The Rundlett File
How New Hampshire quietly turned school buildings into municipal debt bombs — and why Concord’s $155 million vote was the predictable output of a statute no one in Concord ever voted on.
On October 23, 2025, the Concord School Board gaveled in what Patch called “another lame duck public hearing.” Three days later, after more than eight years of meetings, studies, site fights, ballot initiatives, and a citywide poll, the board voted 8–1 to demolish a middle school Concord taxpayers are still paying off from a 1996 renovation — and replace it with a new $155 million building whose total taxpayer cost, once interest and reserves are counted, the local press has put between $232 million and $285 million. The decision is done. The story that matters is not what Concord’s school board decided. It is the system that made the decision look like the only reasonable option on a spreadsheet that never quite included the alternatives.
What Concord Did, and What It Means
The facts of the vote are not in dispute, and they are on the public record because two local news operations did their jobs. The Concord Monitor has run a multi-part “Rethinking Rundlett” series documenting the nine-year timeline from the 2016 HMFH Architects engagement, through the December 2023 board vote to relocate the school to raw land at Broken Ground on the city’s east side, through the August 2024 opposition petition by Concord Concerned Citizens that placed two charter amendments on the November 2024 ballot, through the voters’ passage of those amendments, through the January 2025 board vote that reversed the Broken Ground decision and redirected the project back to the existing Rundlett site in the South End, and finally through the October 2025 approval. Patch has filed dozens of incremental updates covering every step of that sequence, from the 2022 announcement that Rundlett ranked fourth on the state’s school building aid list through the October 2025 final vote. Between them, Concord residents have had more factual reporting on this project than most NH communities get on decisions one-tenth its size.
What neither outlet has been in a position to do — because their job is to cover what happens, not to indict the statute that made it happen — is connect the Rundlett vote to the statewide machinery that produced it. That connection is what this piece exists to make.
Here is the machinery in one sentence: New Hampshire’s school building aid statute, budget cap, and local bonding rules are structured so that the cheap option is invisible, the expensive option is procedurally easy, and the community-wide vote that used to stop projects like this is gone.
Every individual fact underneath that sentence is already public. The sentence itself has not yet been said out loud by any statewide outlet. So let’s say it, and show the work.
The Statute: RSA 198:15-a Through 198:15-w
The relevant law is not hidden. It is New Hampshire’s school building aid program, codified primarily at RSA 198:15-a through 198:15-w, with implementing rules at Ed 321. The short version is that New Hampshire will reimburse local school districts for a portion of approved construction costs. The longer version — the part that shapes $155 million decisions — has three features that matter.
RSA 198:15-a, IV
Since July 1, 2013, school building aid grants have been capped at $50 million per fiscal year, less any debt service payments already owed. The cap was briefly raised to $86 million for the FY2024–2025 biennium, but $44 million of that went straight to “tail” payments on projects approved before the 2011–2020 moratorium, leaving roughly $43 million for new projects statewide.
RSA 198:15-b, Eligibility and Ranking
Districts apply annually by April 1. The Department of Education ranks applications on criteria including school security, unsafe conditions, obsolescence, and operational efficiency. Only the highest-ranked projects receive aid; everyone else either waits, rescopes, or proceeds without state help.
RSA 198:15-v, Alternative Building Aid Formula
Grant amounts are calculated against equalized valuation per pupil and median family income — a formula that looks progressive on paper but produces modest grants against modern construction costs.
In 2022, seventeen NH districts applied for school building aid. Together they asked for $227.7 million against projects totaling $564.4 million. The Department of Education ranked them. The School Building Authority’s own estimate at the time was that only the top three — Rochester, Colebrook, and Monadnock — would actually receive grants, because the money in the cap after tail payments does not stretch further than that.
Concord was fourth. Concord’s requested aid was $70.5 million on a then-$176.2 million project. In February 2024, the Concord Monitor, citing state records, reported that in a best-case scenario, Concord might ultimately receive no more than $32 million — less than half of what was requested. By October 2025, when the board voted, the state aid picture had deteriorated further, because the 2023 legislature tightened the program to an annual rather than biennial cycle: a maximum of $50 million per year for all of New Hampshire, less the tail.
That is the first piece of the mechanism. State aid is rationed so tightly that any district past rank three effectively pays for its project without state help — which means the cost gets loaded almost entirely onto local property taxpayers through municipal bonds.
The Process: Lame-Duck Votes and Missing Options
If the statute sets up the financial trap, the local process springs it.
In Concord, the Rundlett decision was approved by the school board, not by a community-wide vote. This is not illegal. It is not unusual. It is — under current NH school district charter rules in most communities — simply how capital projects get approved. In cities like Concord that have moved to charter governance over the past decades, the school board has authority to bond major capital projects without putting the question to voters directly.
