As middle school students returned to the classroom after remote learning during COVID-19, Concord School District officials knew they needed a new learning approach. Kids were disoriented after remote and hybrid learning had disrupted their ability to socialize.

So the district looked outside of its own walls for solutions. In May 2022, Concord received state funding to begin planning a partnership with the city’s YMCA, and to develop a curriculum that could teach social and emotional learning skills to middle schoolers. The district is also considering a new building that creates a shared community venue for the students and the YMCA.

“We can’t do it alone,” said Ellen Desmond, grants manager for the Concord School District. “And that’s really where the impetus for this idea kind of came from: that we’re feeling the squeeze of student mental health needs on the rise and social skill competency as a result of this epidemic.”

That approach is the type of proposal from a public school district that a recent state law is aimed to encourage. In 2021, the Legislature passed a law to create “innovation schools,” giving public school boards the chance to apply for exemptions to the state’s education rules to attempt new programs.

But despite the State Board of Education’s final approval of the innovation school rules late last month, schools have so far not shown much interest in the new process, officials say.

“I do not know of any district that has submitted for a waiver. Unfortunately,” said Rep. Glenn Cordelli, a Tuftonboro Republican and prime sponsor of the original bill creating the innovation plans.

Intended as a way to provide flexibility, the rules allow a school or a collection of schools to submit proposals for reorganization to their local school boards. The school board must then either approve or reject those plans within 60 days.

“The way I look at it, the state is saying to school districts: ‘Get entrepreneurial. Innovate. Come up with new ideas that you think will improve outcomes for students,’” said Drew Cline, chairman of the State Board of Education.

Schools can propose a broad range of changes, from the length of the school day or school year to new graduation policies, staffing plans, or assessment procedures.

If the school board approves the proposed plan, it moves to the Department of Education, which gives written feedback, and then on to the State Board of Education, which then votes on whether to approve it.

Proponents said it allows school districts to seek innovations specific to their geography or stated mission. As Cline puts it, the proposal could allow anything from learning pods to a single-room, little red schoolhouse.

“Right now, before innovation schools, charter schools were the way to create an innovative public school that operated with flexibility and wasn’t constrained by the really thick layer of regulations that govern most public schools,” Cline said. “So the Legislature wanted to create another option for innovation.”

And the approach has been tried in other states. Former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick signed an innovation schools rule in 2010; the state has since seen a number of schools use the process to overhaul their own curriculum.

Margarita Muniz Academy in Boston used the law to create a bilingual school, where classes are conducted in both English and Spanish. West Brookfield Elementary School in West Brookfield, Mass., created a robust STEM program, using the exceptions to certain rules to allow for dynamic classes rooted in engineering, robotics, and mathematics. And the Nathanial H. Wixon School in South Dennis, Mass., used the flexibility to extend the school day by 40 minutes, allowing students at the music-focused school more time to practice their instruments after school without interfering with class time.

So far, New Hampshire’s innovation school law has not been as well received. In 2021, as the bill moved through the Legislature, the National Education Association of New Hampshire spoke against it, raising worries that it would allow school boards to make sweeping changes to school operations while cutting teachers and other stakeholders out of the decision-making. Opponents said that schools and teachers already have opportunities to innovate without suspending rules.

At Concord’s Rundlett Middle School, the partnership with the YMCA is still in development; the state funds allowed the district to better strategize and create a roadmap, Desmond said.

By creating an alternative schedule and new curriculum for students that highlights interpersonal skills – and potentially a dedicated space to host it – the district could help cultivate lifelong skills without interfering with academic instruction, Desmond says.

“The behavioral health challenges that middle schools across the country are feeling – we can kind of mitigate that a little bit,” she said.

A “statement of interest” document sent to the Department of Education by the school district billed the proposal as an opportunity “to redefine and redesign what a 21st-century middle school education can be.”

Colebrook Academy also used funds under the Innovation School Fellowship program last year, putting them toward the development of a career technical education center at its high school.

