Legislative Update: Claremont - October 17, 2025 Windham Independent

Legislative Update: Claremont

This Tuesday, I attended a joint Senate/House committee meeting about the Claremont school district issue. I would highly encourage everyone to watch the Senate Education 10/14/2025 meeting on the Senate YouTube channel (starting at 10minutes, 45 seconds in the stream). The legal counsel’s initial presentation is about half an hour long - the rest is questions, answers and discussion.

To make a long story short, the Claremont School district spent millions of dollars that they never had, due to a complete institutional control failure at all levels of the organization. The current estimate is over 5 million dollars, and the number is expected to continue climbing as even more expensive mistakes are discovered.

The deficit only came to light in August, and most of the top SAU6 administrators have either already resigned or have been placed on administrative leave.

It is hard to explain how dismal of a situation Claremont schools are in. In my entire career, I have never encountered this level of neglect and incompetence in an organization, including working in Romania immediately after the fall of the communist regime. And to be clear, neglect and incompetence is the most kind and generous way to describe this debacle - while it will be a long time until we unwind all related legal issues, I would not be surprised if this is much more serious than that. 

The district originally hoped that the deficit could be cleared by the summer of 2026, but it has become clear that is impossible, especially after Claremont received an additional 868k reassessment from SchoolCare. As of now, it is likely their deficit will be around 2 million, after all the cuts already made.

Here is a brief list of some of the issues presented:

• Unbeknownst to the school board, large federal grants reimbursements were held due to filing noncompliance by the administration
• Consistent fund balance miscalculations led to the 2025 tax rate being too low after the district reported an expected fund balance despite having a huge deficit
• Administration failed to attend finance committee meetings, did not provide manifests to school board members, etc.
• Auditors JUST completed the 2022 audit report in September 2025… and it was incomplete in certain areas (health insurance, for example, where employees terminated in 2024 were still receiving health insurance from the district) due to the failure of the administration to provide the needed information. The 2023-2025 audits are not still complete.
• Employee and retiree contributions to health insurance were calculated incorrectly, leading to the district overpaying.
• The accounting system was so poorly maintained that the general ledger effectively did not exist - it was meaningless, the numbers were unreliable and inaccurate. Expenditures were not entered into the system, etc.
• Bank accounts were not reconciled against the general ledger.
• The recently completed 2022 audit report describes board management oversight gaps, cash handling weaknesses, failure to perform adequate reconciliations, poor record retention practices, unsubstantiated balances, auditors repeated requests for information not fulfilled, grant reporting gaps...
• The former administration wrote out stipends to employees with no approval or oversight process.
• The cash reconciliation was still not completed as of Oct. 14.

We MUST make policy changes to ensure such failures never happen again, and we need to protect the Claremont children from having their education disrupted… and while the amendment discussed on Tuesday was nowhere near ready to become law, we are working hard finding the right solution as quickly as possible. Next week, I’ll cover some of the issues that led to this disaster and possible policy solutions next week.

Please reach out to me at 603 267 4142 (call or text), or by email at dpmwindham@gmail.com (a quick call or text after emailing me would ensure I never miss an email from you) with any questions or concerns. 

Daniel Popovici-Muller

Windham State Representative,

Vice Chairman, Finance II Committee

Education Funding Committee