Voting Recommendations
School Board Candidates
School Board
The school board is in desperate need of competent members who actually understand how to run the business of education. Most don't.
In this case, avoid the worst.
Don't vote for Brian Rapp.
Brian was previously chairperson of the School Board. During his watch, the Board chose not to conduct audits for several years. Due to this negligence of the school board, bad management took hold and stayed hidden for years.
Brian Rapp also has an obvious conflict of interest.
In the real world, no business would do this and expect to survive.
Warrant Articles
Article 2: Proposed $42.9M Main Budget
This budget includes a 20% increase in spending over what will be spent in the current year ($35.7M according to SAU#6 documents). But the taxpayers actually got taxed a lot more than that when they paid their 2025-2026 tax bills, because $5 million of taxpayer money went into paying off the bills from the previous fiscal year.
In other words, the school district plans on making up for lost time by dramatically increasing per pupil spending for the next year. No discussion about the 10% of students who left the school system in 2025, either. So we're spending more and more on fewer and fewer students.
Claremont voters really have no choice. State law requires that voters accept the budget as it is, or vote for the so-called "default budget." The default budget this year is over $44 million, so it's not a viable option for the tax-weary voter.
We reluctantly suggest voting YES on this warrant article, and then vote YES on Article 8 to limit this kind of nonsense in the future..
Articles 5 & 6: Sale of Buildings
These articles provide for the sale of Bluff Elementary School and the 40 Maple Avenue buildings.
By the time that the Bluff School closed, it was down to less than 150 students in 8 classrooms. School populations have declined throughout New Hampshire and no turnaround is in sight. This is especially true in Claremont. where school populations have declined to 1,376 students as of last fall. (Stevens High was built for 1,500 students--and only had 424 students last October. Next year will be lower, when Unity students leave.)
It does not make any financial sense to hold on to a building and pay for maintenance, heat and utilities year after year, waiting for a baby boom to start. Nor does it make sense for the school district to become a landlord, after proving so clearly that business management is their kryptonite.
Sell the buildings and get them back on the tax rolls! Have the schools focus on their only real business: education!
Vote YES.
Article 7: Adopting Open Enrollment
Open enrollment allows students to attend any public school in the state, with their home district required to pay the receiving district for their education. The payment must be at least 80% of the sending district’s per-pupil spending, and if that amount doesn’t cover the receiving district’s costs, parents must pay the difference.
This system is driven by a 2025 New Hampshire Supreme Court ruling that for the first time required sending districts to pay tuition for students attending schools in other districts—even if their own district does not have an open enrollment policy.
If a district does have an open enrollment policy, it can choose a percentage of students who can go to other schools (with 80% reimbursement by the student's home district), and the district can choose what percentage of the in-district student body can come in from other schools. This warrant article sets the percentage of outbound students at zero percent, and the percentage of inbound students at 5%.
Translated into plain English, this means that Claremont can take in around 70 students. After watching Charlestown, Cornish, Newport, and Unity all terminate their relationships with Claremont over the years, it's hard to see where these 70 students are going to come from. The warrant article also keeps most Claremont kids from having a shot at going to a school that isn't ranked in the bottom quartile of New Hampshire schools.
The reason that this warrant article is on the ballot is that state law dictates what happens when a school district doesn't have an open enrollment policy. It's Claremont's attempt to put in a non-open-enrollment open enrollment policy.
The arguments that have been put forth in favor of this warrant article are two-fold: (1) money that belongs to Claremont will flow out to other school districts (but then Claremont will have one less child to educate, so the school districts costs will drop), and (2) the district loses control of how the money will be spent (which is actually kind of hilarious considering the decades-long checkered financial history of the Claremont school district).
Open enrollment is relatively new in New Hampshire and some details still need to be ironed out to make it work as well as it does in the other two dozen states that have adopted it.
Even though the state's version of open enrollment is not yet perfect, the Claremont School Boards approach slams the door on those Claremont children who are poorly served by the district's low-achieving schools.
Vote No on Article 7.
Article 8: Spending Cap
This warrant article imposes a limit on per pupil spending starting with the 2027-2028 fiscal year. This limit (a spending cap) is based on per pupil spending during the 2025-2026 fiscal year adjusted for inflation. In case the school board needs to increase spending faster than the rate of inflation, they will need to get the approval 60% of the voters. This is a very low bar: most school budgets, both in Claremont and in the rest of the state, have passed by even larger margins.
For the last six years, per pupil spending has risen much faster than the rate of inflation. It is significantly above the average per pupil cost for New Hampshire, yet proficiency levels for English Language Arts, Math, and Science score in the lowest 25% of the state.
In 2024-2025, Claremont's per pupil cost was $26,013. For the same year, the New Hampshire average per pupil cost was $22,700. This pattern has held since at least 2012, the first year that data is available from the New Hampshire Department of Education.
Claremont citizens have almost no control over this rapid growth of the school budget. That is why a spending cap is necessary: it strongly encourages the school board and school administrators to look at what works and what doesn't, to establish criteria to evaluate program success, and, most importantly, to stop using the people who pay the bills as an infinite ATM.
The financial mismanagement which surfaced in August, 2025, should have been sufficient evidence that there needs to be much more active monitoring of school operations by the citizenry. If that wasn't clear enough, the board chairpersons statement that none of them were accountants, and they had no clue what was going on was even more persuasive that public scrutiny was desperately needed. The spending cap is a tool that will bring sunlight into the dark corners of Claremont school finance and operations.
Vote YES on Article 8.