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Commission to Study School Funding

In 2019, the New Hampshire legislature established an independent Commission to Study School Funding and charged it with reviewing the state’s existing school funding formula and making recommendations to ensure a uniform and equitable design for financing the cost of an adequate education. The Commission met throughout 2020, holding numerous deliberative sessions and receiving hours of input from school finance officials, tax administrators, academic experts, and members of the public. It is issued its final report in December of that year.

The commission’s findings quantified what Granite Staters have long known to be true: the current method of school funding is fundamentally inequitable and places a much heavier burden on the poorest towns in our state. The commission set forth a series of recommendations, which included a new funding formula that would deliver more state aid to districts with greater needs (areas of high poverty, more English language learners, and more students with disabilities) to ensure all New Hampshire students receive a comparable, quality public education.

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Statement of Principles

Along with several partner organizations, NHSFFP released the following statement of principles to guide the work of the Commission to Study School Funding.

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We believe the legislative recommendations the Commission is required to produce should:

Be comprehensive in scope

The Commissions recommendations should address not only the cost of an adequate education in New Hampshire, but also the constitutionally-permitted means by which those costs will be met over time.
Establish the level of resources necessary for each district to provide a constitutionally adequate education

In determining those resources, the Commission should:
- Include all elements essential to a robust and modern education – from teachers, counselors, and administrators; to equipment and technology; and to transportation and facilities,
- Recognize the variety of circumstances New Hampshire’s children face and the diversity of obstacles they must overcome and enable school districts to provide an appropriate range and intensity of services and instruction in response, and
- Employ the most thorough and current research and the most accurate and reliable data available.
Require the State to bear full costs

The Commission should require the state to fully fund an adequate education for every child, as mandated by the New Hampshire Constitution.
Create a method of funding the costs of an adequate education that is:
- imposed and collected by the State of New Hampshire,
- sufficient to meet the state’s responsibility,
- uniform in rate among all New Hampshire taxpayers, and
- permanent, sustainable, and stable over time.
Establish procedures for
- annually updating the cost of an adequate education to account for wage and salary growth, price increases, and other factors,
- periodically reviewing and, if necessary, modifying the definition of an adequate education so that it remains consistent with current educational practice and demographic trends, and
- regularly assessing and, if necessary, modifying the method of funding the costs of an adequate education to ensure that it remains uniform and proportional and that it yields a sufficient level of revenue on an annual basis.