Compare this to 1955. When the current Rundlett building was first approved, the rules required a two-thirds majority of city voters to approve the bond. By a decisive margin, they did — nearly 80 percent of Concord voters backed the project, and students took their seats in 1957. The price tag was $1.4 million, roughly $16 million in today’s dollars. The Concord Monitor documented this history in its “Rethinking Rundlett” series. Seventy years later, the same city considered a project nearly ten times larger in real terms, and the community-wide vote was not required.
Instead, Concord residents got a school board vote, conducted on October 23, 2025, at a public hearing — the kind of hearing Patch characterized as a “lame duck” hearing, because several board members were on their way out after the November 2025 municipal election.
At that hearing, the district’s own comparison documents presented the choice as a binary: a new school at roughly $155 million, or a full gut renovation of the existing building at roughly $156 million. When the options cost the same, the board picked the one that doesn’t require teaching in a construction zone. That is a rational decision on those facts.
The problem is the facts in that document are not the only facts. The 2017 HMFH Architects condition study identified scope options ranging from minimum required upgrades — new roof, HVAC, electrical, plumbing upgrades, ADA compliance — at substantially lower cost, up through full replacement. The “limited renovation” option, keeping the building functional without a total gut, was described in earlier district materials but did not appear on the comparison page presented at the public hearings. Concord Concerned Citizens, the opposition group that gathered more than 1,500 signatures in August 2024 for two charter amendment ballot questions, spent much of the 2024 campaign asking why.
This is how the process works, and not just in Concord. Once state aid is rationed away from your district, the decision collapses into a local bond vote. The comparison document narrows to full-replacement versus full-renovation. The cheaper partial-renovation option — the one that might keep the existing facility usable for another twenty years while the state program sorts itself out — disappears from the official comparison, not because anyone lied about it, but because “like-for-like” comparison logic excludes it by definition. A “like-for-like” comparison that excludes the cheapest alternative is not a comparison. It is a sales pitch with footnotes.
The Money: What Concord Just Signed Up For
The approved bond for the new Rundlett — stripped of interest — is $155 million. That is the number in the Concord Monitor’s headline. The numbers Patch has published, including the project’s full life-cycle costs with interest and reserves, run from $232 million at 4.0 percent interest to $285 million at 4.5 percent. The district has reserves that may offset part of this, depending on when and how they’re applied.
Concord taxpayers are still paying debt service on the 1996 Rundlett renovation. They will now pay debt service on the 2025 demolition and replacement of that same building, for decades, at the same time. That double-payment is neither a mistake nor a scandal; it is what happens when the statute allows districts to stack new capital debt on top of unretired old capital debt, without any statutory requirement to close out the first bond before opening the second.
What Concord has not yet received, and likely will not receive in meaningful quantity, is state aid. At the state cap of $50 million per year minus tail, with Concord ranked fourth against districts that are either ahead in the queue or whose projects the legislature considers higher priority, the district’s realistic state contribution is some fraction of the roughly $32 million the Concord Monitor projected as a best-case scenario in early 2024.
The rest is local property tax.
The Rundlett Absurdity Scorecard
Sourced from Concord Monitor and Patch reporting, NH Department of Education records, and SAU 8 documents
| Year the original Rundlett opened | 1957 |
| Year of the renovation taxpayers are still paying off | 1996 |
| Years Concord has been paying debt service on the current building | ~29 |
| Approved cost of the new building (bond only) | $155M |
| Total life-cycle cost at 4.5% interest, no reserves applied | ~$285M |
| State aid Concord requested | $70.5M |
| Concord’s rank on the state building aid priority list | 4th |
| Districts the School Building Authority estimated would actually receive aid | Top 3 only |
| Best-case state aid projection reported by Concord Monitor (Feb 2024) | ~$32M |
| Board vote tally to approve the project | 8–1 |
| Voter approval threshold for the 1955 bond at this same site | 2/3 majority |
| Voter approval threshold for the 2025 bond at this same site | None required |
| Residents who signed the 2024 opposition initiative petition | 1,500+ |
| NH districts on the 2022 school building aid queue | 17 |
| Total statewide aid requested by those districts | $227.7M |
| Annual statewide aid cap after “tail” payments, FY2024 | ~$43M |
| Statewide outlets that have packaged this as a systemic story before now | 0 |
Why This Matters Statewide
Concord is not the outlier. Concord is the visible case. At least three other NH school districts are currently running a version of the same play, and several more are positioned to do the same within the next three to five years.
