On March 9, Pembroke taxpayers proposed then passed a motion to cut the school budget by approximately $3 million.
A school district that employs the 2022-23 New Hampshire’s Teacher of the Year and was named the 2022-23 Secondary School of Year by the New Hampshire Excellence in Education Awards chopped 10% from the proposed budget.
This cut has obviously left many members of the Pembroke Academy community confused and agitated.
In case you don’t know how catastrophic a 10% budget cut will be, let’s put this in perspective. In the 2018-19 budget, the initial budget proposal was cut by $826,000. The $826,000 budget cut led to six teachers and 11 non-certified staff losing their jobs.
This new budget is cut by nearly four times that amount.
This will result in many teachers losing their positions and class sizes ballooning, which means less personalized learning opportunities, less curriculum covered, and less learning, in general.
Many staff members are frustrated, but not necessarily frustrated with the taxpayers.
“The system is designed flawed,” said headmaster Dr. Morris, who believes the people of the town of Pembroke have a justified reason to be upset at the tax increase.
Dr. Morris doesn’t blame the Pembroke residents, rather the whole system in New Hampshire. “If we really want to make a change in how we fund education and what our property taxes look like, that [process] needs to start at the State House.”
Mrs. Doyle, a social studies teacher and a Pembroke resident also believes that the townspeople’s frustrations are reasonable, and she is also upset at the tax increase. “The fact that that we, as a state, only rely on property taxes to fund our education system is what is failing our schools,” she said.
A higher court has also deemed New Hampshire’s educational funding to be unconstitutional.
Rockingham County Superior Court Judge Ruoff, who found that the statewide education property tax is unconstitutional. This is because the taxes are collected by towns, not the state, at a set rate to provide funding for each school district. This allows for tremendous disparity in the funding of public education throughout the state.
All in all, it is safe to say that Pembroke Academy will not be the same next school year.
