According to a report, which was prepared by the American Institutes for Research (AIR) and presented to the commission over the past several weeks, school districts with the highest number of economically disadvantaged students spend less, on average, than districts with the fewest needy students. Communities with the least property wealth “impose the highest local education tax rates to be able to fund their children’s education,” the report concluded.

A report done by the American Institutes for Research, hired through the Carsey School, was accepted by the commission Monday. The result of the report is that New Hampshire student outcomes are among the best in the country so the state is providing an adequate education and spending enough total money on public education, about $3 billion. The new formula would not raise more money but would redistribute what is already spent on education through local and state property taxes, and other state aid.

The Commission to Study School Funding, which was formed to calculate the cost of an adequate education, propose a means to pay for it and devise a formula to distribute the funding, is seeking to determine just what the Supreme Court initially meant nearly 30 years ago when it said that the state Constitution “imposes a duty on the state to provide a constitutionally adequate education to every educable child in the public schools in New Hampshire and to guarantee adequate funding.”

It’s not that Davida Margolin had a crystal ball or whatever one might need to predict the future when she was preparing to teach this semester. It’s all right there in the science: how a coronavirus can mutate, how it can inflect thousands and thousands of people, starting with one tiny droplet. How quickly it can become a pandemic and spread around the world.

Alexandra Papadakis ’21 has long been interested in food. When she started at UNH, she thought that interest would take her in the direction of how it’s grown, harvested, marketed, consumed— that kind of thing. So she majored in sustainable agriculture and food systems, adding the dual major ecogastronomy. Then she started thinking more about hunger.

Once again UNH has shown its true colors — blue, white and green — after being named one of the most sustainable schools in the country by two of the top organzations  that track a school's commitment to sustainability.

Shari Robinson, director of Psychological and Counseling Services, will serve as the interim dean of students. The dean of students position will be posted as soon as possible with hopes of filling the role by end of the semester. 

I’m perched in Banner Mt. Lookout sixty feet above the ground. Five miles to the west, the Jones Fire tears through brush and timber. Smoke billows up thick and white, then a bruised purple-brown as it drifts south over the ridges to Grass Valley. Wind shakes the tower. I feel helpless. There’s not much a lookout can do once a fire is burning. Everyone knows where it is.

The New Hampshire Commission to Study School Funding – working with the Carsey School of Public Policy – recently released a report that shows that New Hampshire’s current system for funding schools “may not be working for large segments of students and taxpayers". The commission and members of the Carsey School  will examine the report as well as possibilities for more equitable school funding. The commission plans to release its final report later in the year.