Know Who You’re Dealing With: How 20 Votes Cut Croydon’s School Budget and 377 Put It Back

Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Robert Greene’s nineteenth law warns against offending the wrong person. In 2022 a 20-to-14 vote cut Croydon’s school budget by more than half. The town that answered had fought the state over its schools before, and it brought 379 voters to a meeting that needed 283.

On Saturday, March 12, 2022, 34 voters came to the Croydon School District’s annual meeting. The proposed budget was about $1.7 million. It paid for a village school serving about two dozen children in kindergarten through fourth grade, and tuition for about 50 older students who attend school in other towns. Ian Underwood, a member of the town’s Selectboard, rose with a floor amendment to cut it to $800,000. He had done the arithmetic in a pamphlet he called “Budget, or Ransom”: 80 students at $10,000 apiece. The amendment passed, 20 to 14, and the district’s business administrator said the result was a legally binding budget. Fifty-six days later, 379 Croydon voters filled the dining hall at Camp Coniston and put the money back, 377 to 2.

Robert Greene’s nineteenth law is about reading people before you move against them. Know who you are dealing with, it says, and do not offend the wrong person. The cost of an insult or a raid depends on who receives it. The costliest mistake is to misjudge the target: to take a quiet opponent for a weak one, or to assume that people who have not fought you yet will not fight you at all.

Croydon is the cleanest New Hampshire case of that law broken. Underwood read a 20-to-14 vote in a room of 34 as the verdict of a town with 565 registered voters. The town he was dealing with had already fought the state Department of Education over how it schooled its children, paid a lawyer through crowdfunding, and won a law signed in its own schoolhouse. He bet that the voters who stayed home in March would stay home again. They were the wrong people to bet on.

Twenty votes

Nothing about the March vote was illegal. Anyone on the checklist could have come, and almost no one did. The town clerk counted 565 registered voters, which means the cut passed with the support of about 3.5 percent of them. The proposed budget had carried an estimated property tax increase of nearly 19 percent, and Underwood argued the town could live on less than half. “To say we can’t do this is a failure of imagination,” he said. He had moved to Croydon in 2007 as part of the Free State Project, the libertarian migration to New Hampshire, and he later told NHPR the cut was his own doing, not the movement’s.

The chair of the school board was Jody Underwood, his wife. She told the Valley News she had not supported the $800,000 figure. NHPR reported that she knew of the plan before the meeting, did not think she had a duty to warn the public, and did not expect it to pass. Whatever anyone expected, the board now had to run a school district on $800,000, and it had until April 1 to send that budget to the state.

What the cut meant was concrete. Under the smaller budget, NHPR reported, the board planned to allot $9,000 per student for older children, while Newport High School, where many of them go, charged about $18,000. Parents with several children talked about paying close to $30,000 themselves to keep them in the local public schools. The board weighed replacing the village school with learning pods run by Prenda, a private company, staffed by guides instead of accredited teachers.

The town he was dealing with

Croydon is a Sullivan County town of about 800 people with no public school past the fourth grade. It pays tuition for older students to attend a school of their choice, and its residents have defended that arrangement before, hard. In 2014 the school board began paying tuition at Newport Montessori School, a private school that charged about $8,200 a year, against about $12,000 at Newport’s public schools. The state Department of Education wrote that the practice was illegal. The board refused to stop. It hired former New Hampshire Supreme Court Justice Chuck Douglas and launched an online crowdfunding campaign to pay him. The state sued the district in 2015 and won a Superior Court order to end the payments.

Croydon appealed, and while the appeal waited, the Legislature took up a measure that came to be called the Croydon bill. Senate Bill 8 let districts without a public school for certain grades pay tuition at nonsectarian private schools. It passed the Senate 14 to 9 and the House 210 to 147. Then-Gov. Chris Sununu signed it on June 29, 2017, at the Croydon Village School, and said that day that a lot of folks “don’t understand the uniqueness of a town like Croydon.” The school board chair at that signing was Angi Beaulieu.

That is the town Underwood cut. Saving money and private schooling did not offend it; it had gone to court to pay a private school less than the public one charged. This was a town that had organized once to protect a specific arrangement for its children, and it read the cut as an attack on that arrangement. Beaulieu, by 2022 a former board chair and one of the 14 votes against the cut, put the town’s mood plainly to NHPR: “People have moved into our town for school choice, and now we’re the laughing stock.”

The bet on an empty room

Read that statute the way the cut’s defenders did. New Hampshire makes a school meeting’s money vote hard to undo. A do-over counts only if the ballots equal half the checklist from the meeting before, and Croydon’s annual meetings usually drew fewer than 50 people, NHPR reported. A rule that keeps a handful of people from reopening the annual meeting’s budget also protected a cut made by a handful of people. In Croydon the bar was 283 voters.

