Last March, I ran for a seat on the Claremont school board and lost. Nowadays, I am thrilled that I did.
Besides the relief from 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 engage in “told ya so.”
I frequently said that local entities, such as the school system and local government, should be cautious about the federal and state grants they accept. SAU6 (and apparently the school board) believes that the more grants, the merrier. But the school administration clearly couldn’t handle the volume, so here we are, looking like deer in headlights. The main reason why some grants aren’t worth going after is that studies show that taking a federal grant costs the recipient 1.5 times the revenue from the grant. SAU6 is like the naive businessman who loses on every small transaction, but then says he’ll make it up on volume.
However, I never would have thought that administrative mismanagement (and I am hoping that it’s only mismanagement) would be so severe that taking grants became even more unprofitable.
So here we are. There’s a big hole in the school revenue; the money has long been spent, and vendors have been stiffed for weeks and months. And now those Claremont City Councilors who are sitting on the business side of the table have to co-sign for 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 usually been #4: raise taxes. (Or, in Claremont’s case, try to steal from other districts.) This is no longer a viable approach.
Take a look at the spreadsheet below showing some of the demographics and school statistics for the last 9 years.
Claremont Statistics
The numbers show that Claremont is economically crashing.
Median household income has declined from $60,583 in 2016 to $54,520, about $6,000 less. And that’s not adjusting for inflation. If we do adjust for inflation, median household income should be around $76,000. That’s $16,000 higher than it was in 2016, and $22,000 higher than it is now.
In the meantime, school costs per student have risen 50% between 2016 and 2024. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand that this is not sustainable. It’s a good thing, because with declines in all proficiency scores in English Language Arts, Math, and Science, there’s not going to be a lot of rocket scientists running around Claremont. ELA proficiency has dropped from 42% to 36%, and math from 34% to 20%. There’s a little hope: science has only dropped from 23% to 20%!
This is what the town of Claremont is being asked to co-sign a note for, thereby committing your taxpayers to either (a) get their taxes raised, and/or (b) take a real hit on delivery of town services.
I’m not going to suggest not approving the loan to the SAU, but I am going to suggest a couple of bitter medicines to go with that sweet, sweet money. One, the city should use every scrap of influence and its bully pulpit to clean up the management of the SAU, and (b) that the city slow the downward spiral and refrain from pushing the property tax to over 10% of the median household income.
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 is simply going to push Claremont closer to total economic failure. Soon.
This impending disaster needs to be viewed as an opportunity to get our city and our school system’s act together. Let’s not waste it.
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