But those fellowship funds are not directly related to the new innovation plan process passed by the State Board of Education last month. And Desmond said that even with the new rules, the district does not anticipate needing to submit an innovation school plan to the State Board of Education.

“I think we can get it all done without the waiver,” Desmond said. “We want the program to have the integrity of what public education has. We acknowledge that the rules are in place for a reason.”

Still, Desmond said the new law could give school districts “the possibility to think a little bit differently about traditional public education.”

For now, it is unclear how New Hampshire school districts might adopt innovation plans in the future. “We didn’t get any applications, I’ll put it that way,” Cline said. “Whether there are districts that are seriously considering it, I’m not sure.”

School Board Association Executive Director Barrett Christina said that the School Board Association hasn’t received inquiries from members about it yet. “It certainly offers an opportunity that we haven’t seen in New Hampshire before to try and do some different things,” Christina said of the law.

But he said that for many districts, the reticence might come down to funding.

“I think a lot of this is going to come down to the resources that a district has, whether that’s money or whether that’s personnel,” he said.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Hampshire Bulletin maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Dana Wormald for questions: info@newhampshirebulletin.com. Follow New Hampshire Bulletin on and .

New Hampshire public schools opened this school year with 1,845 fewer kids than they did last year – a 1.1% drop. But when it comes to the state’s enrollment trends, the change was hardly surprising.

For 20 years, attendance in New Hampshire schools has steadily declined, with no signs of a turning point. The state had the largest number of children in public school in its history in 2002: 207,684. But 2002 was the last year of growth. In 2022, the number of kids had fallen to 161,755, a 22% drop over two decades, this month.

And the proportion of children in New Hampshire has plummeted compared to other states. The state of children under 18 of any state between 2010 and 2020, according to an analysis by the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute, at a drop of 10.6%.

The enrollment decline has diminished local school budgets and added to the state’s workforce shortages. The state is facing a , from certified licensed nursing assistants to long term care providers; that New Hampshire is likely to have around 24,400 openings in health care workers in the next decade. and businesses have had difficulty finding employees, and the drop in school populations comes despite the state growing in overall population since 2002, from 1.26 million in 2002 to 1.39 million in 2022.

“It is important for school leaders to understand how declining enrollment numbers may be impacting their districts and how to plan accordingly for the future,” said Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut in a Nov. 15 press release accompanying the new numbers.

An easy turnaround is likely to be elusive; demographers and analysts say the dip is a result of long-term trends, many of them out of the state’s control.

Here are some of the reasons behind the decline.

New Hampshire’s birth rate is not keeping up with classroom sizes

At the heart of the problem is a simple math equation: There are not as many children being born in the state as there were even 10 years ago.

“What we’re seeing in New Hampshire is the number of women of childbearing age is about the same, and yet the number of births occurring has diminished,” said Ken Johnson, a professor of sociology and the senior demographer at the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey School of Public Policy. “So in other words, the birth rate – the number of births per woman – has diminished.”

That low birth rate is part of a national generational trend. When the state’s school populations climbed in the 1990s, many of the students were the children of baby boomers – the generation born between 1946 and 1964. That generation was famously large in number, and the children born from boomers filled classrooms through the 1980s and 1990s.

But subsequent generations, such as “Gen X,” born between 1965 and 1980, have not had as many children, and school age populations in the 2000s and 2010s have decreased.

The millennial generation, who began entering their twenties in 2001, have proven to be more disinterested in children than earlier generations, a trend that has caused New Hampshire and many other states’ birth rates to drop.

Demographers say the decrease in child births is a result of a number of factors, from societal shifts around marriage and children to economic anxieties caused by high childcare costs and accelerated by the Great Recession. The U.S. birthrate dropped after that recession and never recovered, Johnson noted.