Rochester
The Rochester School District was ranked first on the 2022 state aid list. Its planned consolidation and new elementary school was a $33.6 million project with a $20.2 million aid request. Rochester accepted a $15.8 million aid award in the FY ending June 2024 — not the full ask, but by far the best state-aid outcome of any district in the queue. The local portion is still millions of dollars of bonded property tax liability. The Rochester story is what happens when you are at the front of the line: you still pay the majority of the cost yourself, you just get partial state reimbursement that buffers the property tax impact.
Colebrook
Colebrook, ranked second, pursued a $16.4 million expansion and renovation of its Colebrook Academy & Elementary School, with a $9.9 million aid request. For a small North Country district, this is a proportionally enormous capital commitment. Colebrook’s circumstance is instructive: even in a town with a strong aid position and clear facility need, the district still bonds most of the cost against a property tax base that cannot easily absorb it.
Monadnock Regional
Monadnock, ranked third, accepted a $19.4 million award for major consolidation and renovation across multiple elementary schools. The total project cost was $35.2 million. This is the “best-case” model: a rural cooperative district with strong aid positioning, doing consolidation and renovation rather than wholesale replacement. Even here, more than half the cost stays local.
And the ones behind Concord in line
Litchfield ranked fifth with a new $32.6 million elementary school and a $9.6 million aid request. Behind Litchfield, the queue runs through Derry Cooperative, Amherst, Hampstead, Hudson, Barnstead, Thornton, Monroe, Kearsarge Regional, Brookline, and Hollis-Brookline. Each of these districts will, within the next five years, face a version of the decision Concord just made. Several will not rank in the top three in any given year. Several will therefore do what Concord did: bond the full cost locally, stack new debt on old debt, and push the decision through the school board rather than through a community-wide vote.
This is not a Concord story. This is the statewide operating system for how NH replaces school buildings in 2026.
The Mechanics of Invisibility
A fair question: if this is happening in seventeen districts at once, why does it not already read as a statewide scandal?
The answer is not that anyone is hiding it. The facts are in press releases, in State Board of Education rankings, in individual Patch and Concord Monitor articles, in NH Business Review analyses, and in NH School Funding Fairness Project reports. Each piece is somewhere in the public record. What has not happened is the assembly.
Local news outlets — and this is a structural observation, not a criticism — cover what happens in their coverage area. Patch covers Concord. The Eagle-Times covers Colebrook. The Keene Sentinel covers Monadnock. Foster’s covers Rochester. Each outlet is doing exactly the job it is staffed and resourced to do. None of them is staffed to connect all seventeen districts into a single systemic picture, because that is not a community news function.
Statewide outlets have the reach to do the assembly but have not. InDepthNH has the closest mandate and has touched pieces of this. NH Journal focuses heavily on state-level politics. NH Public Radio does periodic statewide education coverage. The Concord Monitor’s “Rethinking Rundlett” series is the single most ambitious local package on any one of these projects, and it is a Concord-focused piece. The statewide synthesis has simply been missing.
It shouldn’t be. The data is public. The statute is public. The ranking list is public. What has been missing is someone willing to say, in print: this is not individual districts making hard local decisions in good faith; this is a statewide financing architecture producing predictable outputs, and the architecture is what needs fixing.
Three Reforms the 2027 Session Could Pass
The good news — and there is genuine good news here — is that the legislature has already tried to fix this system. NH HB594 in 2021 and HB546 in 2023 both proposed adjusting the $50 million cap structure. Neither became law in the form needed to meaningfully close the gap between statewide demand and statewide supply. But the legislative conversation exists; it just needs to be pushed toward reforms that address the local-procedure pieces of the problem as well as the state-funding pieces.
Three concrete reforms could realistically be filed for the 2027 session. Each is targeted at a specific failure mode documented in the Rundlett file.
Reform 1 — Mandatory Partial-Renovation Disclosure
Amend RSA 198:15-c to require any school district receiving or applying for state building aid to publish, in all public comparison documents and in all public hearings, at least three scoped renovation alternatives, including a minimum-required-upgrade option benchmarked against the district’s most recent facility condition assessment. Districts may still choose full replacement. They may no longer present full replacement as the only option compared against a single full-gut alternative. The point is not to mandate the outcome; it is to mandate that voters and taxpayers see the full option set.
Reform 2 — Community-Wide Vote Threshold for Capital Projects Over $75 Million
Amend RSA 33 (the Municipal Finance Act, which governs municipal bond authority) and RSA 194 (the general School Districts chapter) to require any school district capital project with a total bonded cost exceeding $75 million (indexed to inflation) to be approved by a community-wide ballot vote at a simple-majority or two-thirds threshold consistent with the district’s existing charter type. The 1955 Rundlett project required a 2/3 vote of the city’s residents under the rules then in place. The 2025 Rundlett project required none. That is not progress in local governance; it is an accountability gap created by charter consolidation that was never intended to remove major capital-project votes from the public. The $75 million threshold is calibrated to capture significant capital decisions without burdening small districts with ballot votes on routine renovations, and is compatible with both city-chartered single districts (like Concord) and cooperative districts under RSA 195.
