Unity Elementary School

As we are all aware, the Unity School District has faced a significant financial shortfall  as we are currently part of SAU 6 and share administrative and business operations. As we have all been discovering, longstanding issues including errors in financial reporting, miscalculations of unassigned fund balances, and insufficient internal controls over budgeting and compliance have led to a deficit in both Claremont and Unity.

The SAU 6 (School Administrative Unit 6) has been the shared “corporate office” for Unity and Claremont, managing budgeting, payroll, accounting, HR, and state paperwork. This can help alleviate the financial impact of building and maintaining a full administrative team in one town and instead spread the cost across several according to the size of each district.

Unity Elementary, being its own separate district from Claremont and a separate entity from the SAU 6, and has its own operating budget. We have our own elected school board that works with the Unity Elementary School Principal to manage what happens day-to-day at the school: teaching, programs, local decisions. 

The SAU 6 board combines both the Claremont and Unity school boards. As a single SAU board, the board makes decisions based on information the SAU administrators give them.  As it turns out, mismanagement for a number of years produced information that was inaccurate. This also resulted in an inaccurate tax rate for the town of Unity.

Poor money management, weak accounting, reports that included overstating revenue and incorrect fund balances led to the deficit we find ourselves with. Whether it was incompetence, negligence, or something else, all of these issues started at the SAU level and both Claremont and Unity are feeling the impact.

Together, with our principal, we have slashed costs (including cutting after-school & summer programs, freezing hiring for open positions, trimming many other smaller expenses that add up) and tapped into our trust funds and reserves to bring the real hit to almost zero. We are still on track to be fully independent from SAU 6 starting the next fiscal year in July 2026. 

As a reminder, the decision to split from SAU 6 was decided before any of these financial impacts came to light and was always about Unity’s independence and the best interests of our educational community.