By GARRY RAYNO, Distant Dome

At a public hearing last week on a proposal to help the Claremont School District weather the storm of an unanticipated $5.1 million deficit, it was obvious House Republicans want no part of it.

Due to incompetent and less than honest administrators over the past three school years, the city’s school district has chopped staff, closed one elementary school, unfunded sports and other extracurricular activities and gone without substitute teachers among other cost savings measures.

But the school district still faces a nearly $2 million deficit at the end of the current school year and will not have the cash flow to open schools in the fall of 2026 without outside help.

Many of the Republican House members at the hearing wanted their pound of flesh from a city and its residents that have been reeling since Joy Manufacturing closed its factory in 1983.

Not long after Joy left town, Claremont and four other communities with diminished tax bases like Franklin and Pittsfield sued the state over how it funded public education.

Claremont may be the first to have to deal with a budget crisis of this magnitude, but it will not be the last in a state that actually pays about 20 percent of the cost of public education while the national average is 47 percent.

Claremont is not unique, there are numerous cities and towns across the state that struggle with a property tax base that is insufficient to pay for education and other needed services.

These places were once great communities to live in when the mills were spinning and the factories rolling out products.

Newport, Franklin, Pittsfield, Berlin, Ashland, Groveton, Stratford, and even Manchester.

None have fully recovered from the textile mills or factories moving south as the owners chased cheap labor.

However, these communities are loaded with apartment houses, other cheap shelter and lower real estate values, so young families flock there and school populations grow without the property tax base and they struggle to provide public education well below the high-quality education in communities with property wealth.

The system dependent on local property taxes to pay the bulk of public education costs may have worked when the state was more agrarian with mills and factories in the cities, but it is not equitable now for students or taxpayers.

Now rural communities in the North Country and in Sullivan County are suffering while southern New Hampshire flourishes due in large part to its proximity to the Massachusetts economy fueled by higher education, innovation and financial institutions.

The question many asked at the public hearing was how did it become so bad that the school district teeters on insolvency.

In many ways the cards are stacked against Claremont and other similar school districts.

The Claremont School Board is certainly not blameless as its members failed in their fiduciary duty to oversee the district’s administrators and their job performance.

They were warned well before August when the deficit was revealed that financial reports were not being filed on time as well as failures to provide the basic data needed to meet the requirements for federal grants the district included in its budgets.

But the board did nothing until the auditors alerted the board to the financial shenanigans administrators were performing on the district’s books.

In a city like Claremont with high property taxes, voters fail prey to candidates who promise “to hold the line on taxes” without taking the time to determine what that really means to the children in the community.

And in a community like Claremont with a poor tax base to draw on, it cannot offer competitive salaries for top administrators who will of course gravitate to the property wealthier districts with much higher salary levels.

“You get what you pay for,” in many cases when it comes to top talent for running school districts.

But the school district’s problems do not end in Claremont.

For the past eight years, the Department of Education had a commissioner who did just about everything he could to undermine public education in the state from experiential learning run top down from the department to the voucher program which will eventually bankrupt New Hampshire as similar programs have done to Arizona, Ohio and North Carolina.

All to fulfill a political agenda touted by the 1 percent to do away with public education in order to  avoid having to pay for other children’s education with their tax dollars.

The Department of Education’s focus under Frank Edelblut was not improving public education and you need look no further than the Legislative Budget Assistant’s performance audit on how the department handled special education disputes between parents and school districts to understand the mindset.

Another example is the 25 percent error rate in determining eligibility for the Education Freedom Account or voucher program administered by the Children’s Scholarship Fund New Hampshire in the program’s first two years based on a random compliance test done by the department.

The department was not focused on helping school districts in financial trouble and no amount of legislation passed in the upcoming session is going to change that.

Department of Education personnel are largely funded with federal Department of Education money.

If you are aware even a little, you know what is happening to that department under the current administration. Consequently the New Hampshire department may be significantly smaller in the very near future.

Passing bills that would have financially troubled school districts put into the state’s receivership will be meaningless unless there are people in the department to oversee the finances of those districts, and who have the expertise to juggle the complexities of school finances.

Hiring accountants just out of college is not going to work unless you want to see the calamities the DOGE kids fraught on the federal government here in New Hampshire.

Really fixing the problem is not that simple.

School districts like Claremont’s are bound to fail under the fundamentals of the state governing philosophy which is “tax the man behind the tree, don’t tax me.”

But the man behind the tree is every property owner in the state and how easy or difficult it is to pay those property tax bills is dependent on two things: personal wealth and a desirable zip code with property wealth.

GOP politicians love to talk about the New Hampshire Advantage — a slogan cooked up over a kitchen table in the middle of a political campaign to answer a well-thought-out economic development plan for the state — but it is not an advantage at all for far too many communities in the Granite State.

Unfortunately most of those communities are North of the Lakes Region and along the western edge of the state were they are out-of-sight and out-of-mind for most of the 424 lawmakers in Concord.

Until the education funding system changes in New Hampshire there will be more and more school districts like Claremont with poor administrators, fiduciary failure, and students educationally short-changed.

Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.

Distant Dome by veteran journalist Garry Rayno explores a broader perspective on the State House and state happenings for InDepthNH.org. Over his three-decade career, Rayno covered the NH State House for the New Hampshire Union Leader and Foster’s Daily Democrat. During his career, his coverage spanned the news spectrum, from local planning, school and select boards, to national issues such as electric industry deregulation and Presidential primaries. Rayno lives with his wife Carolyn in New London.