But with most Millenials now in their thirties, demographers say it remains to be seen how consequential the trend will be. People at childbearing age today could be simply putting off having children until later in life, suggesting that birth rates could recover after a delay. Or they could be disinterested in children entirely, suggesting the birth rate dip would be felt more long term.

The pandemic baby bump was likely just a blip

In 2021, New Hampshire received some positive news: The state had a surge in births in the first half of the year. A study from Pew Trusts found that the state’s births increased 7% from 2019, making New Hampshire’s increase the fastest in the country.

State officials – from Gov. Chris Sununu to Director of the Division of Public Health Services Patricia Tilley – applauded the increase.

“We’ve certainly seen the numbers that all births in New Hampshire have gone up in 2020 and 2021,” Tilley said in an interview.

But Johnson warned that the increase appears to be short-lived. A number of states saw their birth rates decline in 2020, as the outbreak of COVID-19 and the lack of vaccines and reliable access to hospitals prompted many people to hold off pregnancy, Johnson said. In 2021, births increased for many states in the country, including New Hampshire – the result of an effective backlog.

But in 2022, the state’s birth rate appears to be returning to pre-pandemic levels, Johnson said, citing data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Migration into the state has not made up the difference

For years, New Hampshire has had one dynamic that has helped its low birthrate: The state tends to attract people in their thirties and forties.

Between 2010 and 2020, seven of New Hampshire’s 10 counties saw their populations grow, according to a review of Census data by Johnson. The growth was a result of migration into those counties, Johnson’s research found.

In all, 89% of the state’s population gain over the decade between the 2010 Census and the 2020 Census was a result of migration, Johnson said. Data show that many of those people were in their thirties and forties, and many of them had children, Johnson said.

That migration has helped displace what demographers call “natural decreases” in population – trends where the deaths in an area outpace births. And it’s been the story for decades; two-thirds of people in New Hampshire over the age of 25 were not born in New Hampshire.

But recently, that migration hasn’t helped displace the drop-off in births.

“New Hampshire traditionally had significantly more births than deaths,” Johnson wrote in a report in 2021. “But that surplus has dwindled recently due to the growing number of seniors in the state, and because of drug-related deaths to young adults.”

The pandemic provided a short term boost to New Hampshire’s migration. New Hampshire had a net migration gain of 16,000 between 2020 to 2021 – a major jump for the state that was, in part, caused by people fleeing cities amid COVID-19. But it remains to be seen whether that migration is a long-term trend, Johnson said.

And in the end, migration can only do so much, he said.

“If that kind of migration were to continue, then the number of kids starting school or in school might go up somewhat,” he said. “But it’s never going to be as much as the number of births. We’re talking about maybe a couple extra thousand (from migration) compared to the birth of 12,000.”

Housing is a key barrier to a turnaround

If new arrivals to New Hampshire have helped grow the state’s school-aged population in the past, increasing those arrivals could be crucial to changing the school enrollment picture today.

That’s a goal that many in the state, from “Stay Work Play New Hampshire” to Sununu, have embraced. “We’ve long known New Hampshire is the best state in the country to live, work, and raise a family,” Sununu said in June, reacting to the Pew Study showing the jump in births in 2021.

But any plan to do so is going to face a major, familiar hurdle, notes Phil Sletten, research director at the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute: New Hampshire’s housing crisis. With housing available scant and prices high, the door into New Hampshire is less open for younger generations than it has been, Sletten said.

Less housing causes two problems, Sletten noted. “There’s more friction there for people to be able to move into the state and take those job opportunities that they see here,” he said.

“And there’s also been less opportunity for kids who are being educated in New Hampshire schools and graduating to either stay here versus find housing and a job somewhere else, or be able to move back here after spending some time away from New Hampshire,” he added.

The state is spending $100 million to try to boost housing construction by incentivizing towns and developers to work together, as part of the InvestNH program; lawmakers and executive councilors in federal funding to create 1,472 rental units in the coming years.

