Kids First Monadnock!

Keene Sentinel 12/05/2007 (Posted with Permission)

SWANZEY CENTER - The contention that plagues the Monadnock Regional School District is now being eyed at the state level - by the Criminal Justice Bureau of the N.H. Attorney General’s office.

In a letter dated Nov. 28, Chief Investigator Paul E. Brodeur informed the school district’s attorney, Paul L. Apple, that accusations from Sullivan selectmen had been forwarded to his bureau.

Under scrutiny are two possible spending “irregularities,” according to Brodeur - specifically concerning the amount out-of-district students pay to attend school in the Monadnock district and the school board’s spending of hundreds of thousands of dollars in health insurance savings.

The letter from Brodeur follows letters Keene attorney Beth R. Fernald sent to the N.H. Department of Revenue Administration and the N.H. Department of Education on behalf of the town of Sullivan.

In those letters, dated Oct. 22 and Nov. 5, respectively, Fernald charges that out-of-district students attending the Monadnock Community Connections School, an alternative program of Monadnock High School, aren’t being charged the full cost of their education.

She also accuses the Monadnock board of spending a health insurance savings of $400,000 on raises and bonuses.

And in a letter dated Nov. 19, Fernald filed a petition for “declaratory judgment” in Cheshire County Superior Court, arguing that the much-debated issue of early retirement was never properly approved by district voters.
“The court could do any number of things but the probabilities are that it will hear it (in a trial),” Apple said.

Apple said he will be responding to both the Superior Court and Attorney General’s criminal bureau promptly.

The move by Sullivan follows a vote by a majority of residents at the 2007 town meeting to authorize $25,000 to investigate the feasibility of withdrawing from the district.

“This has been ongoing,” said Sullivan Selectman Richard Hotchkiss, who said selectmen are attempting to investigate whether any problems in the district can be fixed before deciding whether withdrawal is a good option. As a result, he said, legal fees for the matter are being paid from the voter-approved $25,000. The early retirement benefit, which gives veteran teachers the option to retire early by paying them a percentage of their salaries for seven years, was originally included in the 2000-01 teachers’ contract.

Opponents call the benefit - which was originally intended to represent a savings in the district by enabling it to hire newer, less-costly teachers - prohibitively expensive. And in the latest contract recently negotiated between the teachers union and the school board, the benefit will be phased out in three years.

But, information posted on Sullivan’s Web site challenges whether early retirement was ever legal in the first place.

“The voters were not informed of the yearly cost of the Early Retirement Program over time,” Fernald wrote in her filing with the Superior Court. “Under New Hampshire law, voters must know the financial implications of a cost item or the item cannot be validly approved.”

At most, she wrote, the voters may have been warned of the cost of the benefit in its first year - 2000-01.

But when the 2000-01 contract expired, she wrote, early retirement did too, since the contract “specifically stated the Early Retirement Program would be continued only if it were negotiated as part of a successor agreement.”

By contrast, Apple said the benefit carried forward. In numerous responses to Fernald’s letters, he declined to discuss the topic of early retirement with her since, at that time, it was still part of negotiations with the teachers’ union. In her letters to the state Department of Revenue Administration and the Department of Education, Fernald tackled two other issues - among them, the cost of students attending the Monadnock Community Connections School from out-of-district.

Monadnock Community Connections is supported by federal funds set to dry up at the end of this year. In September, the board voted that in the future, students wishing to attend the school from other districts would be charged the same tuition rate as the rest of the high school.

But critics, such as Sullivan school board member Timothy Aho, said it costs much more for students to attend Monadnock Community Connections, so they should be charged more.

The fact that they won’t be, Fernald wrote in her letters, is “particularly puzzling” since Monadnock voters rejected a warrant article in March that would have made Monadnock High School an open-enrollment school, which means it would accept students from other districts.

Fernald has also accused the Monadnock board of authorizing $400,000 in spending from health insurance savings for raises and bonuses.

Although she stated the savings came from a change in health care providers, the district didn’t change providers. Instead, the savings - which totaled over $500,000 - were the result of a competitive bidding process.

In addition to funding a number of bonuses and wage increases, more than $200,000 of the savings was approved for hiring new staff members.

“I think there’s some misrepresentation in the statements,” Superintendent Kenneth R. Dassau said after the meeting. “The district will now be forced to expend significant amounts of money to defend itself.”
Apple echoed him.