Residents filed a petition with 145 signatures asking the board for a special session and a revote, and the board set it for May 7. The superintendent, Frank Perotti, gave the town’s case in one line: “Twenty people made a decision that wasn’t OK.” The other side’s strategy was to keep the count below 283. Underwood mailed households urging a boycott. Yard signs around town already read “We Stand Up for Croydon Students.” His mailer read “Stand up for Croydon students and taxpayers.” Jim Peschke, a former school board member who backed the cut, explained the arithmetic to NHPR: “the way to vote no is to not show up.”

This is the moment Law 19 describes. The plan rested on a judgment about people: that the voters who missed the March meeting were indifferent, and that indifference would hold for eight more weeks. Croydon’s own record said the opposite. These were residents who had once raised money to fight the state in court over a few students’ tuition. A cut of more than half the school budget gave them a deadline and a number to hit.

377 to 2

Organizers began recruiting voters before the March meeting adjourned. Between March and May, 52 people registered by the time the supervisors of the checklist last met, and 18 more registered on the morning of the vote, bringing the rolls to 635. On May 7 the special meeting moved to the dining hall at Camp Coniston, the only room in town big enough, and filled it to standing room. The count was 379 ballots, 96 more than the law required, and nearly 60 percent of the town’s registered voters. The vote to restore the budget was 377 to 2. Hope Damon, who helped organize the revote, told NHPR that “Croydon turned out and fixed the mistake.”

Underwood did not attend. He sent the Valley News a text that cast the result as 380 people using the threat of force to take money from 420 people who did not want to give it. That is a consistent position for a man who titled his budget pamphlet “Budget, or Ransom.” It also shows the misjudgment. His plan needed his side’s voters to stay away, and they did. It had no answer for the 377 who came.

The long memory

Greene warns that some people forget nothing, and Croydon kept score. In August 2022 Ian Underwood resigned from the Selectboard by letter, without explanation. When the chair read it into the record, most of the roughly 50 residents at the meeting applauded, and the board appointed Amie Freak, a mother of three who had campaigned for the revote, to the open seat. In March 2023 Beaulieu ran for the school board against Jody Underwood and won, 229 to 36.

About 120 voters came to the 2023 school meeting, roughly three times the 2022 turnout, NHPR reported, and they passed a $1.7 million budget by a wide margin. Ian Underwood asked them to add $700,000 for reading help, including 10 reading specialists. It failed. NHPR counted at least five people from the campaign to reverse the cuts who had since moved into state or local office. A town that had let 34 people set its school budget sent about 120 to the next one.

A fair objection

The people who backed the cut have a real argument, and it deserves its strongest form. Town meeting belongs to whoever attends. Joe Marko, a selectman who supported the cut, said it to NHPR on the day of the revote: “Everyone here should have been back here in March.” He is right that the March vote was lawful and that the absent majority had the same notice as the 20 who voted yes. He is right, too, that an estimated tax increase of nearly 19 percent in a town of about 800 is a burden worth a fight.

But Greene’s law grades the reading of people, and on that test the spending argument does not help. Underwood may have had a case on cost. He did not have the town, and a vote in a room of 34 told him nothing about the 531 voters who were not there. Croydon’s history told him the most important thing about them. When this town believes its children’s schooling is under attack, it organizes, raises money, goes to court or to Concord, and wins.

The verdict

Greene’s nineteenth law holds in Croydon, and the town shows its New Hampshire form. In a state where a few dozen people can set a budget at town meeting, the people you offend include everyone on the checklist, whether or not they came. Underwood mistook a quiet town for an indifferent one and a narrow procedural win for consent. The town answered with the one number the statute made hard to reach, cleared it by almost a hundred votes, and then remembered the next March.

The lesson reaches any select board, school board or petitioner who wins at a thin meeting. Before you act on a small room’s vote, ask who stayed home and why, and what they did the last time someone touched the thing you are about to touch. In Croydon the answer was in the town’s own history: a governor’s bill signing in the same schoolhouse the cut put at risk.

Next: Law 20, on refusing to commit to anyone, tested against the New Hampshire record.

Fact check

Editor’s note: Commentary and analysis, not legal advice. This piece is about how a public decision was made and reversed, not about the merits of any school model or of any person; no one named is accused of wrongdoing. Facts about the 2022 and 2023 meetings come from the Valley News, NHPR and InDepthNH as cited. The statute is quoted from its current text at gc.nh.gov. The GSR Power Index is editorial, not data. Granite State Report did not request comment from Ian or Jody Underwood or from the other people quoted for this piece; any of them may write to the address above and a response will be added with its date.