One year ago, Croydon voters cut the town’s school budget in half.
But at the most recent annual meeting, Ian Underwood, who spearheaded that cut, urged a packed room of voters to increase the school budget by $700,000 to improve student reading scores.
“If we need something in addition, then we should be raising and appropriate whatever amount is required to get the job done,” he said, reading from a self-published pamphlet titled “Let’s FULLY Fund Education in Croydon.”
“This amount will not do it,” he continued. “There is some amount that will, and it’s your responsibility to get the job done.”
The proposal, which would have added 10 reading specialists to the district, failed dramatically. But it was the latest chapter in a school budget saga that has reshaped how Croydon residents engage with their local government, their school and each other.
Croydon’s education funding battle began last March, after a group of residents at a sparsely attended annual meeting voted to slash the school budget in half. Community members successfully rallied for a revote to reverse the cut. Their efforts drew attention from national media, state lawmakers, and nearby communities.
Since then, more residents have gotten involved in local democracy — attending meetings, voting, and in some cases running for office themselves. And they have started to change the face of Croydon’s government: At least five of those who campaigned to reverse the budget cuts now hold elected office, at the state or local level. But the divisions in town over public school funding continue to simmer.
“I definitely didn’t see myself running for any town offices or for being as involved as I am,” said Ed Spiker, one of the parents who campaigned to reinstate the school budget, who was recently elected to selectboard.
“For better or for worse, I think it opened up my eyes and got me more involved in local town government.”
About 120 voters attended Croydon’s school district meeting this year — three times the number last year. And they overwhelmingly approved the school’s $1.7 million school budget, which covers the Croydon Village School and tuition for older students to attend nearby middle and high schools.
Voters also approved a petition warrant article meant to encourage more transparency and involvement in local government decisions moving forward. Since last year’s school funding fight, Spiker — the new selectboard member — has recorded nearly every official town meeting and uploaded those videos to YouTube. The newly approved measure calls for Croydon to buy technology to stream official town meetings online, rather than rely on Spiker’s videos.
While the annual meetings and recent elections drew larger than average crowds, attendance at weekly and monthly town meetings has dwindled since its peak last spring. Some say this is because Croydon is no longer facing an acute funding crisis.
“A lot of people say what happened last March was pretty terrible and stressful and hard to deal with,” said Amanda Leslie, one of the organizers of the group We Stand Up for Croydon, which fought the budget cut. “In the long term, it has done something good in terms of engagement and involvement.”
‘It had nothing to do with the Free State Project’
The fight over Croydon’s school funding added fuel to ongoing debates about the role of the Free State Project, a libertarian movement to bring “freedom-loving people” to New Hampshire, with a goal of reducing the size and influence of government institutions, including public schools.
Two of the most prominent supporters of the proposed funding cuts, Ian and Jody Underwood, are well-known members of the Free State Project. And some Croydon residents viewed the Underwoods’ ties to the movement with anger and skepticism.
But Ian Underwood, who has likened Croydon’s school budget to a “ransom” on taxpayers, said his neighbors’ focus on the Free State Project last year detracted from deeper debates on public education and taxes.
“It had nothing to do with the Free State project. It was me as a person,” he said. “I live in this town. They're taking my money and they're wasting it.”
Had last year’s budget cuts not been reversed, the school board was considering replacing the elementary school with a private learning pod and requiring some parents to cover part of the tuition for their kids to attend local middle and high schools.
Jody Underwood, who was serving as the chair of the Croydon school board during the school funding fight, was among those who saw the budget cuts as an opportunity for the town to radically reimagine public education: what it was supposed to accomplish, how to get there, and how much of it taxpayers should cover.
“We didn’t get to have that discussion because everybody just threw dirt at us and said what awful people we were and ‘Why should anyone listen to you?’” Jody Underwood said in an interview with NHPR after this year’s town meeting. “So the discussion that [Ian] wanted to have never happened.”
Jody Underwood recently lost her seat on Croydon’s school board to Angi Bealieu, a local parent who was a key organizer in the campaign to reverse the school funding cuts.
In her final school report, Jody Underwood warned of an “unsustainable status quo” in the district, pointing to future costs to upgrade facilities and the recent increase in tuition at Newport High School, which charges Croydon about $19,000 per pupil.
She also noted that the lower-cost private schools that some Croydon students attend on the taxpayers’ dime may no longer be able to accept as many students, because more families from other towns are sending their kids to these schools with the help of New Hampshire’s new voucher program, Education Freedom Accounts.
“Our low-cost options could be going away,” she wrote.
As Croydon continues to figure out the path forward, Bealieu says she hopes to use her new platform on the school board to repair the relationship between local government and the community at large.
“I’m a little more untrusting of people because of what happened last year,” she said. “It really inspired me to run for school board to protect what we’ve built here. I really want to restore some trust between the board and the town.”
Disagreement over test scores, student achievement drive much of the debate
Among the ongoing debates still playing out in Croydon is the question of how to improve student performance, as test scores continue to show some local students lagging behind their peers.
The scores are difficult to parse, in part because older students attend an assortment of nearby private and public schools with widely varying academic scores.
Newport High School is one of the lowest-performing schools in the state. But Sunapee High School, which receives about a dozen Croydon students, has reading and math scores that far exceed the state average.
In his proposal to add more reading specialists to the school budget, Ian Underwood pointed to state education law requiring schools to ensure that students are performing “at the proficient level of above.” That argument resonated with a small portion of residents at the meeting, including Cathy Peschke.
“Is it more about social activities and babysitting or is it really about getting a good education for our students?” said Peschke, who also supported the proposed school funding cuts last year. “If half of our students aren’t reading, we should do something about that.”
Other voters dismissed the proposal as a gimmick.
“People are saying that the kids can’t read,” said Lynn Touchette, a Croydon resident and former teacher at Croydon Village School. “That has never been true.”
She pointed to the number of students who get on the honor roll and succeed once they reach middle and high school.
“I think they are focused on this one piece and trying to highlight our schools as failing because of this one piece of data,” Amanda Leslie told NHPR after the meeting. “But it’s only one little part of the picture.”
Based on last year’s test scores, the most recent data available, more than 50% of Croydon Village School third and fourth graders demonstrated reading and writing proficiency, slightly higher than the state average. About 40% reached proficiency in math, slightly lower than the state average. Internal assessments of student reading progression this year, though, shows the vast majority of students are struggling.
Nicole Lackie, the school’s principal, attributes this in part to a large kindergarten class with many students who didn’t attend preschool. She also points to delays observed widely in younger grades due to isolation and disruption during the pandemic.
“I want people to know that students leaving Croydon and going on to other schools are having successes,” Lackie told NHPR. “All of them may not be meeting every proficiency. But they’re succeeding for themselves.”
Earlier coverage
In Croydon, school budget cuts prompt a reckoning on the role of local government
Croydon cut its school budget in half. Inside the historic push to reverse that decision.
Croydon voters restore school budget in a landslide
This American Life: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Quorum
