The Sullivan County NH Republican Committee

Tag: Claremont

  • 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.

    FY26-27_3v4_school_budget_deltasDownload
    FY26-27_category_deltasDownload
    FY26-27_Disnard_price_tagDownload
    FY26-27_function_deltasDownload

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

  • It Takes a School to Bankrupt a Village

    It Takes a School to Bankrupt a Village

    By Emily Sandblade

    Last March, I ran for a seat on the Claremont School Board and lost. Nowadays, I’m thrilled that I did.

    Besides the relief of not sitting on the business side of the table at school board meetings and facing a large crowd of upset and fearful people, I can now engage in a bit of “told ya so.”

    Grants and Mismanagement

    I frequently said that local entities like the school system and the local government should be cautious about what federal and state grants they accepted.

    SAU 6 (and apparently the school board) believes the more grants, the merrier. But the school administration clearly couldn’t handle the volume, so here we are—looking like deer in the headlights.

    The main reason some grants aren’t worth pursuing is that studies show taking a federal grant costs the recipient about 1.5 times the revenue from the grant.

    SAU 6 is like the naïve businessman who loses on every small transaction but insists he’ll make it up on volume.

    I never would have thought administrative mismanagement (and I am hoping it’s only mismanagement) would be so severe that taking grants became even more unprofitable.

    A Growing Financial Hole

    So here we are. There’s a big hole in school revenue, the money has long been spent, and vendors have been left unpaid for weeks and months.

    Now, Claremont City Councilors sitting on the business side of the table have to co-sign a loan that looks an awful lot like kicking the can down the road.

    Due to state law, the City Council can’t set requirements for the district to get its act together. To get out of this mess, the School Board will need to do some and/or all of the following:

    1. Close things
    2. Sell stuff
    3. Fire people
    4. Raise taxes

    Generally, the go-to approach has been #4: raise taxes. (Or, in Claremont’s case, try to take from other districts.) This is no longer a viable approach.

    The Numbers Don’t Lie

    Take a look at the spreadsheet below showing demographics and school statistics for the last nine years.

    The numbers show that Claremont is economically crashing.

    • Median household income has declined from $60,583 in 2016 to $54,520 today—about $6,000 less.
    • Adjusted for inflation, median income should be around $76,000, which is $22,000 higher than it is now.
    • School costs per student have risen 50% between 2016 and 2024.

    You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see this is not sustainable. In fact, with declines in all proficiency scores, we’re not likely to see a lot of rocket scientists coming out of Claremont.

    • English Language Arts (ELA): 42% → 36%
    • Math: 34% → 20%
    • Science: 23% → 20%

    What This Means for Taxpayers

    This is what the town of Claremont is being asked to co-sign a note for, thereby committing taxpayers to either:

    • higher taxes, and/or
    • significant cuts to town services.

    I’m not going to suggest rejecting the loan to the SAU, but I am going to suggest a couple of bitter medicines to go with that sweet, sweet money:

    1. The city should use every scrap of influence and its bully pulpit to clean up the management of the SAU.
    2. The city must slow the downward spiral and refrain from pushing the property tax to over 10% of the median household income.

    Time to Act

    We are already at the point where:

    • our houses are devalued,
    • our business community has been crippled,
    • our town’s reputation is that of a very business-unfriendly place, and
    • our workforce is poorly educated.

    Raising taxes while failing to fix the education system that provides the future fuel for economic survival will simply push Claremont closer to total economic failure.

    This impending disaster needs to be viewed as an opportunity to get our city’s and our school system’s act together.

    Let’s not waste it.

    Blog post contributed by Emily Sandblade

  • Annual BBQ | Sept 6th | 12 PM – 4 PM

    Annual BBQ | Sept 6th | 12 PM – 4 PM

  • Delaying Education Reform Has Consequences

    Delaying Education Reform Has Consequences

    By Tom Luther

    Schools shouldn’t become museum pieces — they should serve families well.

    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

  • Claremont School District’s Financial Crisis

    Claremont School District’s Financial Crisis

    Introduction: A System in Survival Mode

    Parents in the Claremont School District (SAU6) are living through a crisis that can no longer be brushed aside as a temporary budget hiccup. The district is not merely facing a “tight year.” It is confronting a full-blown financial collapse brought on by years of mismanagement, structural deficits, and an inability to adapt to New Hampshire’s restrictive education funding model. The district’s own leaders have described their position as “survival mode.” For parents, the implication is clear: waiting for the state or municipal government to ride to the rescue is no longer realistic. Families need to make immediate, practical plans for their children’s education.

    This post explains how SAU6 got here, why legislative and municipal obstacles block a quick fix, and how parents can use Education Options edopt.org to take charge of their children’s education amid systemic breakdown.

    How Did We Get Here? Mismanagement and Lack of Oversight

    The immediate trigger of the crisis was the revelation that SAU6 failed to file for timely reimbursement of federal grants, leaving millions of dollars of anticipated revenue uncollected, compounding existing budget deficits that had already forced painful staff reductions and program cuts.