Increasing the state’s housing stock  and restoring a healthy housing market will not on its own reverse the bigger demographic trends holding back school growth, Sletten said. But if the market doesn’t improve, the state’s population loss has little chance to change either, he added.

“The housing constraint means that the in-migration – certainly the levels that we saw in the second half of the 20th century in New Hampshire – becomes more difficult,” Sletten said.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Hampshire Bulletin maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Dana Wormald for questions: info@newhampshirebulletin.com. Follow New Hampshire Bulletin on and .

A group of New Hampshire taxpayers have chosen a new target in their quest to sue the state over its school funding system: the statewide education property tax.

In an Oct. 5 filing in Grafton Superior Court, the taxpayers asked the court to grant an injunction against the tax to stop it from being implemented next year, arguing that it is not applied fairly between property-rich and property-poor towns and is unconstitutional.

The motion is the latest move in to dismantle the state’s school funding model. In June, the same group of plaintiffs sued the state over broader objections to the school funding system, arguing it unconstitutionally creates different tax burdens depending on a property owner’s hometown.

“In 1997, the New Hampshire Supreme Court rejected the state education taxing scheme…” the lawsuit states, referring to the “Claremont II” decision in which the court required the state to create a more equal school funding model.

“…Now, the State is primed to once again impose a tax using the same mechanisms previously held unconstitutional that will result in some taxpayers paying up to seven times as much for education funding as their wealthier counterparts,” the lawsuit continues.

The statewide education property tax, known as SWEPT, on top of their local property taxes. Across the state, those taxes must total $363 million every year. That money is never sent to the state, but rather retained locally and passed to local school districts. Each fiscal year, the Department of Revenue Administration determines a standard tax rate to apply to all New Hampshire property owners by calculating what the total property valuations are for the state and how much is necessary to get to $363 million. That number typically hovers between $1 and $2 per $1,000 in property value, or $300 to $600 per year for a $300,000 house.

Advocates of SWEPT say it helps to standardize education property taxes across towns and addresses the Supreme Court’s Claremont II decision.

But critics say that in practice, the tax what taxpayers in different towns pay toward education.

In Wednesday’s filing, attorneys Natalie LaFlamme, Andru Volinsky, and John Tobin say that the new SWEPT system does not meet the directive made by the Supreme Court in the Claremont II decision. In that ruling, the court said that New Hampshire’s constitution requires the state to fund its public schools through taxes that are “administered in a manner that is equal in valuation and uniform in rate throughout the State.” SWEPT does not create a tax system that is “equal in valuation,” plaintiffs argue.

Because the SWEPT rate is flat, towns with higher property values collect more money from it than those with lower values. When originally established in 1999, the tax sought to balance that reality by requiring that any excess taxes collected under SWEPT by wealthier towns be sent back to the state to be redistributed through the Education Trust Fund. That meant that any town whose SWEPT revenues more than covered their public schools had to pass the extra funding to the state, which would effectively distribute it to towns whose SWEPT revenues did not cover their school expenses.

But in 2011, amid arguments that the richer municipalities had become “donor towns,” the Legislature removed the redistribution requirement, allowing wealthier municipalities to keep excess revenue they raise from the SWEPT and use it to offset other taxes in their town.

Now, plaintiffs argue that rather than bringing equality to school funding, SWEPT has allowed some wealthier towns to offset their local taxes so much that they effectively become “negative taxes” – a reduction of their other taxes. Poorer towns, meanwhile, still come up short and are required to raise their local tax rates to keep their schools open.

And critics say a move by the Legislature in 2021 to temporarily cut the required statewide collection number from $363 million to $263 million – intended to serve as a statewide property tax cut – was undermined by a simultaneous decision to cut targeted aid for property-poor towns. That move forced some of those towns to make up more of the difference and raise taxes overall, according to an analysis from Reaching Higher NH, a left-leaning education think tank.

