By Tom Luther
When Claremont’s progressive elites threw out the SAU6 warrant article and added more than a million dollars in spending, I found myself on the losing side—joined by just 47 “No” voters. The replacement budget never went through public review, yet there was hardly a peep from the liberal media. Instead, large quantities of mediocre white wine were consumed in celebration. A former mayor, state representatives, union officials, and city councilors gathered in the Stevens auditorium to toast their coup over property owners.
Years later, the consequences of that default budget cramdown are clear. Claremont’s progressive elites spent money they didn’t have, and much of it still lacks proper accounting. By contrast, when a 13-year-old transgender policy came up for discussion recently, the school board meeting had to be rescheduled due to violent protesters. The priorities of progressive elites are revealed by their actions: financial chaos is celebrated, while social chaos is defended.
How Did We Get Here?
The current crisis is the direct descendant of that warrant cramdown, worsened by years of delayed audits that allowed the problem to fester. With just a month of cash left, a financial warning light finally came on. How did SAU6 go broke? Slowly at first, and then all at once.
Claremont suffers from a distinct lack of fiscal prudence among its progressive elites. They would rather risk systemic destruction than lose power. It’s a scorched-earth approach to education: if they can’t have it, no one can. Education itself becomes secondary—it’s about control and spending other people’s money. The kids are almost irrelevant within this dominance hierarchy.
The Volinsky Lawsuit
Blame falls heavily on the Volinsky retirement lawsuit. A Hail Mary pass from the pied piper of income taxes might have seemed like a way to pay the bills. Why change course if free money might be coming? But the real cost of the Volinsky lawsuit is the culture of dependency and stagnation it has fostered among local elites.
For thirty-five years, the lawsuit has distracted from and impaired genuine reform. Socialist Superman is not coming to the rescue on a free-range unicorn.
The Good News and the Bad News
The good news: Reality is making a comeback. Price matters again, and value for the dollar is regaining prominence. For those with an engineer’s mindset, the future looks brighter.
The bad news: Virtue signaling is no longer enough. You need to do the work—and show your work—to get credit. Not academic credit, which increasingly has little market value, but practical results that matter in the real world. Reasoning with letters and numbers is as relevant as lettering in a sport.
A Way Forward
The robber barons are no longer industrialists; they hide in plain sight on town greens, councils, and nonprofit boards. Education funding has allowed the perfect to become the enemy of the good. In the name of “education,” we are impoverishing young adults and leaving children uneducated. Schools risk becoming like Shaker furniture—a vacant reminder of social failure.
We can either continue to hope the Volinsky unicorn will ride to the rescue with other people’s money—or reform the system to better serve parents and children at affordable prices. Only one of those paths leads to prosperity.
The Bright Future of Education
The irony is that true education still has a bright future. It will be a parent–student–teacher-focused future, not the centralized Horace Mann/Dewey model we’ve endured for over a century. We are moving back toward small, mixed-age, experiential schools—the model that served New England so well for so long.
Ignoring that lesson is too expensive, even in Claremont.
Blog Post Contributed by Tom Luther
