Citizens defeating the Thornton Central School Board’s initiative to spend $16 million.
Despite declining enrollment at the Thornton Central School (down from 235 to 185 over the past few years) our principal, SAU Superintendent, and the school board decided that we are out of space and need to modernize the existing building, add an additional 60% to the square footage, and to build a new separate library.
Together those expenditures amount to about $16 million. To put that in perspective, the entire budget for the town, including the school is about $9 million. Our property tax rate is about $20/thousand and the $16 million would have added about $3.50 to the tax rate, almost 18%. (For more information see www.stopthetax.info.)
This issue came to a head at the annual school board meeting on March 18, 2023, where the townspeople vote on the warrant articles.
School Boards have a tough job. They must balance the needs of the teachers, administrative staff, kids, parents, and taxpayers against the realities of what the town can afford. It was clear from the actions and decisions of our school board that they ignored the taxpayers. More importantly, the school board relied on their website to disseminate information and the information they had lacked in clarity. For example, they never produced a document explaining why they are out of space and why $14.5 million was the right amount for the school nor $1.5 million for the library.
Because many felt the school board was trying to ram something through without properly notifying the townspeople, some of us got together to try to stop it. We succeeded. To pass, the warrant articles needed 60% of the votes, they got 38%. Historically, there have been about 200 people who come to that meeting and vote. Our initiative brought in over 500 people and there were more than 450 votes cast.
Here’s a summary of how we approached it.
We put together a group of six very strong people and we agreed to spend some money between us. On this informal committee was one current selectboard member, one person running for selectboard, one parent, one former member of the state republican committee, and one sales and marketing person.
We decided that we needed to get the information out and if people were informed, we could drive attendance to the vote.
This campaign consisted of:
A website that documented the facts. www.stopthetax.info. This site was critical as it could drill down on the issues. It was convincing because it only used the school board and SAU data in our analysis. Much of that data came from a “Right to Know” request to the SAU. For example, they contended they were out of space, but our analysis showed that they had 34 kids in the seventh and eighth grades, yet they used four classrooms and four teachers.
A direct mail campaign to about a thousand households in the town telling them they could get the information from the website.
A telephone campaign to the townspeople. This was highly informative because universally people asked us “Why didn’t I know this? Why didn’t anyone tell me this was going on?”
Twenty signs that we placed in strategic locations in the town directing them to the website.
Here’s what we learned from this successful exercise:
We were willing to spend some money and spent about $1,000 total.
No one person can do it all. We assembled six highly capable people with varying skills and expertise. Everyone contributed in one way or the other, but more importantly we had a sounding board on which we could bounce ideas.
We approached this as businesspeople, whereas they approached it as bureaucrats.
We had a compelling message, they did not. We changed the narrative from school renovations to property taxes. They had no rebuttal for that other than “we’re for the kids”. We admitted the school needed updating but our secondary message was compelling: “Yes, we want the best for the kids, but is this the right option, the most sensible option, the most cost-efficient option?”
Our approach to educating the public was highly effective. The four forms of outreach, the postcards, the signs, and the telephone campaign drove traffic to the web site. Within three days of the mailing and phone calls, we had 1,000 visits by 585 people with an average time spent on the site of over three minutes.
Part of the reason the website was convincing is that it was factual. All the data came from them. Using real, accurate, data is important. So, using the NH “Right to Know” process is effective. It’s very simple. Interestingly, even using their data, they still called it lies!
We did all of this within a two-week period and the timing of our mailing with the signs was the weekend before the vote on a Tuesday. In retrospect, we should have started this a month in advance as we were very rushed to get it out.
What we could do differently:
We hypothesized that there could be 500 people in the room, but we didn’t warn our side that it was going to be SRO and to get there early. I had texts from people at 6:00 p.m. who said, “Just drove by, nowhere to park, line out the door, I’m going home”. They would have been fine if they had got there at 5:30 p.m.
Given more lead time, we would have bought Google keywords so if someone searched for, for example “Thornton Central School” (or any variation of that) our site would have been at the top of the search results. That would have cost $25-$50 for a month.
For more information contact:
Bob Hatcher, bob@livefreeordienh.us
Bonnie Gorbaty, bonnie@livefreeordienh.us
