Five out of six school board candidates pledged to respect a majority vote on the ballot referendums that will face Concord voters on Nov. 5 – even if the measures fail to reach the 60% threshold to amend the school district’s charter.

The votes, which were born out of the controversial decision to relocate Rundlett Middle School but would apply more broadly to future projects, will determine whether the school board has to seek voter approval when it wants to move a school and when it wants to sell a substantial piece of property.

“A majority vote on the charter amendments would indicate fractured public trust in this decision, to me,” Sarah Sadowski, one of the challengers, said at a forum hosted by the Monitor on Thursday. “It is extremely important and on the minds of voters in this community. I am ‘team revisit’ all the way anyway, because I think this has been a flawed public process.”

Four other candidates – current board member Barb Higgins and three challengers, former board member Clint Cogswell, disaster restoration project manager Joseph Scroggins and attorney Andrew Winters – all agreed.

Several of them said they’re running on a mission to rethink the Rundlett decision no matter what.

Pam Walsh, the current school board president, was the only candidate who didn’t commit either way.

“I would have to wait and look at what the cost would be, what it might mean for building aid and evaluate all of those things,” Walsh said. “The charter amendment actually leads to a more expensive project.”

Cogswell and Walsh said they don’t support the referendums. Scroggins and Winters do, calling for more checks on school board authority and more connectivity with the City Council. Higgins said she doesn’t approve of the specifics but supports them if that’s what constituents want. Sadowski, who signed the petition to get the votes added to the ballot, declined to share her opinion and said she doesn’t want to put her thumb on the scale – it should be up to voters, she said.

All candidates agreed that if the voters pass the 60% threshold, they would apply to the Rundlett decision, setting the stage for a potential referendum.

Cost of Rundlett

The current school board has maintained that it’s too late to turn back on Rundlett – it would seemingly cost taxpayers millions more and delay the project, though it hasn’t provided the public with numbers on the site development costs to build on the raw land at the Broken Ground site, which may or may not be more than the cost of delays.

As many voters have expressed wariness over costs and tax increases – both to the school board directly and in a Monitor poll on Rundlett – the six candidates running for three seats on the Concord School Board echoed those concerns.

Overall, they bemoaned the source of their budget issues – scant funding from the state and rising costs of services they are required to provide, but steered away from specific answers on any budget cuts or new sources of revenue.

Winters said one of his primary concerns is the continuing erosion of student enrollment. As Concord’s school-age population declines and the city’s population is expected to peak in 20 years, he said, the board could face longer-term problems.

“You’re going to have fewer students, you’re going to have a much-reduced pool of labor to choose from so you’re going to have higher wages,” Winters said. “There’s major, major budgetary challenges ahead.”

Several candidates said they’ll advocate for more money from the state. A judge recently ordered New Hampshire to pay a larger share toward public education after another school district asserted the funding model was unconstitutional.

Some expenses are difficult for the school board to control, like transportation and special education costs and other services the district is legally obligated to provide.

Walsh added that the Concord School District is required to give special education help for students in charter schools, too. Each year, she said, the board has to weigh class sizes and the number of teachers to balance the budget.

“So much of our budget is out of our hands,” Higgins said, comparing it to developing a picture in a dark room where you can’t see your hands. “We have conflicted interests to need to keep the tax rate low, but we want to have good test scores and educate our children.”

Scroggins said the new school building will increase taxes and require some budget cuts but urged the board to be more clear with constituents.

“We need a little more transparent approach,” Scroggins said, and “go through a prioritization process and clearly communicate what has to happen.” 

Cogswell said the school board tries to reduce its budget, while providing a quality education.

“I don’t know the solution, but I do think that the school board is trying real hard to keep the budgets low,” Cogswell said. “I wish we could stop the rising property taxes.”

Trans athletes

Candidates responded to questions on other issues facing the school district, including COVID learning loss and positions like a diversity, equity, inclusion and justice director for the school district and a school resource officer.

They also considered what the board should do if the district had a transgender girl who was banned from playing on girls’ school sports teams due to a new state law.

Walsh voted with the rest of the board in 2021 to allow children to play on teams that correspond with their gender identity.

“I still support that,” Walsh said. “Today, we offer extracurricular activities for academic reasons, to allow kids to learn important values, and every kid should have that chance.”

