Dear Governor...

It was a long week here in Newmarket and yesterday I was angry at a situation that was feeling hopeless. 

So I wrote a letter. Please consider writing one too. (Edited to add: Follow this link for mail and email addresses for our elected officials.)

Dear Governor Hassan, Rep. Michael Cahill, Rep. Patricia Lovejoy, Rep. Marcia Moody and Rep. Adam Schroadter:

I’m writing to you at the end of an emotional week here in Newmarket.

As I hope you are aware, our town has been faced with a school facilities crisis for the last decade.  Our Jr. Sr. High School has many State DoE  deficiencies, including Fire and Life Safety concerns which, if not fixed by September 2015, will cause our school to be shut down. (A full list of problems and deficiencies can be found on the school's website.)

We have explored many options, including most recently a tuition agreement with Oyster River Cooperative School District that fell through when that district decided to partner with Barrington this week.

Thursday evening our Superintendent presented a revised plan for a Jr. Sr. High School project. It is a modest proposal that we believe will meet the needs of our students in this 21^st century learning environment. The cost of this project is $45 million-a cost we will need to shoulder ourselves due to no state aid. It’s a hard pill to swallow.

Add to this an astronomical (and unprecedented) increase in our SPED population that has resulted in a proposed budget increase of 7%. Again, we shoulder a bigger portion of this cost than ever before because of decreased state aid.

And to add insult to injury, last night it was brought to our attention that we will need to update our almost 30 year old heating system at a cost of approximately $122,000 and put aside plans to install a security system in the elementary school.

So here we are, faced with choosing between heating systems or security systems. It breaks my heart as both a mother and as a taxpayer. Can’t we do better for the kids of New Hampshire?

We need attention to be paid to NH schools. We need to stop cuts to Catastrophic Aid and we need to fund a school building aid program. Towns like Newmarket need your support.

Sincerely,

Toni Weinstein

Newmarket, NH

New design.

Want to know what this means? There will be a public forum tomorrow night (Monday) at 6:30 in the Town Hall auditorium.  

The view from the cheap seats.

This was the scene at last night's NES holiday concert:

60 kids in band.
100 kids in chorus.

Coming soon to a Jr. Sr. High School near you.

Cuts

There were some interesting suggestions made at last night's budget committee meeting.  

• Bigger class sizes at the Jr. Sr. High School. Combining math levels, for example. Is bigger better?

• "Looking at" classes like home ec and woodworking. For the record, they don't call it home ec anymore.

• Eliminating extra art classes like ceramics. Not sure why ceramics doesn't make the grade.

• Pay to play. It's a slippery slope.

• Cutting "optional" programs. My understanding of this is cutting electives. Interesting. Just because they're electives doesn't mean they aren't necessary.

• Bringing in consultants to deal with the "business" of special education. More on this later.

And this process is just getting started.

Facebook Reality.

When citizens get involved and ask our elected officials to act, things start to get done. 

I've seen two examples of this in Newmarket in recent weeks:

• A group of citizens got together, formed a petition and gathered signatures in the hopes of asking the Town Council to consider allowing studies for hydroelectric power at the Macallen dam. They presented their case to the Town Council a couple weeks ago. At last night's Town Council meeting, a resolution was read (though not voted on yet) to support such a study.

• A couple parents stood up at the last School Board meeting and requested that the administration and School Board take a second look at the current plans for a new school and do their due diligence to make sure that the estimated cost for a new Jr./Sr. High School is as low as possible.  Reworking the plans has been in the works since the October public forums, and the issue was highlighted publicly by these parents. Now more people are paying attention. 

I hope this trend of public involvement continues. But last night I was one of three citizens at the Town Council meeting. People can complain that they're not being heard, but if you want to speak directly to the leadership of our town you have to show up.

In the last few years, several Facebook forums have been created in Newmarket and they're great for a lot of things.  People have used them to rally support, increase awareness, and disseminate information. It is a place to vent and to express ideas. But it DOES NOT replace expressing your opinion to your elected officials through appropriate channels.

Go to meetings. Write letters. Send emails. Leave Facebook for other things.

Back to square one.

School Board members from Newmarket and ORCSD met yesterday and the initial reports from that meeting don't sound promising for a tuition agreement between the two districts.

So what's next? 

A group of people approached the School Board in November to ask that the school designs be reevaluated to ensure that we are keeping it to the absolute minimum in both scale and cost. My understanding is that a committee has been formed and will be working on this over the next couple of weeks. The hope is to bring the cost down to something a majority in Newmarket can swallow.

And we are still looking at a budget that represents a significant tax increase if approved and warrant articles still need to be finalized.

Here's a list of meetings we should all be paying attention to:

School Board--Thursday 12/5 at 7pm
Budget Committee--Wednesday 12/11 at 6:30pm
School Board--Thursday 12/19 at 7pm

We go to the polls in 96 days.