PRIORITIES

Year after year, rising property taxes have ratcheted up stress on overburdened homeowners. Despite this increased spending, very little seems to change in the learning experiences of our students. As a product of the public schools himself, Cody knows that education is one of the most important factors in setting our children up for success. That’s why he’ll work to simultaneously improve student outcomes and develop a funding model that eases tax burdens while protecting the state’s bottom line. To do this, he will:

• Enable property tax relief targeted toward communities with high local burdens by supporting a sliding scale model indexing each town’s state-level base per-pupil funding rate to its median income, property wealth, and number of students
• Reconvene and expand the role of the New Hampshire State Accountability Task Force to study novel, innovative approaches to boosting student outcomes in New Hampshire — such as those which brought recent successes to the Franklin School District — and provide recommendations to the Legislature and school districts on policy alternatives to pursue
• Redirect all state-collected revenues from casino gambling and videolottery terminals toward the Education Trust Fund (ETF)
• Return excess State Wide Education Property Tax (SWEPT) funds raised by wealthy ‘donor towns’ to the Education Trust Fund, which can then be used to offset tax burdens in towns like Loudon and Canterbury
• Allow school districts to make their own decisions about open enrollment policy, budgets, and adoption of SB2 — and oppose state-imposed School Administrative Unit (SAU) consolidation efforts
• Promote an accountable, trustworthy, and fiscally prudent school choice program by reinstituting an income eligibility cap for Education Freedom Accounts (EFAs), transferring EFA compliance and monitoring responsibilities to the NH Department of Education, and enabling legislators to access student outcome data to help steer the program toward maximum efficacy