MANCHESTER, N.H. – A four-part amendment to the city’s charter impacting the Manchester School District will not go before the voters this fall following a vote by the Board of Mayor and Aldermen (BMA) on Tuesday night.
In a 5-7 decision, the motion to add the amendment failed, following news last week that concerns by the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office wouldn’t stop the amendment proposal from going to the ballot.
The proposed amendment would have changed the name of the Manchester Board of School Committee (BOSC) into the Manchester School Board that would be led by one of its members rather than Manchester’s mayor. Additionally, the amendment would have given the proposed board the authority to issue bonds independently with a two-thirds majority, authorize the board to appoint an independent auditor, clerk and treasurer and given the board complete control over its budget outside of revenue and expenditure cap limitations in the city charter.
Currently, the BMA approves bond requests from the BOSC and also approves a final school district budget, although the BOSC decides where the funding amount approved by the BMA will be allocated.
Opponents of the proposal such as Ward 12 Alderman Keith Hirschmann noted the BMA’s traditional role as a budgetary watchdog over the BOSC. Ward 4 Alderman Jim Roy noting that last year’s School Charter Commission could not come to a consensus on the matter of school district financial autonomy, a concern echoed by Ward 9 Alderman Barbara Shaw.
While Shaw believed that the BOSC had expertise on the operation of the city’s schools, the circumvention of the charter commission’s recommendations and fiscal anxiety among taxpayers in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic made putting the question to the ballot inappropriate.
“Why would we make a decision for (the Charter Commission) and then put this on the ballot?” she said. “We approve the money (for the school district) and they take over from there, what’s wrong with that?”
Ward 6 Alderman Sebastian Sharonov said he appreciates ballot measures normally, but said that they must be concise and consist of a specific topic rather than multiple topics combined into one question. In this situation, he felt that voters would be confused and the vote would not be fair unless the four parts of the amendment could be separated.
Ward 3 Alderman Pat Long also asked if different parts of the amendment could be separated into separate questions, but the city has been given legal advice that dividing the wording presented could make the amendment legally unenforceable.
Long urged his colleagues to allow the matter to go to the voters, citing the requests of his constituents, but other Aldermen such as Ed Sapienza from Ward 8 said their constituents asked him not to support moving the measure to the ballot.
In regard to Hirschmann’s concerns over fiscal oversight, Long noted that voters could remove any school board members acting without fiscal responsibility every two years at election time.
At-Large Alderman Dan O’Neil also supported moving the measure to the ballot, stating that it would help retain and attract new families to Manchester using schools as a key factor in their decision on where to live.
O’Neil and Long were joined in support by Bill Barry (Ward 10), Kevin Cavanaugh (Ward 1) and Will Stewart (Ward 2). Opposing the motion to put the measure on the ballot were Roy, Sharonov, Shaw, Hirschmann, Sapienza, Normand Gamache (Ward 11) and Joseph Kelly Levasseur (At-Large). Tony Sapienza (Ward 5) and Ross Terrio (Ward 7) were absent.
