When Terese Bastarache returned to her truck after last year’s Merrimack Valley School District annual meeting, she cried.

“We felt like we had gotten enough individuals educated that we would be able to hold the budget from being dramatically increased, and we fell short,” Bastarache, a Loudon resident, recalled.

After this year’s marathon meeting ended around midnight, Bastarache returned to the Merrimack Valley parking lot and her eyes welled up in tears once more.

“We won. We won,” she declared in a video posted to social media, her voice breaking up.

For roughly four hours on March 6, Bastarache had held court at the microphone inside the Merrimack Valley High School gym, battling the moderator and other meeting attendees through a series of motions that ended in the passage of a $2 million cut to the school district’s proposed budget. It was the first time in anyone’s memory that the district’s budget had failed to pass as proposed.

For Bastarache, a well-known Republican activist, the vote was the culmination of a years-long grassroots campaign that demonstrated a level of connection to national politics that is not always invoked on the local level.

“Think about President Trump,” Bastarache said she reminded the 200 people she had assembled in a group chat the day of the vote. “Think about how he took a bullet to the ear and he said, ‘Fight, fight, fight.’ He needs us to show up because it is the school districts where the majority of our tax dollars are going.”

“If we are not good stewards of every single dollar going to our school district, guys, we are not going to take back this country,” she said.

Bastarache, a hospice nurse and the owner of a small business in Boscawen, gained statewide notoriety when she was arrested for disrupting a 2021 Executive Council meeting where officials discussed COVID vaccines. The charges against her and others who were arrested were ultimately dropped.

She is active in the conservative group We the People NH and ran unsuccessfully for the Executive Council in 2024.

The campaign

In an interview after the vote to cut the budget, Bastarache laid out the blueprint for the multi-year campaign she waged, describing a level of organization and support from the county Republican party that is unusual for a school district annual meeting. She said she has already fielded messages from people in other communities who are interested in replicating what she helped pull off in Merrimack Valley.

Bastarache said the organizing effort started a couple of years ago and involved an “education campaign” with neighbors about their property taxes.

“If you find someone who is fiscally conservative, who’s concerned about their ability to keep their head above water with the current tax burden, you need to educate them that probably the most important vote is going to be their school board budget vote,” she said. “It’s probably more important than who you vote for for president because it’s where your taxes are going and it’s also where we’re sending our children, which is our most precious resource.”

Each new resident of the five-community school district that Bastarache and her group encountered got added to the group chat. The group also posted polls on the Loudon community Facebook page.

“If you answered the poll a certain way, [we] knew that you were politically aligned with the group and then we would pull people into that [Facebook] Messenger group,” Bastarache said.

She said she and other Loudon organizers also received about $500 from the Merrimack County Republicans, which they used to send text messages to all registered Republicans in the district. Separately, a group that Bastarache did not work closely with mailed out a letter to registered Republicans in Loudon calling on them to show up for the annual meeting.

The New Hampshire’s Republican Party “is starting to say that these are partisan races and you do have two polar opposite ways of governing,” Bastarache said. “If we don’t rein in and be careful at the local level, we are going to be subject to an income tax and sales tax here in the state of New Hampshire, or we’re going to continue to lose our tax base.”

Scott Maltzie, the chairman of the Merrimack County Republican Committee, said this was the first year his group financed municipal and local school political efforts.

“The Democratic Party, even though these are supposed to be non-partisan elections and non-partisan things, has been actively involved for many, many years,” Maltzie said in an interview. “And we may be a little late to the party, but we are definitely going to continue to be involved.”

Efforts to reign in government spending are nothing new, but they’ve gained new prominence lately.

“We’re seeing it at the federal level with DOGE, we’re seeing it at the state level with COGE, and certainly we would be an advocate for fiscal responsibility at the local level, as well,” Maltzie said, referring to the groups working to cut spending at the federal and state levels.

The meeting

As the Merrimack Valley School District annual meeting approached, Bastarache and others prepared six potential amendments to the district’s proposed operating budget of $51.7 million.

When Bastarache rose to the microphone for the first time, she started with the biggest cut of the six, which would have dropped the district’s spending plan to $47.9 million.

She said she was “very surprised” when it failed by a relatively small margin, 321 to 281. She returned to the bleachers where her organizing group sat and asked them which of the five remaining amendments she should propose next.

The group settled on $49.7 million, which Bastarache described as “last year’s budget plus 3%.”

Shortly after 11 p.m., moderator Charlie Neibling read the results: 267 in favor of the amended budget, and 250 opposed.

As Bastarache addressed her followers on social media afterward, she said she was in shock. She said her goal had been a $400,000 reduction. What voters approved was nearly five times more.

“We showed up and we actually got the proposed budget down by $1.9 million and the remedy and the formula is just to simply create a group chat,” she said.

“Unbelievable. Un-flipping-believable.”

The future

Bastarache has two children who attend Loudon Elementary School and she said she is satisfied with their education. However, she plans to pull them from the district and send them to a charter school when they reach middle school.

Though some supporters of the reduction claimed to also support increasing state-level spending for education, Bastarache is not one of them. She argues the problem is unchecked and inefficient spending, and in particular what she termed administrative bloat, rather than a broken school funding system.

Last week, as administrators and the school board discussed where to make cuts during their first meeting since the vote, Bastarache called for more transparency and warned what would happen if she didn’t get it.

“These taxpayers that showed up are going to only grow,” she said. “We have only scratched the surface of people who understand where their property taxes are going. Next year, it will be double the size.”

“And it won’t be last year’s budget plus 3%,” she added. “It will be half the budget.”

Jeremy Margolis can be contacted at jmargolis@cmonitor.com.