The Conway School District has two simultaneous failings. The first is academic, and the other is financial. It would be deplorable enough if students’ assessment results had dropped as low as they have over the past dozen years, even if the cost to taxpayers were not so onerous. At the same time, even above-average academic performance could not compensate for how heavy an economic burden Conway’s schools have become.
In that respect, we have the worst of both worlds — unacceptably high cost, aggravated by the insult of disappointing scholastic results. Our educational leadership seems unable to make more than minimal headway in performance, and unwilling to address cost at all.
William Marvel has perfectly diagnosed the 'dual failing' that is crippling the Mount Washington Valley's educational ecosystem: premium costs that deliver Tier 3 scholastic results. Marvel correctly points out the board’s habit of prioritizing administrative 'market adjustments' over taxpayer relief. This is exactly why the current vendor model is broken. We cannot keep paying premium Tier 1 prices for an 18% math proficiency rate while the board sidesteps the budget committee to fund administrative bloat. As I recently noted in my own column, we must strip away this bloat, abandon unproven frameworks like Building 21, and reallocate those funds directly into the classroom to demand critical thinking and foundational academics for all.
Furthermore, this resistance to accountability is glaringly evident in the board's recent rush to formalize new five-year tuition contracts with Albany, Bartlett, Eaton, and Jackson. As Marvel rightly pointed out at the June 8 meeting, the Conway board bypassed their own taxpayers, refusing to put these agreements to a citizen vote despite the precedent set in 2005. By unilaterally locking these regional towns back into the same fractured 'vendor/customer' dynamic, the board is actively suboptimizing the generational opportunity for a true step-change solution. Instead of using this transition to pursue a unified, high-performing cooperative district where all towns share equity and representation, the leadership is doubling down on the status quo and deliberately shutting the public out of the process.
Ultimately, there is perhaps no clearer example of this broken system than the burden placed on Chatham. For a town of barely 300 residents, writing an $18,000 check to SAU 9 for 'administrative overhead' is not a negligible rounding error; it is a profound misuse of local tax dollars. Chatham does not send its students to New Hampshire schools, meaning our taxpayers are forced to subsidize a neighboring bureaucracy that provides zero educational value to our community. It is time to end this structural inequity and stop treating small towns as captive revenue streams.
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William Marvel has perfectly diagnosed the 'dual failing' that is crippling the Mount Washington Valley's educational ecosystem: premium costs that deliver Tier 3 scholastic results. Marvel correctly points out the board’s habit of prioritizing administrative 'market adjustments' over taxpayer relief. This is exactly why the current vendor model is broken. We cannot keep paying premium Tier 1 prices for an 18% math proficiency rate while the board sidesteps the budget committee to fund administrative bloat. As I recently noted in my own column, we must strip away this bloat, abandon unproven frameworks like Building 21, and reallocate those funds directly into the classroom to demand critical thinking and foundational academics for all.
Furthermore, this resistance to accountability is glaringly evident in the board's recent rush to formalize new five-year tuition contracts with Albany, Bartlett, Eaton, and Jackson. As Marvel rightly pointed out at the June 8 meeting, the Conway board bypassed their own taxpayers, refusing to put these agreements to a citizen vote despite the precedent set in 2005. By unilaterally locking these regional towns back into the same fractured 'vendor/customer' dynamic, the board is actively suboptimizing the generational opportunity for a true step-change solution. Instead of using this transition to pursue a unified, high-performing cooperative district where all towns share equity and representation, the leadership is doubling down on the status quo and deliberately shutting the public out of the process.
Ultimately, there is perhaps no clearer example of this broken system than the burden placed on Chatham. For a town of barely 300 residents, writing an $18,000 check to SAU 9 for 'administrative overhead' is not a negligible rounding error; it is a profound misuse of local tax dollars. Chatham does not send its students to New Hampshire schools, meaning our taxpayers are forced to subsidize a neighboring bureaucracy that provides zero educational value to our community. It is time to end this structural inequity and stop treating small towns as captive revenue streams.
Jeff Patch
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Keep it Clean. Please avoid obscene, vulgar, lewd, racist or sexually-oriented language.
PLEASE TURN OFF YOUR CAPS LOCK.
Don't Threaten. Threats of harming another person will not be tolerated.
Be Truthful. Don't knowingly lie about anyone or anything.
Be Nice. No racism, sexism or any sort of -ism that is degrading to another person.
Be Proactive. Use the 'Report' link on each comment to let us know of abusive posts.
Share with Us. We'd love to hear eyewitness accounts, the history behind an article.