Casko Won’t Seek Re-election to Concord School Board

After two three-year terms on the , has decided to not run again.

Casko, who was elected in 2006, said it was time for him to spend more time with his wife and daughter.

“I enjoy the work,” he said. “But it’s more because of the strain it puts on the family schedule. Our entire family schedule revolves around my board meeting schedule.”

Casko said that his wife has wanted to do various things during the last six years but wasn’t always able to because of the scheduling. She is involved in amateur theatre productions as a board member of RB Productions but the meetings are on the same night as the school board, as example.

“I figured after six years of that, it’s time to be able to be available more at night than I have been,” he said. “I think I’ve asked my family to do a lot already.”

If it were entirely up to him, Casko said, he might run again, because he does enjoy the work and thinks it is “worthwhile.”

Casko pointed to was one of the most fulfilling aspects of working on the board. He said when he came to the board, the project was just an idea and was in the planning stages. Casko said he felt that it was a significant accomplishment he made on the board.

Casko also thought that the board had been very responsible with the taxpayer’s money and been responsible with budgeting.

“I’m proud of that,” he said. “I think we’ve been able to maintain education and a reasonable budget without being too overly burdensome as far as the taxes … although, in this state, it’s still a large, overall problem. I still say that taxes are too high for people but it’s almost impossible to provide the school system that we want without it being a significant tax burden … I think it’s a bigger problem in this state, the overall tax structure.”

Casko said he hadn’t decided until recently that he wasn’t going to run. He was going to wait until closer to the filing period but decided last week that it was better to announce early he wasn’t intending to run.

“I think it’s more fair, probably, and better for me to do it at the beginning of the filing period or even before the filing period,” he said, “because if that impacts who wants to run or not, I don’t want to hold back on that type of decision. They need candidates and the more the better. The bigger the field is the better it will be in the end.”

Casko said he hopes a large field of candidates emerge this September to run for the three at-large seats. There were large fields of candidates when he ran unsuccessfully in 2005 and 2006 and he thought that was “preferable” to board members being elected by default.

“As a candidate, it’s much more exciting in a forum when you have eight people or nine people,” he said. “If you don’t have a big field, sometimes (policy) ideas don’t get fleshed out. You don’t have a debate.”

In his newly found spare time, Casko, who currently works for the New Hampshire Department of Safety, will also be working on a new writing career. He’s about to publish his first novel, “The Elimination Plan,” on Piscataqua Books, a new self-publishing company run by the owner of the RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth.

The book traces the life of a prosecutor who becomes upset with criminals getting off with light sentences and decides to become a vigilante. A detective the prosecutor works with begins to investigate the murders and the mystery ensues. Casko has been working on the book since 2008 and has other ideas and manuscripts at varying stages of completeness.

“I was very opposed to self-publishing,” he said. “I was trying to get an agent and I tried for a couple of years and it was to the point where I was saying, ‘This thing is going to die on my computer.’ Every Saturday morning I would be putting together these letters for agents and after a couple of years of doing that and not even getting a single response, I thought, ‘This isn’t going to go anywhere … I’ve got to be more proactive.’”

After reaching out to a former professor, getting involved in the New Hampshire Writers’ Project, and learning about ebooks, he decided to do more research about self-publishing and found Piscataqua.

“I was recharged,” he said, “and I liked what he offered through his service.”

The book will be out in September and then Casko will have to spend time promoting the book.

A filing date has not been set for potential candidates to run. But historically, it tends to happen towards the beginning of September through the middle of the month. The election for Concord School Board members will be held on the same date as the general election in November.

The terms of School Board President and also run out this year.

The candidates who win in November will be the last round of completely at-large candidates running for school board. Next year, voters will choose new school board members from instead of the entire city. Each cluster district will get to vote for one person for school board in 2013 and 2014. In 2015, three at-large members and two members from each district will be elected to make up the nine-person board.