Facing another increase, Pembroke School Board takes new tact on explaining budget
Published: 01-30-2025 3:18 PM |
Presenting a school budget is a typically staid, number-laden affair.
In Pembroke this week, it felt a little more like a group therapy session.
For nearly two hours on Tuesday, Doug Johnson, 78, sat silently in the second row of a mostly filled room at the Pembroke Town Library. As the meeting wound down, he – like about half a dozen people before him – raised his hand to address the four members of the Pembroke School Board who were present.
“Just consider or address the seniors who have to go out and budget,” Johnson implored them. “Present it so that we can relate. It’s not you coming down and saying, ‘Here’s the budget, you’re going to pay this, hustle up.’”
Pembroke School Board Chair Andy Camidge tried to empathize.
“That’s not the relationship we want to have with folks who are in retirement and on a fixed income,” Camidge said. “We completely understand it. I plan on being a retired person in Pembroke someday. We get it.”
“Last year that didn’t come across,” Johnson responded. “… It just felt like you were doing it and you never considered us.”
The back-and-forth between Johnson and Camidge was precisely the sort of exchange the board had hoped for when it planned a pair of question-and-answer sessions about next year’s school budget, which will be voted on in March.
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Almost a year after frustrated voters trimmed the school district’s proposed budget by over $3 million, the board members recognized that their previous forms of communication about why school costs are rising had proven inadequate.
As the Pembroke schools have weathered the repercussions of last year’s budget reduction and as the board prepares to recommend a $2.6 million increase, the board members decided they had to try something new to prevent a repeat at the annual meeting this year.
Where school board meetings are formal government proceedings that leave little room for dialogue between community members and their elected representatives, Tuesday’s meeting proved starkly different, with the interchange of both information and emotions taking center stage.
While many people present expressed unabashed support for the Pembroke school system, some attendees, like Johnson, discussed their own financial precarity and questioned whether the school board scrutinized its budget as carefully as residents are forced to consider their own.
Camidge, who did most of the talking for the board, navigated a presentation and fielded questions about both figures and feelings.
“I’m not going to argue that everybody can afford the tax increase,” he said. “I get that that is a real thing that some people just might not be able to take another $1,400 increase on their tax rate. And if that’s the case I will understand if you vote against our budget. What I want people to understand, though, is we are not being unreasonable.”
Camidge argued that the board – like other boards across the state – was “in a rock and a hard place,” forced to pay for employee benefits and special education expenses that have risen significantly faster than inflation, despite not receiving corresponding financial support from the state and federal government.
For much of the night, the discussion between the board and the roughly 40 attendees in person and online focused on how to balance educational quality with affordability.
“The question that the school board has to grapple with, and part of what we’re asking you for your input on tonight, is where is that line?” Camidge asked. “You can certainly say that hurdles are not essential. I wouldn't argue with that. But we have a track team, and if we’re gonna have a track team, I think we should allow the track team to practice with the equipment that they need.”
Matt Petersons described the school budget as a “moral document” that reflects a community’s values.
“There’s a moral or community value that public education provides to the community, whether or not we’re utilizing that community,” said Petersons, the father of a middle school and a high school student in the district.
School board member Gene Gauss put it a little more bluntly.
“When my old ass is in a nursing home, and these students are LNs or RNs, I want them to be smart,” he said.
After the marathon meeting, school board member Kerri Dean expressed cautious optimism that the new approach had served its purpose.
“I think we had a couple people who maybe were teetering and maybe changed their minds,” said Dean, though she also expressed concern that many of the people who supported trimming the budget last year had not shown up.
The board will have another opportunity at a second Q&A on Feb. 19, prior to the vote on March 8.
Jeremy Margolis can be contacted at jmargolis@cmonitor.com.