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February 2025 NEWFOUNDLAKELIFE.COM LETTER TO THE EDITOR
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Greg BARKER CHIMNEY & HEATING
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(603) 254-6101 Alexandria, NH 03222
Dear Newfound Area School District community:
When I asked for your vote last year, I promised to work to put parental rights before the au- thority of the district, to make the district as transparent as is legally allowed, and to rein in spending. I do believe that transparency has improved, and I think the district has a long way to go with spending and parental rights.
Come this summer, I will no longer be a member of your school board. For my detractors, this is surely cause for celebra- tion, however others support the positions I've taken on various matters, my unconventional ap- proach, and the small victories we've had. The greatest victories so far are that the school admin- istration is doing a much better job with being open and trans- parent with the public, that (un- like in other years) there was no evidence of shenanigans in the most recent School Board elec- tion, and that (after a very lively debate) there is a reasonable ap- proach to ensure all past Pre-K students continue to have access to our programs. These are huge improvements.
Regarding the public's right to know laws, we've a few issues that might be cleaned up, and there's some legal action still pending but, overall, the district has become much more respon- sive to requests for information and proactive in its publishing of information on the website. Su- perintendent Hoiriis has been at- tentive to your expectations, and the desire by some members of the school board to not change earlier policies seems to have, in many circumstances, abated, with a noteworthy exception - parental rights.
The board recently voted to leave parents (and the public at- large) generally unaware of what forms of literature are available to their kids in the school libraries and classrooms, creating an opt- out program, by title, in the event that a parent or guardian disap-
proves of a book's content. This includes literature that could be described as pornographic and (in at least one case) involving a detailed narrative of sexual in- tercourse between a minor and his uncle. The trouble with this policy, beyond what some may argue is its immorality, is it puts the responsibility of knowing the content of every book in the school library on the shoulders of parents. How is a parent to know what book to disallow if he or she doesn't know the content of each book? We, members of the board, teachers, and perhaps even the librarians, are unfamil- iar with all of the titles of all of the books and their content in the libraries, so it seems quite un- reasonable to expect parents to have that knowledge. As a par- ent, I find this type of literature disgusting, but given my support for parental rights and given the expressed desire by some parents to make this unfortunate mate- rial available to their children, I recently made a proposal for an opt-in policy where a parent who wishes for their child to view this sort of material could sign a form to make it available to their kid. This was voted down by the school board, choosing instead the ineffective policy of opting out. To me, this is troubling, and while Fran Wendelboe and I voted against it, the other mem- bers of the school board all voted in favor of this policy. All of them. Twice. Absent a new state law, a change via a future board, or a vote at a deliberative session, kids will have virtually unfettered access to harmful literature going forward.
School spending is another challenge - your school budget is out of control. In 2023 there was a breach of the financial data of the school district. Evi- dently, much of that data could not be recovered. This has left the district at a disadvantage for accounting for spending in past years. A few issues have come up and the board has voted to spend
money in a manner that I feel is improper. Additionally, it seems that your school budget com- mittee Intends to ask for your support in March to remove the tax cap that currently exists. This should cause you some concern in that your taxes are already too voluminous, your tax base is diminishing, and your cost of operation is not diminishing commensurately. In other words, if you live in Alexandria, Dan- bury, Bristol, or New Hampton, your taxes are probably going to go up over the next several years—a lot.
If you truly care about the issues in this letter, the only way you're going to prevent bad stuff from happening is by 1) running for school board when the op- portunity arises, 2) taking a day out of your life to go to the de- liberative session on February 1st (bring a barf bag) and 3) vote against the warrant articles in March. If you don't, there's not much you can do to stop our community's kids from being in- fluenced by things that we may not agree with, and there's no way to stop your taxes from be- coming astronomical. While it is the responsibility of your elected representatives to make sure that the school administration is doing its job properly, the center of gravity on fixing what ails the district rests with you. Only you can prevent this from getting worse, and only you can make it improve. Deliberative session is not fun, in fact, it's horrible, but if you don't participate, then you stand to suffer financially, and more importantly, kids will be exposed to stuff that they need not see during their childhood and teenage years. I'm grateful for having been able to serve you this far. I'm looking forward to the next several months, and I hope that you will pick up the baton and run with it. Thanks very much, and God bless you and your families.
Respectfully,
Bill Jolly, SAU 4 Board Member
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