PLAINFIELD — After hearing a plan to combine the two towns’ middle schools at a joint meeting this week, the Plainfield and Cornish school boards voted unanimously to continue to move forward with considering a merger and to reconvene in a month. 

They also asked for more information about a $2 million Plainfield Elementary School renovation, which could be required to accommodate both towns’ middle schoolers in Plainfield. The boards have not yet decided whether to send a merger proposal to voters in March.

Plainfield School Board Chairwoman Jenny Ramsey said that without a merger, decreasing enrollment would cause taxes to rise, as “the lack of kids at Plainfield will make the cost per pupil go up.”

The Plainfield Elementary School, where Tuesday’s meeting was held, has 182 students in grades K-8 right now. Three years ago it had 214 students.

Combining the two towns’ middle schools could help control costs and improve student outcomes, helping to address concerns about middle school education that have been “longstanding” in both Plainfield and Cornish, Superintendent Sydney Leggett, who leads both school districts, said in Tuesday’s meeting, which was attended by about 45 members of the public, both boards and each school’s administrative team.

Small class sizes limit academic and extracurricular offerings, and the small number of peers can adversely impact students’ social and emotional development, Leggett said. 

A merger, Leggett said, would move roughly 40 students from Cornish to Plainfield. There are currently 78 students in grades 6-8 at Plainfield and 35 in Cornish.

Along with increasing school size, the plan — crafted by a 27-member committee comprised of board members, teachers, administrators and members of the public — would come with a thorough redesign of the way that middle school education is delivered. The proposed new curriculum would emphasize project-based learning within a completely interdisciplinary curriculum.

“It’s really exciting how it aligns with their actual brain development,” Cornish resident Tricia Kruidenier, whose two children attend the Cornish School, said of the new curriculum.

Exposing students to new things, and giving them the agency to explore them “is what project-based learning really does,” said Kruidenier, who served on the learner development subcommittee of the middle school merger committee. It is “much more relevant to the real world,” than more traditional curricula, she added. 

That new curricular approach is reflected in the building design recommendations made by the committee. 

Leggett presented the boards with three options for renovating the Plainfield Elementary School. All three included open-concept classrooms with flexible spaces tailored to project-based and interdisciplinary learning.

Each option would cost an estimated $2 million to build, but that cost could be offset by an anonymous benefactor. 

A family working through the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation has offered to donate $1 million to the project, Leggett said. The donation is available exclusively to the Cornish-Plainfield school merger this year. If the merger does not go forward in March, that donation will be opened to other applicants.

The tax estimate for a million-dollar bond for Plainfield residents would average roughly $106 per year over six years on a house assessed at $300,000, according to data presented by Leggett.

For Cornish residents, relinquishing a local middle school would mean paying tuition for the roughly 40 students it would send to Plainfield. Unless the two school districts decide to consolidate, Cornish will bear that tuition burden in perpetuity. (Voters in March also approved the creation of a committee to study the feasibility of combining the two school districts, but that committee’s timeline extends out at least two years). 

Leggett estimated that the tuition requirement would add an average of about $105 to the annual property tax for a Cornish property assessed at $300,000.

Asked by Plainfield board member Norm Berman whether Cornish students could move to the Plainfield Elementary School without a building renovation, Leggett said that “this isn’t just about moving kids, it’s also about programming.”

While the Cornish School Board is interested in exploring options that benefit students, board Chairman Justin Ranney said, “just moving kids to another building is not what we want to do.”

“The only sales pitch to Cornish is the program,” he added. 

In the audience, there was concern about what seemed to be an uneven burden that the merger would place on the two towns. Plainfield would bear the costs of the five-year bond, after which its residents would likely see a reduced tax impact as a result of the tuition paid by Cornish students. The school building, as a capital asset, would belong to Plainfield. 

Cornish residents would be locked into paying per-student tuition at an estimated rate of $15,500 per student, according to the proposal. The initial merger agreement would extend for five years, after which Cornish could renegotiate its terms. 

The primary advantage of the merger for Cornish would be the curricular model, which would put its students “way ahead of where anyone else is” in terms of forward-looking programming, Cornish board member Jason Tetu said. 

“I’m all in,” he added.

If Cornish and Plainfield residents decide in March to combine their middle schools, Plainfield would need to hire three full-time and one part-time teacher. Cornish teachers, displaced by the closure of their school, Leggett said, would need to apply for the Plainfield positions in the general applicant pool. 

A merger would allow Cornish one-time savings on renovations to its current school building. 

The current Cornish school lacks potable water and is in need of repairs and upgrades. “Renovation is going to have to happen no matter what,” Ranney said, adding that there would be cost savings in renovating for a pre-K to 5 rather than a pre-K to 8 school.

Should both school boards decide to bring the merger to voters at Town Meeting in March, Cornish voters would be asked to agree to send all of its students to Plainfield for at least five years. Plainfield voters would be asked to agree to share the middle school with Cornish and to pass a bond for the revenue needed to renovate and expand its existing school building.

The goal would then be to have the renovations and merger complete for the beginning of the 2026-27 school year. 

The boards plan to reconvene in December to deliberate further and decide whether to bring the issue before voters in March. 

Christina Dolan can be reached at cdolan@vnews.com or 603-727-3208.