A Civic Education

After meeting as a community to set policy on schools and other matters since 1766, residents of Deerfield, New Hampshire, are altering that democratic process to make room for modern demands. This article describes the decision in Deerfield to discontinue holding the traditional New England annual school district meeting. Instead, by a thin margin, Deerfield residents voted to follow a 1997 New Hampshire law known as Senate Bill 2, which allows towns to opt to break their public-voting meetings into two events: a hearing where citizens hear the issues and decide which ones to bring to a vote, and a separate session where voters simply show up throughout the day to cast ballots. This article describes and compares how the residents of Deerfield approach addressing various education policy issues under the old and new systems.