    Further investigation revealed that the district had not conducted proper financial audits for several years, meaning deficits accumulated silently. Cash reserves were depleted, and by the time the problem became public, SAU6 was unable to meet its obligations without emergency transfers and short-term fixes.

    The result has been a cycle of reactive measures: staff furloughs, canceled programs, deferred maintenance, and rising class sizes. For families, this translates into instability,  the very opposite of the aura public schools prefer to project.

    Why Can’t Claremont Just Fix This?

    At first glance, one might assume the solution is simple: raise local taxes or authorize an emergency bond. But the legal and legislative framework makes such remedies extremely difficult.

    State-Level Constraints

    New Hampshire funds education through state “adequacy grants” derived mainly from the Statewide Education Property Tax (SWEPT) and general state revenues, with local property taxes covering the remainder of the budgeted funds, creating wide spending disparities between property-rich and, as in the case of Claremont, property-poor communities.

    Borrowing Prohibitions

    By law, school districts cannot borrow money to cover operating deficits. While capital projects can be bonded, a hole in the operating budget must be filled within the fiscal year. That leaves districts like SAU6 boxed in: they cannot simply borrow their way out of insolvency.

    No Midyear Tax Increases

    State law also restricts municipalities from enacting midyear tax hikes or special appropriations without following specific legal channels. These rules were designed to ensure fiscal discipline, but now function as handcuffs when a crisis demands urgent flexibility.

    Claremont’s Charter Limitations

    At the municipal level, the City of Claremont’s charter adds a layer of constraint. The city cannot simply call a special referendum to authorize new funding for the schools. Doing so would require either an amendment to the charter passed by the legislature or a judicial petition,  both time-consuming and politically fraught.

    In practice, this means that even if the community is willing to raise revenue, after already sustaining a significant property value reassessment and resulting tax increase, to save its schools, the mechanisms to do so are locked behind structural barriers.

    What This Means for Parents

    The uncomfortable truth is that parents cannot wait for the legislature to fix Claremont’s problems. The gears of Concord turn slowly by design, and even the most sympathetic lawmakers cannot unwind decades of restrictive funding policy overnight. Municipal officials, meanwhile, are bound by charter restrictions that prevent quick intervention.

    For families, the question becomes immediate and personal: What do I do to ensure my child receives an education this year?

    The law in New Hampshire is clear: parents are legally responsible for ensuring their children are educated. Public schools fulfill that duty only as long as they are functional. When the system falters, the responsibility does not disappear.

    Education Options (EdOpt): A Practical Lifeline for Families

    This is where edopt.org comes in. EdOpt is a resource built precisely for moments like this, when families need to explore options beyond their assigned public school.

    Parents visiting the site can:

    EdOpt’s value lies not only in presenting options but in helping parents navigate them quickly. In a crisis, time is the one resource families cannot afford to waste.

    What Is To Be Done?

    The collapse of SAU6 is not just an institutional failure; it is a test of community resilience. While parents cannot rewrite state law overnight, they can take control of their children’s education. By using tools like edopt.org, families can fulfill both their legal obligation and their moral duty to ensure that the next generation is not left behind by bureaucratic paralysis.

    The path forward will not be easy, and it will not be solved solely by local activism or legislative lobbying. But parents are not powerless. The choices you make today,  to explore alternatives, to demand accountability, to act decisively,  will shape your child’s future more than any budget vote in Concord.

    If you are a Claremont parent wondering what to do next, start here: visit edopt.org, explore your options, and take back control of your child’s education.

  • Emily Sandblade: Advocating for Claremont School Board Changes

    Emily Sandblade

    Emily Sandblade, 71, is running for a seat on the Claremont School Board, citing a strong commitment to improving educational standards and ensuring responsible fiscal management.

    Sandblade previously served one term in the New Hampshire House of Representatives, representing Goffstown, ten years ago. She is an engineer working part-time, a retired physicist, and a former college instructor in computer science and physics.

    Focus on Academic Improvement

    Sandblade emphasized the need to raise educational standards in Claremont schools.

    “Right now, students are scoring at a 38% competency level on standardized tests,” she said. “The School Board needs to heavily focus on getting the Claremont School District out of the bottom quarter of New Hampshire schools.”

    Fiscal Responsibility and Taxpayer Representation

    In addition to improving academics, Sandblade believes that taxpayers and stakeholders deserve better representation in school district decisions.

    “It takes a school to bankrupt a village,” she said. “Next year, education will cost about $28,000 per student. Are Claremont families receiving good value for the sharply increased taxes on their homes?”

    Commitment to Educational Choice

    Sandblade previously ran for the New Hampshire House in November from District 6, representing Claremont and Croydon. In that campaign, she advocated for expanding educational choice for parents while reducing the tax burden. She also supports the expansion of Educational Freedom Accounts, which provide tuition vouchers for families seeking alternatives to public schools.

    Please vote for Emily Sandblade for Claremont School Board on Tuesday, March 11, 2025!