A Civic Education

After meeting as a community to set policy on schools and other matters since 1766, residents of Deerfield are altering that democratic process to make room for modern demands.

Deerfield, N.H.

One Saturday each year, when the cold weather begins to break and the maple sap rises, the citizens in this central New Hampshire town pull on their boots and head to the town’s only public school for the annual school district meeting.

Rare outside the six New England states, school district meetings are gatherings where voters debate and then decide how to educate the town’s youngest residents. Should they build a new school? Raise teachers’ salaries? Those and other questions are all up for deliberation at the annual meeting.

The traditional New England school meeting—like the town meeting, which Deerfield holds on a different Saturday in March—is democracy at its purest. Every one of Deerfield’s 3,212 registered voters is entitled to attend either meeting and have a direct...