Dan Tuohy / NHPR
A group of New Hampshire communities is organizing against potential efforts by lawmakers to resurrect a model of funding public education that redistributes money from “donor towns” to poorer school districts.
The burgeoning group has roots in The Coalition Communities, an initiative spearheaded by the city of Portsmouth 20 years ago to fight how the state raised and distributed its statewide "education property tax."
That Coalition, along with Republican lawmakers, successfully pushed for a funding formula that allows property-rich towns to keep all the money raised through their statewide property tax and spend it on their local school district, rather than send it to property-poor towns with a lower tax base, as was originally intended.