The plaintiffs’ motion requests that the state issue a preliminary injunction to prevent the Department of Revenue Administration from implementing SWEPT next year. That rate has been announced at $1.44 per $1,000 in property value for next year; the department is advising towns of that rate and approving their tax rate between October and December of this year.

The plaintiffs are also asking the court to bar the DRA from approving any SWEPT tax warrant that allows for a negative tax rate.

Wednesday’s motion is the latest move in an ongoing legal effort to dismantle the state’s school funding model.

The latest motion is separate from that broader lawsuit and specifically focuses on SWEPT. The broader lawsuit will have a court hearing in August, the Grafton Superior Court .

This year’s taxpayer lawsuit from LaFlamme, Volinsky, and Tobin is also separate from the 2019 lawsuit from Contoocook Valley School District and other school districts that argues the funding model creates an unconstitutional financial burden on school districts themselves.

The taxpayers will have to clear a high legal bar. In order to succeed with this week’s motion, and temporarily block the implementation of SWEPT, plaintiffs’ lawyers will have to prove to the court that their preliminary motion will likely succeed on its merits if brought to a full trial; that the current SWEPT tax system will cause the taxpayers immediate, irreparable harm if it isn’t blocked in time; and that blocking the SWEPT would not disproportionately burden the state. If the court finds that any one of those conditions is not met, the attempt will fail.

LaFlamme argues that the first condition – a likelihood of success on the merits – has been met because the state has already admitted that negative SWEPT taxes exist and that wealthier towns are able to offset their other taxes using their SWEPT revenues. The state admitted this in a filing last month in which the Department of Justice did not contest the plaintiffs’ assertions about the negative SWEPT taxes, LaFlamme noted.

In fact, LaFlamme said, it was the state’s decision to admit that fact that led the plaintiffs to file the latest motion this week.

“The factual basis for this is when the state answered our complaint a few weeks ago, they specifically stated: ‘Yes, this excess is still happening. Yes, we admit or agree that some towns have a negative local tax rate,’” she said. “This particular injunction (motion) was really set off by the state’s answer to our complaint.”

LaFlamme and other attorneys are hoping to combine that admission with previous Supreme Court opinions in the late 1990s that found that a similar proposed state property tax allowing  towns to retain their excess revenues did not meet the Claremont II requirements and were unconstitutional. Those proposals in the 1990s were defeated in favor of SWEPT. But the legislative change in 2011 to eliminate donor towns effectively created a system that mirrored the 1990s proposals that were struck down, plaintiffs argue.

This is the first serious legal challenge to the SWEPT system since 2011

“Despite this express language in Claremont II, the State has repeatedly sought new mechanisms to alleviate the tax burden on wealthier towns,” the motion states. “And, each time, the courts have held these mechanisms unconstitutional.”

They hope the court will make the same finding now.

The timeline for the preliminary injunction proceedings is likely to be brisk. The state typically has 30 days to respond to a request for a preliminary injunction with its own motion. A spokesman for the Department of Justice, Michael Garrity declined to comment on the new SWEPT lawsuit but confirmed it would respond.

“We intend to respond to the motion in the normal course and have agreed with plaintiffs’ counsel that any response will be due within 30 days,” Garrity said Thursday.

While the state has not yet responded to Wednesday’s motion, the Department of Justice did provide a glimpse last month into their defense strategy against the broader taxpayer lawsuit. In its response to the plaintiffs’ lawsuit, the state outlined 10 defenses it might choose to deploy at trial, including the argument that the state cannot be sued because of the doctrine of sovereign immunity, that the courts are barred from requiring specific legislative fixes because of the separation of powers, and that schools spend “significant funds” on programs and services that are not constitutionally necessary and should not be funded by the state.

That response is just a preview; a full counter motion from the state with detailed defenses and case citations will come closer to the trial date in August.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Hampshire Bulletin maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Dana Wormald for questions: info@newhampshirebulletin.com. Follow New Hampshire Bulletin on and .