A bill pending in the state Legislature would consolidate school administrative units in New Hampshire and make superintendents’ jobs elected positions.

Across New Hampshire, there are now more than 100 school administrative units, which oversee the management of school districts. This would be reduced to 12 under Rep. Dan McGuire’s House Bill 765.

The Epsom Republican said his bill would improve efficiency in a state public education system that has seen falling standardized test scores and increased expenses over the past decade.

“What this says to me is that what we need are different methods, different structures in education because what we have now is not working and more money isn’t solving the problem,” he told the House Education Policy and Administration Committee on Monday.

“With more centralization, fewer superintendents and so on, there should be some economies of scale.”

No one besides McGuire spoke in favor of the bill before the committee, which took 800 online comments against the measure and 13 in support of it.

The bill calls for Hillsborough County, the state’s most populous county, to have three SAUs, one for Nashua, one for Manchester and one for the rest of the county. Every other county would have one SAU.

Administration of transportation, grant writing, payroll and collective bargaining, among other things, could be done more efficiently through the consolidation, he said.

Superintendents in charge of the state’s many SAUs now have responsibilities regarding curriculum and policy, which would shift to school boards under HB 765, McGuire said.

“This, I think, increases local control in a good way, in the sense that the school board is the closest to the actual situation in their schools, and the superintendent in some sense is the least accountable,” he said.

“At least the school board gets elected. So if you’re not happy with what’s being taught in your school, you can change your school board.”

School boards now select superintendents, but this would also be altered under the bill, which would leave this function to voters.

Jerry Frew, associate executive director of the N.H. School Administrators Association, testified against the bill.

“The superintendent is a key component of the local community,” he said.

“They are involved and dedicated and care about what’s happening in their place. And if they’re not doing a good job, the local school board can fire them, and that’s happened.”

Putting superintendents up to a public vote would be disruptive, Frew said.

“The possibility of having to replace that person every two years with someone who may or may not be an educator, who may not really be invested in the children and the families of the district is a very slippery and scary slope.”

Robert Malay, superintendent of SAU 29, which covers Keene and six other local districts, said superintendents now must meet stringent credentialing requirements.

He also said that the state’s students have outperformed students in many other states in standardized tests.

The N.H. Department of Education said in a Jan. 29 news release that, for example, the average fourth-grade math score on the National Assessment of Educational Progress test last year in the state was 242, compared to a national average of 237. In 2013, fourth-grade math scores in the state averaged 253, compared to 241 nationally.

“Do we want to adopt a model used in other states that are performing significantly lower than we are?” Malay asked, referring to places where school district oversight is done on a county-by-county basis.

“If you’ve got one superintendent for each region or county, what does that mean for all of the districts inside that oversight? Does that inadvertently impact local control ability that we have valued very highly and that allows taxpayers in their towns to make decisions?”

Malay added that the costs of running public schools have gone up, but the biggest reason for this is inflation, not an overabundance of administrators.

HB 765 has eight sponsors, all Republicans. The committee will eventually schedule a vote on the measure and send it to the full House for further consideration.

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