The Claremont Bypass, Part Two

Gov. Ayotte already signed the theory into law. The operational bill — the one that names school nurses and superintendents as things the state doesn’t have to pay for — is being buried on a Senate consent calendar Thursday. The quiet part is the whole strategy.

“It’s up to districts to go beyond that. There is no need for the state to pay for superintendents, administration and all that.” That is Rep. Rick Ladd, R-Haverhill, chair of the House Education Funding Committee, explaining his House Bill 1121 to the Senate Education Finance Committee on April 1. The bill lists the “resource elements” the state of New Hampshire should be constitutionally obligated to fund in public education. The list is short. It does not include school nurses. It does not include superintendents. It does not include paraprofessionals or teacher aides. The state, Ladd argued, should not have to pay for those things. Local property taxpayers should.

The Senate Education Finance Committee heard him out, asked skeptical questions, and then on April 14 voted 4-0 to send the bill to interim study. In year two of the biennium, “interim study” means the bill is dead. HB 1121 is on the Senate consent calendar this Thursday, April 23, where it will be formally buried without a roll call — unless a senator pulls it off consent, which nobody currently plans to do.

If the story ended there, this would be a footnote. A Republican bill to redefine adequate education gets watered down, then quietly killed by a Republican-controlled Senate committee. Democrats celebrate a win. Move on.

Except the story doesn’t end there. It ends on March 27, when Gov. Kelly Ayotte signed HB 1815 — Chapter 19, effective May 26 — into law.

The Part That’s Already Law

HB 1815, authored by Rep. Bob Lynn, a Windham Republican and former state Supreme Court chief justice, is the constitutional theory. The bill declares that the obligation to provide a constitutionally adequate public education is a “shared responsibility” between the state and local school districts. It removes language tying the state’s funding obligation to the minimum standards for public school approval. And it asserts, in statute, that “how the state and its local governmental entities choose to raise, allocate, and spend financial resources to implement this integrated public education system is a political policy matter reserved to legislative and executive judgment and control.”

Translation: the Supreme Court does not get to tell us what to pay for. The legislature does. That is a direct, deliberate confrontation with three decades of Claremont precedent, which held that the state has a constitutional duty to define an adequate education, fund it, and raise the money through taxation that is proportional and reasonable across districts rather than wildly varying from town to town.

HB 1815 passed the House 187-152 on a nearly party-line vote. It passed the Senate. Ayotte signed it on March 27 — Chapter 19 — and called it a step toward restoring legislative control of education funding. The Department of Justice, which is representing the state against the ConVal and Rand plaintiffs at the New Hampshire Supreme Court, endorsed the bill and had Assistant Attorney General Sam Garland testify in its favor. Garland told the House Education Funding Committee that HB 1815 provides “needed clarity.”

HB 1121 was supposed to be the operational manual for that clarity. If HB 1815 says the state’s obligation is narrower than the courts have ruled, HB 1121 is where you itemize what’s inside that narrower obligation and what is outside it. Ladd’s list — teachers, principals, administrative assistants, guidance counselors, library/media specialists, technology coordinators, custodians, instructional supplies, technology, professional development, facilities operations and maintenance, transportation — is what gets paid for. Everything else is a local problem.

The Bill Nobody Wanted to Vote On

The House passed HB 1121 on March 11 by a 187-152 vote. Same margin, same breakdown as HB 1815. House Republicans were willing to put their names on both the theory and the mechanics.

Senate Republicans were not.

The Senate Education Finance Committee took testimony on HB 1121 on April 1. Rep. Ladd was the only witness. He explained the 2008 education funding oversight committee framework his bill draws on, argued that school nurses provide health care rather than curriculum, and suggested that Medicaid — not the state education obligation — should cover children with complex medical needs.

Sen. Cindy Rosenwald, D-Nashua, asked what happens to the child whose medical condition is so severe that she cannot attend school without a nurse. Ladd acknowledged the question and pivoted to Medicaid. Sen. Debra Altschiller, D-Stratham, pointed out that the bill removes the statutory requirement for a periodic review of what elements comprise an adequate education — a review originally designed to let the definition evolve as schools change. Ladd conceded that society changes and said the legislature could return to the question sooner if it chose to.

At the House Education Funding Committee meeting in March, when the committee cut nurses out of the bill’s list of essential resources, Rep. Tracy Bricchi, D-Concord, put the argument in one sentence. The state is constitutionally responsible for providing an adequate education, Bricchi said, and the bill is another way the state is shirking that responsibility.

