Tomorrow’s School Board Meeting: The Budget Is Public, But the Data Still Isn’t

Preparing for the Spring fleecing

SAU 6 has started building the FY27 budget and has published a “Budget Presentation” plus operating budgets for the 3-school and 4-school configurations. Unfortunately, the district continues to publish core financial information only as PDFs. SAU 6

PDFs are fine for printing. They are terrible for analysis. When public budgeting is distributed in a format that cannot be cleanly filtered, summed, or compared without manual re-entry, it predictably blocks taxpayer review. Whether that outcome is intentional or merely habitual, personally, (I suspect the former), the effect is the same: it raises the cost of oversight and lowers the odds that anyone catches bad assumptions early. After all, that’s how they created our current deficit crisis.

So we did the obvious thing: we converted the PDFs into spreadsheets and compared the two models line by line.

Meeting notice

The SAU 6 site lists the next Claremont School Board events as: SAU 6

• Claremont School Board Policy Subcommittee Meeting: Jan 7, 4:00 PM to 5:15 PM
• Claremont School Board Meeting: Jan 7, 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM

Location for regular meetings: Sugar River Valley Regional Technical Center (SRVRTC), 111 South St., Claremont, NH. SAU 6

Note: SAU 6 states that budget subcommittee meetings are public but not open for public comment, unlike full board meetings, where the public may speak and be ignored. SAU 6

What SAU 6 published

In its “Initial Budget Plans Shared” post, SAU 6 says the FY26 budget inputs were flawed and that prior year bills and other pressures require building FY27 “from scratch.” It also frames the budget around three priorities: student achievement (stop laughing!), school configuration, and the tax rate impact. SAU 6

The district linked:

• A budget presentation
• An operating budget for a 3-school configuration
• An operating budget for a 4-school configuration SAU 6

What the numbers say (3-school vs 4-school)

From the two operating budget PDFs:

• 3-school total: $43,968,103.77
• 4-school total: $44,861,008.03
• Difference (4-school minus 3-school): $892,904.26

That difference is not driven by transportation or food service. It is mainly support-service overhead.

The big drivers

Net change (4-school minus 3-school) by major category:

• Support services (functions 2100 to 2699): +$1,038,285.95
• Instruction (functions 1100 to 1999): -$147,564.19
• Net difference: +$892,904.26

The largest function-level adds in the 4-school model are:

• 2410 School administration: +$475,461.92
• 2600 Facilities operations and maintenance: +$287,812.88
• 2120 Guidance: +$135,551.95
• 2130 Health services: +$111,540.67
• 1200 Special education instruction: +$93,050.39
• 1100 Regular instruction: -$281,952.88 (a partial offset)

The structural reality

The 4-school model effectively “turns on” the complete set of fixed costs for an additional school site.

One location code (20, labeled as Disnard in the presentation materials) increases by +$5,571,321.01 in the 4-school model, while other locations decrease by -$4,678,416.75 to partially offset it. Most of that offset is concentrated in two location codes (15 and 25), which drop by a combined -$4,628,522.47.

In plain English:

• The 4-school model adds the fixed cost of operating an additional school site.
• It attempts to pay for that by moving instruction and SPED spending out of other sites.
• The net is still +$892,904.26 higher.

What taxpayers should ask, out loud

1. Which positions are truly added in the 4-school model (new hires), and which are reassignments?
2. Which costs are one-time (setup) versus recurring (every year forever)?
3. What measurable outcomes justify about $0.9 million per year in added overhead?
4. If those outcomes do not materialize, what is the exit ramp? What will be reversed, and when?
5. Why are these budgets still being published only as PDFs, with no downloadable spreadsheet or exportable dataset?

Attachments (spreadsheets you can actually analyze)

• Full delta workbook (category rollups, function rollups, top line-item deltas): FY26-27_3v4_school_budget_deltas.xlsx
• Disnard “price tag” workbook (location-level deltas and Disnard breakdown): FY26-27_Disnard_price_tag.xlsx
• Function and category exports: FY26-27_function_deltas.xlsx, FY26-27_category_deltas.xlsx

If SAU 6 wants to make this easier for everyone, the fix is simple: publish budgets in machine-readable formats (XLSX or CSV) alongside the PDFs. Transparency is not a scan. It is a dataset.

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The opinions in this essay are the author’s alone and do not represent the policy, platform, or opinions of the Sullivan County GOP.