March 8, 2022 Oyster River School Election Ballot

The sample ballot for the Oyster River School District is posted here (and on town web sites also).

This article represents my own opinion only and is not the official position of the Oyster River Cooperative School District or Oyster River Cooperative School Board.

This is a quick rundown of the ballot:

Article 1: We elect the Moderator every year. The Moderator is the head election official for the school district and is responsible for running the Deliberative Session (which is an election).

Article 2: There are 2 school board seats up for election this year. These are at-large seats. Any registered voter from Durham, Lee, or Madbury could have signed up to run for these. They are for 3-year terms. These new school board members will replace Tom Newkirk and Al Howland who are each leaving the school board after 10 years of service. Stay tuned for my recommendations for these seats. Brief bios of each are posted online. There have been two forums for the candidates, one run by the ORMS PTO and one by the ORHS debate club.

Article 3: This is most of the operating budget for 2022-2023 school year. The proposal is $52,133,325. My opinion is that this is a reasonable budget that maintains programs and includes money to pay for tutors at ORMS and ORHS, maintaining the new middle school, and a district DEIJ coordinator. I’ll try to write one more post about the budget before the election. Roughly 80% of this gets collected in local property taxes as either Local School Tax or State School Tax.

Articles 4 and 5: These are contracts between the school district and the unions that represent custodians and office professionals (ORESPA, article 4) and paraeducators, nurses’ aids, school nutrition, and clerical workers (ORPASS, article 5). The school board negotiates these agreements, and any agreement that goes into a future year must be approved by voters. The $ shown are the estimated increases in the budget for each year of the contract based on the current school employees in each group.

Article 6: Tells the school board to set aside $125,000 at the end of the school year (June 30, 2022) to save towards buying the solar array on the new middle school building. I tried to explain this at the 2021 deliberative session (you can see the slides here, starting on page 15). If there is any money left unspent at the end of this school year, the first $125,000 goes into the facilities fund. The goal is to have enough money to buy the solar array in 2027 for $873,000 without a jump in taxes or cutting other programs.

The language at the end of Article 6 (written by lawyers) says, “No amounts to be raised from taxation.” This can be a little confusing. Any money left at the end of the school year is tax money that was unspent. So while none of this $125,000 will be added to tax bills at the end of 2022 (when the rest of the 2022-2023 budget is collected), it does belong to taxpayers. If we didn’t save this in the facilities capital reserve fund, it could go back to taxpayers as slightly lower taxes in December (about $.05 per $1000 valuation, which is $15 on a $300,000 house), or the school board could choose to save it in the emergency fund instead.

My personal recommendation is to vote Yes on Articles 3 through 6 on March 8.