“I think there’s some representations in those letters that with some investigation would not have been made,” he said. “It’s just a plain misstatement of fact that we changed insurance carriers.”

Fernald was unreachable for comment.

Aho, Sullivan’s school board representative, said health savings should have gone back to the taxpayers. And he questioned the legitimacy of adding staff positions under a default budget.

On Tuesday, the school board also approved $50,000 from the health insurance savings to hire a new director of buildings and grounds. This money will cover the director’s salary for the remainder of the school year, whereas roughly $94,000 will have to be raised for that salary next year.

That $94,000 will not appear as a separate warrant article, but will be part of the operating budget for 2008-2009.

(Keene Sentinel Editorial, July 15th. Reposted with permission)

It’s thought to be axiomatic that in self-governing democracies voters generally do the right thing. But that principle is being put to the test in the Monadnock Regional School District.

Over the years, residents of the eight-town district have had many opportunities to fix or replace their crowded and crumbling high school. But they have chosen only limited repairs and a facilities plan for a potential future.

t’s obvious that the school needs a serious upgrade. Michael Hoefer of Richmond is a member of Kids First Monadnock, a pro-schools group that recommended a warrant item earlier this year that would have added $200,000 to a trust fund for future school construction. It failed 1,629 to 1,408. “I feel our facilities show a lack of respect for the children of the district,” Hoefer told The Sentinel last spring. “To me all it takes is a walk down the aisles of Monadnock High School to realize that we are far behind a real positive and engaging learning environment.”

Actually, a drive past the place, with its portapotty classrooms out on the lot, pretty much tells the tale. Failing that, read what the New England Association of Schools and Colleges had to say leading up to its decision this past April to drop the school’s status from “warning” to “probation.” The accreditation committee wrote of overcrowding, poor air quality, inadequate facilities for the school nurse, science labs that fail to meet federal safety regulations, exterior doors that allow unwanted visitors during school hours and so on.

And this is a place we send our children.

The school was also told to improve its staff mentoring program for new teachers and to “encourage members of the school community to become active leaders and supporters of the school’s well-being.” That’s a key recommendation. Specifically, the report said the Monadnock Regional School Board should work “more effectively” with the community to increase support for school budgets and other financial needs.

It could hardly work less effectively. These officials often seem more interested in fighting among themselves than in fighting for the students. They certainly don’t provide what you could call clear leadership. For example, this past spring, the chairman of the Monadnock Regional School District budget committee was urging voters to reject the district’s proposed operating budget, which they did.

Last year, voters rejected the budget and teacher and support-staff contracts.

Despite all this turmoil, MRHS has shown much evidence of excellence. The accreditation report praised the school for its educational opportunities, its dedicated staff and the experimental Monadnock Community Connections School. Awards and other recognition abound from year to year. Most recently, the New Hampshire Art Educators Association named Monadnock regional teacher Debbra Crowder the 2007 “Art Educator of the Year.” So there’s plenty of praise to go around for students and teachers who find themselves in a tough spot, just as there’s plenty of blame to be borne by the folks who put them in it.

Speaking of blame, let’s not forget the New Hampshire school-funding system that looms in the background, poisoning everything it touches. That system charges property owners for educational expenses, based on the size of the education budget, the number of students each town sends, and the assessed values of taxable property. So the tax consequences of any given education budget can be vastly different from town to town.

Ten years ago, the New Hampshire Supreme Court declared that system to be unconstitutional “fiscal mischief” when it’s used to pay for an adequate education. Yet that fact rarely comes up in these school-budget debates, or in legislative and gubernatorial campaigns, for that matter.

Last week, the accrediting association told MRHS Principal Joseph E. Smith that, despite his efforts to have his school’s probation decision rescinded, the sanction will stand. That means an initial improvement plan will be completed late this fall. It will surely call for additional resources. Then the district will have a little more than a year to demonstrate that it’s serious about fixing the problems.

Failing that, MRHS will eventually lose its accreditation. That means students and teachers will continue to study and work under increasingly trying and dangerous circumstances, college bound seniors will be awarded transcripts from a school that has been deemed sub-par, and property values in the district towns will reflect the uncertainty of poor educational opportunities.

“It’s really now up to the taxpayers and voters,” said board Chairman Colline Dreyfuss of Swanzey the other day. It always is.