim down administrative bloat.

Charlotte Matherly is the statehouse reporter for the Concord Monitor and Monadnock Ledger-Transcript in partnership with Report for America. Follow her on X at @charmatherly, subscribe to her Capital Beat newsletter and send her an email at cmatherly@cmonitor.com.