Winters said while he’s “personally inclined” to allow children to play on the team that corresponds with their gender identity, especially at these lower levels, the school district needs to follow the law.

Higgins, Sadowski, Scroggins said their priority is to protect and be welcoming to all students but didn’t answer the question of whether they’d follow Kearsarge Regional School District, which chose not to enforce the law, citing potential Title IX violations. Higgins has previously said it’s exclusionary to prioritize gender identity over biological sex in sports. All three called for conversations with families and students if a trans girl wanted to play in Concord, and it could depend on the individual case.

Cogswell also did not directly answer the question but noted that trans youth have high rates of mental health issues and suicide and said he wishes he could do more to help.

Potential positions

Concord’s first director of diversity, equity, inclusion and justice transitioned to a new role this year, focusing on restorative justice at Rundlett Middle School. The superintendent has said the district has no plans to immediately fill the role, and the school board will need to redefine the position.

Candidates were split on how best to approach it – Walsh and Higgins support the step back to rethink it, with Walsh saying the job was too much for one person. 

Sadowski said she’d want to fill the role and shape it with more focus on civic engagement, too.

“I think that that would very much be an appropriate use of public dollars,” she said.

Others, like Scroggins and Winters, favor alternatives. Scroggins said he’d support the position if that’s what the community wants but argued that DEIJ efforts also need “organic” support from students, teachers and existing groups in the school district.

“We have an opportunity to create a little more, let’s say, outreach with those groups and leaders of those groups,” Scroggins said. “I think we’ll get greater impact that way.”

Candidates’ positions were similar on hiring a school resource officer – a decision that’s gone before the school board and has been voted down. Many said they’d want to define the position in such a way that it wouldn’t be a waste tax dollars; they also tended to favor other security measures over police officers.

Cogswell and Higgins said they’d need to determine the SRO’s role. In Higgins’ experience, she said an SRO at her former school was mostly busy interacting with kids and giving presentations to classes.

Walsh said a social worker could be a better fit and that she was “uncomfortable” adding a police officer to Concord schools. Winters, a former public defender, agreed and said while SROs are there to be a friendly face, police presence in schools can present equity and justice issues.

“They’re not there to arrest the kids. They’re there to just be a friendly face, but it seems like that is the role of our guidance counselors and our teachers,” Winters said. “Police officers can be triggering for a lot of people.”

Sadowski said she’d want to see evidence on the impact of SROs and solicit public opinion before making a decision.

COVID learning loss

Concord students are recovering from learning gaps during the pandemic shutdown slower than other districts in New Hampshire, according to state data.

To boost academic performance, Scroggins said the district should solicit more feedback from teachers and support them. Sadowski said the district needs to think about its class sizes.

“We need to invest where it matters, where the evidence is clear: low student-teacher ratios, including having more teaching assistants in the classroom,” Sadowski said.

Walsh, who initially ran for school board because of her own child’s COVID learning loss, said the district has tried to boost its scores, but many challenges stem from an “inability” to hire more tutors and instructional assistants.

Higgins said Concord shouldn’t compare itself to other districts – instead, she argued, the board should focus on its own teachers and students.

Cogswell said he thinks the district is making strides in the right direction but that the learning gap is unavoidable, and Winters said he’s unsure how to catch students up. He does, however, think the learning loss will naturally begin to fade and return to normalcy.

Rebuilding trust

Several candidates acknowledged the decision to relocate the middle school on the East Side of the city last December has created division and mistrust from the public in the school board.

Winters and Sadowski called for more transparency from the school board to rebuild that trust, while Scroggins suggested board members go out into the community more to meet people where they’re at and get feedback. Cogswell did not directly answer the question.

Walsh said the board could’ve done better in the Rundlett process but said it’s been difficult on her end, too.

“This is an ongoing public process, so you have this push-pull where people want all the answers at once but we haven’t gotten to that part of the equation yet,” Walsh said.

Higgins said while Rundlett has been contentious, the school board has done the best it can. Still, she said the board can do a better job of listening and acting on feedback.

In this election, she said, it’s important to have a diverse board that can work together. 

“Choose the three of us that you think can sit at a table and work with each other, and listen to you, and listen to one another, and get angry sometimes, and bite your tongue sometimes, and come to decisions that are best for the kids,” Higgins said. “You decide, who do you feel good about?”