Greg Adams, Treasurer, The Committee to Say No, 11 Bowen Street, #2075, Claremont, NH 03743
On March 10, The Future of CLAREMONT Schools is on the Ballot
vote no on article 8
Check out the
Claremont Folks
Cartoon Series here…
Click here for the Sensible Schools
VOTER’s GUIDE
Click here to see how Article 8 hides a Budget Bomb within its confusing language
Article 2
The School Budget
Vote YES on Article 2 to Ensure a LOWER School Budget Next Year
In addition to Article 8, there are several articles that ask voters to make important decisions.
Article 2 in the actual proposed school budget for next year. It proposes a spending level LESS Than what was included in last year’s budget. Vote YES on Article 2 if you want to lock in a lower schools budget and lower taxes for next year. If Article 2 is defeated, by default a HIGHER budget is adopted. So vote YES on Article 2 to ensure a lower school budget.
Article 7
Open Enrollment
Vote YES on Article 7 to keep Claremont Tax Dollars in Claremont
Article 7 relates to Open Enrollment.
There are a lot of moving parts in the Open Enrollment debate, but what you should know is that this is NOT an article for or against Open Enrollment as an idea or policy. That is being fought at the State level. This is just an article to limit the number of transferees to protect Claremont from having tax dollars transferred to other towns.
Vote YES on Article 7 to make sure our tax dollars stay here.
Article 8
Budget Cap
Vote NO on Article 8 to Keep Sports, Arts, and The Tech Center in the Budget
If you have read Article 8 and find it confusing, join the club! Because what initially looks like a proposal to limit growth in future school budgets to 3% a year is actually a proposal to cut all future school budgets by nearly 25%.
Here is how to decode Article 8: The article points to THIS CURRENT YEAR’S spending as the baseline for all future budgets. And this year’s spending was dramatically cut to cover a $5 million disaster.
So the cuts made this year — no sports, no arts, no extracurriculars, a severe shortage of teachers — would stay in place forever.
That’s correct. No sports…forever.
Close the Claremont Tech Center…forever.
No arts…forever.
No extracurriculars…forever.
That’s why it is critical to vote no and defeat Article 8. Learn more about the Claremont School Election below…
Click here for an explanation of each of the Articles on the Ballot
As explained above, Article 8 masks a massive spending cut of more than
$9 million dollars for the Claremont schools.
A spending reduction of that size is not possible with the elimination of sports, the Tech Center and all extracurriculars.
That is because a significant amount of the school budget is MANDATED spending, required by Federal and State laws. This mandates REQUIRES certain levels of spending on Special Education and other programs. SO those parts of the budget CANNOT be cut.
The Article is purposely worded to sound reasonable…it says basically “future budgets will grow no more than inflation”.
But it ALSO says that every future budget will be based on THIS YEAR’s SPENDING, a level of spending that included one-time cuts in response to the deficit crisis.
Article 8 Would make those cuts permanent.
Vote NO on Article 8.