Local Education

Education is what focuses a community on the future and produces the leaders who will make the vision come to pass.

New Hampshire prides itself on consistently producing some of the best students in the country. This success can be attributed to many things: a willingness to support the schools with the necessary resources, excellent teachers, engaged parents and a unique way of organizing and administrating our schools. In New Hampshire, state government plays a very minor role in education. The funding, administration and curriculum are all managed at the local level.

This dedication to local control of schools results in a system where the decisions surrounding education, what to teach, how to teach it and how to pay for it, are all made by local school boards elected by local voters. Local voters elect these volunteer boards of education to varying terms, giving them the responsibility and authority for meeting the needs of the students in their town. This tradition of local control results in a system of education that is widely supported by its community.

In all but the most rural towns, each town has its own system of education, with its students attending classes in local elementary and junior high schools, and then either attending the town’s local high school or in a few cases a cooperative high school, where several towns have combined efforts to share the burden of the more expensive and specialized years of education. In the Greater Nashua region, several communities have chosen to build cooperative high schools, while maintaining the more intimate and personal local elementary and junior high schools. These include the Hollis-Brookline High School and the Souhegan High School, which serves the towns of Amherst and Mont Vernon.

Nashua, with 12 elementary schools and three middle schools, has recently made a substantial commitment to public education. Because of an increasing number of students Nashua High North has become the newest addition to Nashua’s public school system. It is located across the river from Nashua High South which is now under renovations. It will mirror the new high school with similar architectural features. The addition of Nashua High North and the renovation of Nashua High South is the largest public high school building project in New England. The $140-million-dollar project will result in two completely new high school facilities for the region’s largest city.

In addition to a fine public school system, the Nashua region offers many options to parents preferring a private or parochial education. The city of Nashua alone has two parochial elementary schools, a junior high school and Bishop Guertin High School, which has more than 800 high school age students in attendance. Parents will find a wide variety of private pre-school and elementary education options as well.