Francestown’s and Dublin’s requests to leave the Contoocook Valley School District will go before school district voters in March, the state Board of Education decided Thursday.

The two towns’ withdrawal requests – set in motion by a soundly rejected effort last spring to explore consolidating the district’s eight elementary schools into four – could reshape the nine-town regional school district, which was formed in 1967. Motivated by a desire to preserve their town schools and for autonomy that they claim would lead to better educational outcomes at lower costs, leaders from Francestown and Dublin lobbied the state board for the opportunity to bring their requests to voters’ ballots at next year’s annual school district meeting.

“They ought to at least have a chance to have a vote on that,” state board Chair Drew Cline said following Dublin’s presentation of its withdrawal report, which he praised as “one of the better written, better structured” he had seen.

The requests – which will be presented as separate votes – can be approved in one of two ways. Either they must receive simple majority support from the district voters overall and from the withdrawing town’s voters themselves, or they must receive at least 60% support from withdrawing town’s voters and 40% support from the district at large.

Dublin’s and Francestown’s withdrawal requests come as small communities increasingly question the utility of regional school districts, most of which were formed in the 1950s and 1960s during an era of enthusiasm for cooperatives and in order to pool resources. 

ConVal School Board member Curtis Hamilton, speaking in opposition to the two towns’ withdrawal requests, argued that Dublin’s and Francestown’s exits from the 2,000-student district would lead to the duplication of administrative responsibilities and force the small districts to bear unforeseen expenses on their own.

“One of the things our cooperative district has going for it are our economies of scale,” said Hamilton, who is from Greenfield. “We pool our buying power, our resources, and our risk.”

On Sept. 12, the ConVal Feasibility Study Committee – made up of a Select Board member and a School Board member from each of the nine towns in the district – voted against supporting either Dublin’s or Francestown’s bids to leave the district. The vote against Dublin was 9-6, and the vote against Francestown was 8-7.

In support of withdrawal, Dublin Select Board member Carole Monroe argued that Dublin’s interests were not the same as ConVal’s.

“Dublin has in fact been subsidizing ConVal for 57 years,” she said, referring to the district’s cost-sharing formula.

That formula works the following way – half the cost is divided based on the proportion of students each town has, while the other half is divided based on the towns’ proportion of district-wide total equalized property value. The formula means per-pupil expenses vary widely, from $14,279 in Bennington to $32,382 in Dublin, according to Dublin’s minority withdrawal report. However, local education property taxes also vary in roughly an inverse fashion, from $10.09 per $1,000 of assessed value in Antrim to $18.62 in Greenfield, according to an informational document prepared in 2023.

Because Dublin has relatively high property values but has the third-fewest students in the district, it bears the highest per-pupil expense, but has a tax rate in the middle of the pack, at $14.41 per $1,000. Francestown has both the third-highest per-pupil expense at $27,136 and the third-highest tax rate at $16.74 per $1,000.

Dublin leaders projected the town could save roughly $1 million from its current contribution of $5.3 million if it withdrew, while Francestown leaders projected withdrawal would cost $124,000, or 3% more, than their current contribution of $4.9 million.

Both towns said they would intend to negotiate tuition agreements with ConVal – Dublin ultimately from seventh grade on, and Francestown for sixth grade on. Currently the two elementary schools, which span from kindergarten through fourth grade, educate 52 and 42 students, respectively.

ConVal attorney Dean Eggert wrote that the two towns’ withdrawal would cause a “substantial increase” in the school district’s tax rate, though the district did not provide a precise estimate.

“The burden that a withdrawal would place on our SAU cannot be overstated,” Hamilton said.

Jeremy Margolis can be contacted at jmargolis@cmonitor.com.