Residents in some New Hampshire school districts voted for major reductions to their school budgets earlier this year. Timberlane School District is cutting over $6 million dollars and Merrimack Valley schools are cutting $2 million.
As the school year comes to an end, two students reflect on how those cuts could affect them when they return to school in the fall.
Abigail Robinson and Nicholas Gelinas are both high school juniors who served as the student representatives of their respective school boards. Gelinas sits on the Merrimack Valley School Board, and Robinson was on the Timberlane School Board.
They joined NHPR’s All Things Considered host Julia Furukawa to talk about the budget cuts facing their schools.
Transcript
Abigail, Timberlane is cutting $6.6 million from its budget. What changes are going to take place in the new school year as a result of that?
A lot of things are going to be [changed]. You see staffing positions being decreased. One of the things that jumped out to me was when I'm at the school board meetings and I kind of see a list of positions that are going to be cut, I'm able to, unfortunately, put a face to that name. It really hurts to be able to, as a student, put a face to a name and be like, “Wow, this person, their life's going to be changed because they're no longer going to have this [job].”
We’re going to see a big change in transportation. We have a lot of really great career and technical opportunities at other schools, but things like busing is going to be much more of a hassle.
I kind of worry about opportunities, like senior scholarships, honor societies and other kinds of organizations. So I'm worried about the opportunities for kids.
Nick, let's turn that to you. Merrimack Valley is cutting $2 million from its budget. What changes do you expect to see in your community?
A lot of changes, same as Timberlake, a lot of teacher positions. We have some teachers that have left, and we're just not going to refill those positions.
We're getting rid of B sports at the middle school, so that's a big deal. Now kids are going to have to look—of course, our community does have great athletic opportunities around [the] district—but being on a B team at the middle school is a lot of fun. I remember being on a B team when I was in middle school, and that's going to be an opportunity that's no longer.
We've lost all our French programs at the high school and the middle school. So that’s big.
Transportation—same as Timberlane. We've already had trouble getting drivers. I know for the remainder of the school year we have two buses that will no longer be running, so students have to find [another] way home. The transportation committee here at the school district has decided to look into maybe widening the walk zone to one-and-a-half miles around the school. So if you live within that one-and-a-half mile zone, you'll have to walk to school. And that brings up safety concerns. And they might need to hire crossing guards
But luckily the school board has made a big effort to try to make sure that our students still have the opportunities available to them. We recently signed into the Lakes Region High School Consortium agreement, which pretty much says that we can go to any of the schools within the Lakes Region that had signed into this consortium agreement, go there and take a class.
Nick, what have you been hearing from your classmates and your peers about these cuts? How are they feeling?
Right around that annual meeting, before they had the meetings that talked about what was going to cut from the budget, there was a lot of concern. Not only were students concerned about their own well-being and what it's going to look like here at the school next year, but they were concerned about the teachers well-being. We’ve become very close to most of our teachers because we see them pretty much every day from August all the way to June. So when we see teachers that don't know what next year is going to look like, and they're looking around for other jobs because they don't know if their job is going to be available or if they're going to get cut from this school, it's nerve wracking. Not only does it affect us, but it affects the teachers, it affects administration, it affects everyone. It affects the community. It's very hard to see what all the students and teachers have to go through when stuff like this happens.
And Abigail, what are your classmates and friends and peers saying?
I feel like initially, after the vote, [we were] kind of in a stage of, I want to say, not disbelief, but just taken aback. Because we never thought something like that would happen with the number that it did—with $6 million. I think a lot of people were questioning what our next step is. That was kind of the buzz around school; how are we going to make our voices heard if they weren't heard the first time? We did all of this speaking out initially and the vote still didn't go our way.
[Also] kind of like what Nicholas said about teachers, too. Not only are the students thinking about their well-being and [things like] French classes, because right now we have one [teacher] and she's retiring. So we're kind of questioning, are we going to be able to have French continually? I'm in a class with a 21-to-1 student-to-teacher ratio right now. Are we going to be able to do that? But I definitely think as much as students have been questioning what our next step is, we've also been thinking about the teachers.
Abigail, I think many of us, regardless of age, might not think of a school board meeting as the most, like, exciting, engaging thing of all time. And yet, both you and Nicholas spent a lot of time engaging in this process over the past year. What was it like to witness those conversations and be a part of it? And why were you motivated?
Nowadays, it's hard to kind of figure out what information is reliable, if what you're hearing is true. So I took that as a motivating factor to want to sit in the meetings, and [be like] okay, if I have a problem, I want to see how to make this right.
Coming in my first year being [a] school board representative, it's definitely a bigger kind of topic to come into something, for lack of better words, [as] prominent as the school budget cuts. I know it can be very nerve wracking when you're speaking out about something that big with a group of adults in a community that voted the way that didn't support you necessarily.
I think my first year taught me a lot, with interacting with adults and not being afraid to step out and voice out opinions. I thought that I highly regarded their word as much as they did mine in these certain things, whether it's about the budget cuts or if it's about renovating a bathroom. But definitely wanting to take my voice to the next level was the motivating factor for me. I want to relay the information to my fellow classmates and the students, that their voice is heard along with mine in those meetings.
Nick, I see you nodding along with a lot of what Abigail's saying.
Yeah, I agree. I'm a junior right now, and I started my freshman year. So I've been the school board representative for three years now. It's been a very eye-opening experience for me seeing civic engagement throughout the community, getting involved with that and really making sure that the student voice is heard. Whenever the board members might have a question about anything that they are voting on, they are always able to ask me a question about it. I do not have voting rights on the board, but if they ask me a question, what I say can kind of dictate what their answer is, so I'm always there for them in case they have a question on anything that might affect the student body.
We had a lot of students actually go to those public hearings and speak about what these budget cuts could have an effect on the student body.
And I always say whenever people ask me kind of what my favorite part about being the student rep is, my favorite part is kind of going along with them and learning about how these public meetings go, because that's also very important for me to learn for my future. It's very cool to see how these public meetings work.
