William Marvel: Unaccountable

Conway School District taxpayers are apparently not the only ones tired of shoveling money into a sinking ship. Two Cheshire County districts held their deliberative meetings recently, and voters in each tried to cut budgets that will produce phenomenal tax increases. Both are SB 2 districts, so of course the meetings were dominated by school employees and the cream of the PTA, and both attempts failed.

In Jaffrey, the budget and warrant articles for the Jaffrey-Rindge Cooperative School District reflect a tax increase of $428 per $100,000 of assessed valuation. That comes to $1,284 for Jaffrey’s median $300,000 home, just for the increase. A selectman who had never seen so severe an increase in four decades as a taxpayer complained of something Conway knows too well — that school staff keeps growing while enrollment keeps dropping. Some of Jaffrey’s army of school staffers dismissed his point, voting down an effort to trim the $27.5 million budget by 72 to 24. Those 96 voters, including the school board, decided the budget for a combined population of about 12,000.