This blog post is adapted from this Substack essay.

Break the Cycle or Change the System

TLDR: The people who could be punished have been. Chasing more scalps won’t bring the money back and will burn cash we don’t have. The real failure is structural: the board slid into oligarchy. Everyone who played along shares responsibility, and recovery starts when we admit that, take a moral inventory, and rebuild the machinery so it actually reflects the community’s will. If we can’t do that quickly, the only honest move is to fund families directly rather than continue feeding a broken apparatus.

What accountability already did

Personnel discipline happened. Contracts were ended. Doors were shown. You can want more, but there is a legal and practical ceiling on punishment: due-process rights, insurance coverage, bond covenants, and the hard truth of collectability. There is no magical pool of money sitting behind a curtain waiting to be “clawed back.” Where a solvent party exists, go get it. Where it does not, stop pretending retribution is a revenue plan.

Why retribution drains funds instead of restoring them

Every new investigation, special counsel, or lawsuit has a price tag. Staff time is money. Outside counsel is money. Discovery is money. Even a narrow win can be net negative when the target cannot pay or insurance refuses coverage. Meanwhile, the meter is running on today’s students while adults relitigate yesterday. If a punitive action cannot be tied to a credible, collectible recovery within a year, fix the system instead of feeding the lawyers.

How the board slid into oligarchy

Robert Michels called it more than a century ago: complex organizations drift toward rule by the few. Agenda control, procedural tricks, and committee capture turn “public” bodies into insider clubs. That is what happened here. Meetings became choreography. Documents multiplied while visibility into real commitments shrank. Insiders managed the menu; the public got the check.

For the Claremont-specific anatomy of that drift, see “Procedures With Gravity: Michels’s Iron Law Meets Claremont.” It is not a villain story. It is a machine story. The machine rewarded convenience over contestability, and predictably, insiders consolidated control.

Shared culpability is not a slur; it is a way out

There is no neat chalk line between the board, the administration, bargaining units, and the public when incentives fail. We all touched the wheel. The healthy response looks like twelve-step recovery: admit what happened, make a moral inventory, make amends where you can, and change the habits that enabled the mess. As one attorney told the room during the crisis, no one is coming to save us. That is not nihilism. It is adult supervision.

Searle in one paragraph, without the philosophy headache

John Searle talks about collective intentionality: institutions work when a community’s “we” shows up in the rules and outputs. A dollar works as money because we all act as if it does. A school board works when the community’s intentions flow through it and constrain action. When the board keeps grinding but no longer embodies that shared intention, you do not have “governance.” You have a prop.

Build a structure that resists re-oligarchizing

Here is a practical, testable redesign that makes it costly to hoard information and hard to ambush the public:

• Open ledger, not PDF theater. Publish a transaction-level budget with daily refresh. Every encumbrance and payment gets a unique public record ID that traces back to the vote or contract that authorized it.
  
• Agenda marketplace. Lock one-third of each meeting to citizen-submitted items selected by lottery from proposals filed a week in advance. Staff must attach a one-page brief: plain English, costs, tradeoffs, deadlines.
  
• Quarterly priority sprints. Town-wide ranked-choice vote sets three binding operational priorities per quarter. Each becomes an OKR with public metrics updated weekly.
  
• Citizen juries for exceptions. If staff wants to exceed a policy limit or move money across lines over a threshold, a randomly selected nine-person jury reviews a plain-English brief and records a yes/no recommendation that the board must adopt or publicly override.
  
• Anti-capture guardrails.
  
  • Two-key approvals for mid-cycle reallocations: one admin and one citizen controller co-sign digitally.
    
  • Term limits for committee chairs and a cooling-off period before a repeat gavel.
    
  • A live, searchable conflict-of-interest ledger updated before votes.
    
  • Publish all bargaining cost models fourteen days before ratification.
    
• Stopwatch governance. If an agenda item lacks a deliverable, an owner, and a date, it does not get docketed.
  

This is not about punishing personalities. It is about changing the cost of secrecy and the ease of accountability.

Why the force majeure story does not fly

Some people toss around the term “force majeure” as if “unforeseeable catastrophe” explains a budget hole or institutional drift. In contract law, force majeure covers genuine external shocks that make performance impossible. It is not a fog machine for ordinary managerial failure or a hall pass for inadequate controls. Storms are storms. A missing ledger is a choice.

Two predictable pushbacks, answered

“We need more punishment to deter the next crew.”
Punishment deters best when a strong control environment already exists. Without visible ledgers, binding OKRs, and hard guardrails, the same incentives will reproduce the same failure with new names. Build the cage, then punish whoever tries to gnaw through it.

“Crowdsourcing will turn meetings into chaos.”
Random, unstructured input is noisy. Structured input with filters is not. The lottery only picks from proposals that meet the one-page brief standard. Citizen juries are only triggered when material exceptions arise. Ranked-choice sprints cap the churn at three priorities per quarter. You get sunlight and participation without turning every meeting into open mic night.

The fail-safe: fund families directly

The priority should be creative destruction: keep public dollars, replace the broken machinery, and prove that a public system can operate in public. But there has to be a deadline. If, after one sprint, the re-founded structure still cannot manifest the community’s “we” with basic solvency, transparency, and responsiveness, the honest move is to route the money to parents. Education Freedom Accounts and similar mechanisms already exist to do precisely that under rules, audits, and reporting. The State’s duty is to cherish education, not a specific delivery mechanism that cannot meet minimum standards.

A ninety-day plan you can measure

• Day 0: Resolution of responsibility. Board, administration, union leadership, and key civic groups sign a one-page admission of shared responsibility and commit to the overhaul above.
  
• Day 7: Turn on the open ledger. Machine-readable, daily refresh, unique IDs tied to votes and contracts.
  
• Day 14: Launch the agenda marketplace. Publish the brief template and lottery rules; reserve one-third of the next agenda.
  
• Day 21: Run the first priority sprint. Town-wide ranked-choice; set three binding OKRs with public metrics.
  
• Day 30: Seat the first citizen jury. Use it for any exception over the threshold.
  
• Day 45: Contract sunlight. Post bargaining cost models two weeks before any ratification vote.
  
• Day 60: Mid-sprint check. Publish KPI progress and corrective actions.
  
• Day 75: Fail-safe readiness. Draft the family-funding transition plan in case benchmarks are missed.
  
• Day 90: Decision point. If metrics are on track, continue the sprint. If not, activate the fail-safe and begin funding families.
  

Choose results over rituals

New Hampshire prides itself on local control. Local control without local accountability is theater. We can keep reenacting the accountability spectacle and call it governance, or we can build a structure that turns community intention into measurable results. If we can do that in ninety days, great. If we cannot, then be honest and fund families. The cherishing belongs to children and their education, not to an institution that no longer works.

That is the fork in the road. Pick one, and do it now.