Reform 3 — Tail Payment Transparency and Stacked-Debt Disclosure
Amend RSA 198:4-d to require every NH school district to publish, annually and in plain language, (a) the remaining debt service on all active school-construction bonds, (b) the year each bond will be fully retired, and (c) for any proposed new capital project, a clearly stated overlap period during which property taxpayers will simultaneously service old and new bonds. This is data that already exists in district records and state filings. The reform simply requires it to be presented in a single public document, updated annually, in a format comprehensible to a voter reading a bond warrant rather than a bond counsel reading a prospectus.
None of these reforms is partisan. None requires new state spending. None tells a local district what to build. What they do is close the three disclosure-and-accountability gaps that produced the Rundlett outcome: invisible cheaper options, vanished community-wide votes, and hidden stacked debt.
The Close: What’s Yours to Do
Concord’s decision is made. The bond will be issued, the contract will be let, and — according to the district’s published timeline — students will move into the new middle school over the holiday break at the end of 2028, built on the existing Rundlett site in the South End, adjacent to the current building, which will be demolished in 2029 to make way for playing fields. The students whose education motivated this fight — many of whom deserve a better building than the one they have — will finally have one. None of that is in question, and none of it should be.
What is in question is whether the next twelve NH districts behind Concord in the state building aid queue will go through the same process, with the same missing comparison options, the same vanished community-wide vote, and the same stacked-debt pattern, or whether the legislature will close the loopholes before those districts reach their own decision point.
That is not Concord’s question to answer. It is Concord’s next-door-neighbor’s question. It is Derry’s question, Hudson’s question, Amherst’s question, Hampstead’s question, Kearsarge Regional’s question. And it is the NH House Education Committee’s question for the 2027 session.
The local press corps has done its job. Patch has documented, in dozens of articles over more than half a decade, every incremental factual step of the Concord process. The Concord Monitor’s “Rethinking Rundlett” series has given the city the most sustained local investigative attention any NH school project has received in a generation. The NH School Funding Fairness Project has produced the statewide data analysis. NH Business Review and the NH Bulletin have tracked the legislative mechanics.
Every fact in this piece is drawn from their work. What was missing until now was the sentence. The sentence is: New Hampshire’s school building aid statute is a financing architecture with predictable, repeatable outputs; those outputs include invisible renovation options, eliminated community-wide votes, and stacked municipal debt; and the legislature can fix the disclosure and procedure pieces in a single 2027 session without spending an additional dollar.
The next NH district facing this decision deserves the reforms in place before the comparison document is published. The 2027 session is where that happens or doesn’t.
GSR will be filing a public RTK request list on school building aid disclosures this quarter and tracking the 2027 legislative filing window. Readers with NH school building aid records, district comparison documents, or stacked-debt disclosure material are encouraged to contact the publication directly.
Sources and verification: NH RSA 198:15-a through 198:15-w (statutory text via NH General Court); Ed 321 School Building Aid rules (NH DOE); November 14, 2022 NH Department of Education press release on the FY2024–2025 ranked building aid list; NH Business Review, “Need for school building aid exceeds appropriated funds in state budget” (Aug 2023); Concord Monitor, “A moving target: How does state school building aid work? And how much can the middle school project expect?” (Feb 24, 2024); Concord Monitor, “Rundlett rebuild for $155M gets green light from Concord Board of Education” (Oct 24, 2025); Concord Monitor “Rethinking Rundlett” series (2024–2025); Patch, “Concord Board Of Education Approves New Rundlett Middle School Proposal By 8-1 Vote” (Oct 26, 2025); Patch, “Acting-Concord School Superintendent Says Community Should Attend New Middle School Project Public Hearing” (Oct 23, 2025); Patch, “Concord School District Hosts 2 Meetings Concerning New Middle School” (Sept 27, 2023); Patch, “Concord’s Rundlett Middle School 4th On NH School Building Aid List” (Nov 15, 2022); Patch, “Opponents Of East Concord Middle School Location File 1,500 Initiative Petition Signatures” (Aug 13, 2024); NH School Funding Fairness Project, “State Building Aid and the Condition of New Hampshire’s Public Schools” (July 2023); LegiScan records for NH HB594 (2021) and NH HB546 (2023). Publisher: Granite State Report, Northfield, NH. Editor: Dexter Dow.
