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.”
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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.
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.
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: 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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.”
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?”
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.