On April 14, the Senate Education Finance Committee voted 4-0 to recommend interim study. The bill is co-sponsored by a senator — Sen. Ruth Ward, R-Dist. 8 — and it was still unanimously sent to the legislative graveyard. That is not a drafting problem. That is a political problem. Senate Republicans do not want to cast a recorded floor vote on a bill whose operational effect is to strip school nurses from the list of things the state has to pay for. Not in a state where the affordability conversation already dominates every campaign cycle. Not in a year when three Republican senators face independent-leaning electorates in 2026.

What the Endgame Actually Looks Like

The working assumption in Concord is that HB 1121 dying in the Senate is a setback for conservative education funding reform. That reading misses the architecture. HB 1121 was never the load-bearing wall. HB 1815 was. And there is a third leg to this stool that has gotten almost no coverage outside the courts bar.

In February, the New Hampshire Department of Justice filed the state’s appeal of the Rand decision at the New Hampshire Supreme Court. Rand was the 2024 Rockingham Superior Court ruling that found the state was failing to meet its constitutional obligation to fund public schools and special education, and was improperly shifting those costs onto local property taxpayers. The state’s appeal asks the Supreme Court to overturn the original Claremont decisions from the 1990s outright — the 30-year-old precedents that established the state’s constitutional duty to define, fund, and guarantee an adequate education.

That is the real play. HB 1815 tells the courts, by statute, that the state’s obligation is a “shared responsibility” and a matter of legislative discretion. The attorney general’s office tells the courts, in litigation, that the original Claremont rulings were decided incorrectly and should be tossed. If either effort succeeds, the operational work HB 1121 was supposed to do — line-iteming what is and is not covered by state adequacy funding — becomes unnecessary. The legislature will have the unreviewable authority to fund whatever it wants, whenever it wants, at whatever level it wants. And if the state doesn’t want to pay for a school nurse, no court will be able to say it must.

That is why HB 1121 can be killed without consequence. The constitutional end run is happening at 1 Charles Doe Drive, not in Senate committee rooms.

The Concord Preview

If you want to see what a New Hampshire where the state’s obligation is a “shared responsibility” looks like in practice, drive to Concord.

Last month, as detailed in Granite State Report’s April 12 reporting, the Concord Board of Education approved a 12.2 percent property tax increase for the coming year — more than double the board’s own stated ceiling — while cutting nearly 40 staff positions, including teachers. Concord High School alone lost the equivalent of 14 full-time staff. The reason wasn’t a budget failure. It was the state funding formula working exactly as designed. Because Concord’s equalized property values rose — driven by the same housing price surge that has made the city unaffordable for the teachers it employs — the state’s adequacy calculation treated Concord as less “needy.” The district received roughly $2.8 million less in state education funding this year. The city got richer on paper. The schools got poorer in fact.

This is before HB 1815 takes effect. It is before any court ruling shifts. It is simply what happens under the existing formula, which the Claremont decisions have spent three decades trying to constrain. Strip the constitutional floor, and the Concord pattern generalizes. Every district with rising property values absorbs the cost of every service the state decides it is no longer obligated to fund. Every teacher laid off to balance a district budget is a teacher laid off because the state decided its share of adequacy stopped at the gymnasium door.

Ladd’s answer to this, in committee testimony, was that districts choosing to fund teacher-to-student ratios of 12:1 when the state recommends 30:1 are making a local decision and should bear the local cost. That is a defensible policy argument about discretionary spending. It is not a defensible policy argument about school nurses caring for children with cystic fibrosis, or superintendents who oversee federally mandated special education programs, or paraprofessionals assigned to students with individualized education plans that the state itself approved. The line between what a district chooses and what a district must do is not a line HB 1121 respects. The bill draws the line at the state’s balance sheet.

The Sponsor

Rick Ladd is not a marginal figure. He is the chair of the House Education Funding Committee. He is the prime sponsor of HB 1121 and a co-architect of the House Republican response to the ConVal and Rand rulings. His co-sponsors on HB 1121 are Rep. Peeples of Hills. 14, Rep. Dan McGuire of Merr. 14 — a name familiar to GSR readers from prior coverage of the Office of the Child Advocate — and Sen. Ruth Ward of District 8.

