HANOVER — Budget is top of mind for two candidates vying for one seat on the Hanover School Board.
Incumbent Tara Velozo, an IT executive, is facing challenger Christopher Rivet, a research scientist at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, for a three-year term on the board.
The Hanover School Board has proposed a $17 million operating budget for the fiscal year starting in July, a 2.89% increase over the current budget.
In the fall, the School Board was facing down a 6% budget increase due to a massive and unexpected spike in health insurance costs and an unexpected drop in reserve revenue that could otherwise have been used to offset the increase, according to a letter from board chair Kelly McConnell.
The administration and board were able to bring the final proposed budget increase below 3% through changes such as cutting vacant positions and decreasing staffing in the English for Speakers of Other Languages program, opting not to add to reserve funds; delaying the start a pre-K program at the Bernice A. Ray School, and keeping staffing level.
With the drop in revenue, the school tax rate in Hanover is expected to increase by more than 7% if the proposed school district budget passes.
Christopher Rivet
Rivet, 41, has two children at the Ray School and two younger children. He is a former teacher at Windsor High School and has not held elected office in the past.
“Unsustainable” budget increases are Rivet’s primary motivator for getting into the race, and he described the district’s financial situation as “the immediate fire to put out” in a recent interview.
He pointed to discontent around the budget process, including the response from the Hanover Finance Committee to the Hanover and Dresden budgets as an indicator of the ongoing problems.
“There’s clearly some acknowledgement of ‘taxes keep going up, what are we going to do to kind of stop this unsustainable increase,'” Rivet said.
The Hanover Finance Committee voted unanimously to support the proposed Hanover budget, but urged an extensive review of the district’s budgeting processes to curb future increases in a Feb. 18 letter. The committee recommended steps including starting the process earlier in the year and conducting “multi-year budgeting.”
“Structural changes to reduce future budgetary increases must be considered; compensation, benefit structure and staffing levels must be carefully examined,” the committee wrote.
As a research scientist, Rivet said his skills in identifying solutions for “complex problems” are especially applicable to the Dresden School District’s budget challenges. His professional experiences also make him good at “taking an abstract point of view, not making it personal.”
Tara Velozo
Incumbent Velozo, who declined to share her age, works in IT management and was first elected to the school board in 2023. Her two children graduated from Hanover High School in 2021 and 2022.
Velozo said she is running again because of “how highly I value education, particularly public education” and her “strong personal value for service.”
“My mom was a public school teacher for her entire career at the high school level, and I saw how hard she worked and how deeply she cared, and that made a big impression on me,” Velozo said.
If reelected, she hopes to focus her energy on making the budget process more efficient and figure out how to be as “effective as possible with our budgetary dollars in order to protect the high-quality educational programs that we provide to our students.”
The budget question is especially important amid a “lack of clarity on the federal and state level about funding streams” and ongoing pressures like increasing insurance costs.
“We were tasked with a very difficult challenge of integrating those unforeseen costs into our budget and I feel really proud of the work we all did,” Velozo said.