Ladd’s reasoning is internally consistent. He argues that the state’s adequacy obligation is for academic content, not operational support. He points to the 2008 funding oversight committee as precedent for that distinction. He believes local districts can and should cut administrative costs to control property taxes. None of that is incoherent. All of it assumes that the state’s role is to fund a thin core and that everything else — including the services that let children with medical conditions attend school — is someone else’s problem.

John Tobin, one of the attorneys for the original Claremont plaintiffs, testified against HB 1815 in February. He said the bill, in a large way, pretends the constitution doesn’t exist. Tobin’s co-counsel in the Claremont cases, former Democratic Executive Councilor Andru Volinsky — now representing the Rand plaintiffs — put it more directly: Bob Lynn, the author of HB 1815, should know better than to think you can change the constitution by statute. The same argument applies to Ladd’s HB 1121. Defining what the state has to pay for is a policy choice. Defining it in ways that contradict three decades of Supreme Court rulings is a different kind of act.

What This Means

Strip the political theater out of Thursday’s Senate consent calendar vote and here is what remains.

One. The theory is law. HB 1815 is signed, takes effect May 26, and will be cited in every future litigation over education funding in New Hampshire. The statutory language that education is a “shared responsibility” will sit in the record as evidence of legislative intent, regardless of whether the courts ultimately agree with it.

Two. The mechanics are in reserve. HB 1121 goes to interim study, which in year two of the biennium means it dies. But the architecture survives. Ladd can refile in 2027. The 2008 framework he cites isn’t going anywhere. If the Supreme Court hands the state a favorable ruling on Rand, the political ceiling on a bill like HB 1121 rises overnight.

Three. The court case is the actual event. The attorney general’s office has asked the New Hampshire Supreme Court to overturn Claremont itself. That is not a technical procedural move. That is the policy endgame HB 1815 and HB 1121 were always designed to support. A favorable ruling eliminates the constitutional floor under school funding. Every service the state does not want to fund becomes a local property tax bill or a program cut. Concord is the preview. The rest of the state is the sequel.

Four. The Senate Republicans who voted HB 1121 into interim study didn’t protect school nurses. They protected themselves from a roll call. The difference matters. One is a policy stance. The other is a political calculation about 2026 primary exposure and general election vulnerability. Senators Ward, Carson, Innis, and the rest of the Republican caucus can credibly tell constituents they didn’t vote to exclude nurses — a bill that never reached the floor can’t be voted against. The protection isn’t for the nurse. It’s for the senator.

The Generational Ledger

There is a reason the affordability conversation and the education funding conversation keep colliding in New Hampshire, and it is the same reason both get harder every year. The costs don’t disappear when the state stops paying them. They migrate. The state writes a smaller check to Concord schools. Concord raises property taxes. The property tax bill lands on the homeowner who bought in 2019, whose house is now “worth” 78 percent more on paper but who is paying off the mortgage with wages that have grown 28 percent. The renter pays through the pass-through. The young family trying to buy in calculates the total cost of living in a state where the median home is $530,000 and the schools are cutting teachers, and makes a different calculation.

This is what Generational Malpractice describes as the compounding transfer — costs moving downward across time, from asset holders to wage earners, from the generation that built the system to the generation that inherits it with the floor missing. Education funding is one of the cleanest examples in the ledger. Every dollar the state decides not to spend on adequacy is a dollar that reappears on someone else’s bill: a property tax line, a tuition payment, a lost program, a teacher who leaves for Maine. The invoice doesn’t go away. It just changes who has to pay it.

Rep. Bricchi said the quiet part in committee: this is another way the state is shirking its responsibility. She is right. But shirking doesn’t describe the full architecture. Shirking is one bill. This is three tracks — one signed, one shelved, one pending — each designed to reinforce the others, each moving at a different speed so that the public debate never focuses on all three at once.

HB 1121 is supposed to look like a win for its opponents on Thursday. It isn’t. It’s a scheduling decision. The bill that matters was signed three weeks ago. The ruling that matters is pending. And the generation paying for all of it is still filling the tank at $4 a gallon, reading the 12.2 percent tax hike notice from the school district, and doing the math on whether to stay.

Dexter Dow is the editor of Granite State Report and the author of Generational Malpractice, which examines how policy failures compound across generations. Read GSR’s related coverage in Half a Million and Climbing and The $4-a-Gallon Senate Race.