School board candidate decries personal attacks

ALTON — Acknowledging that he had become “the most controversial School Board candidate,” as he said, half-smiling, Brennan Christen spoke to a reporter at the polls on Tuesday to “set the record straight.”

Christen, 22, found himself the subject of a heated discussion thread on the “Alton NH Community” Facebook group, when one user, Andrew William, shared a YouTube video Christen posted when he was living in Washington state and was using the name Brennan Robinson.

“Perhaps Brennan's name change is an attempt to hide his failed attempt to secede from the union while living in Washington state. New zip code, same decisive rhetoric. It seems like Brennan's goals are not about what's best for Alton students, but instead, an opportunity for him to live out his political fantasies,” William posted.

“Some of the claims out there are so absurd, I don’t know where to start,” Christen began on Tuesday, speaking outside the polls.

Firstly is the question of the name change. Both he and his wife, Emily, who is also running for School Board, changed their last name to Christen last year while they were living in New Durham. The petition for change of name was filed with the 7th Circuit Court, Probate Division, in Dover, on May 12, 2020.

Christen said the reason for the name change was to dissociate with his paternal grandfather, whom he described as “an extremely abusive man” who was cruel to both his grandmother and his father. Meanwhile, his maternal grandfather was “like a second father to me.” As he and Emily were hoping to start a family – they now have an eight-month-old baby – he said he wanted his child to carry the family name of his mother’s father, rather than his father’s father.

“I didn’t want my daughter to continue to have that particular man’s name. I didn’t want any association with him because of his past behaviors,” Christen said. “It’s not something you typically want to broadcast to the entire public, but at this time it seems like it’s impossible not to address it.”

As to the secession charge, Christen said he was advocating for eastern Washington seceding from the Seattle side of the state to create a new state within the union, not seceding from the United States, as William characterized it.

If, as William insinuated, Christen was trying to hide from controversy, he didn’t do a very good job of it. Last year, Christen was one of the leaders of Absolute Defiance, a group that picketed outside Gov. Chris Sununu’s private residence in Newfields to express their disagreement with the statewide mask mandate.

Christen said the “purely personal attacks” against his candidacy are regrettable. “You have plenty to work with, you don’t have to engage with city-like smear tactics to get what you want,” he said, adding that he hasn’t tried to hide. “All these people had my address, any one of them could have easily walked up and knocked on my door. It’s a small town.”

As to his policy positions, Christen said he’s a proponent of curtailing the rise of property taxes, abolishing the requirement that elementary children wear masks in schools, and preventing what he called “racist” curriculum from being taught in Alton schools.

“UNH is pushing a 1619/Critical Race Theory, they want to go district by district. I believe that particular ideology is racist in nature. It tells everyone to view their status in society as associated with their ethnic group,” Christen said, adding that he thinks the country is more racially divided than it was in the 1990s and 2000s.

Though he acknowledged that the motion would probably be unsuccessful, Christen said one of the first things he would do as a school board member would be to toss out the rule requiring elementary students to wear face coverings, as recommended by the CDC to prevent spread of the coronavirus. While greeting voters at the polls on Tuesday, Christen was not wearing a face covering.

“It would absolutely fail, but I would absolutely push for the end of mandatory masking in grade school,” Christen said, citing a “point zero, zero, zero three” percent chance that young children could die from the coronavirus. Meanwhile, he said, they are suffering from psychological damage from being around masked people at school, as, in his view, they need to see facial expressions.

Christen’s candidacy represents an age group not usually present on municipal boards, he noted. He said he would also represent lower-wage earners.

“Decisions to have lavish pay and go on a spending spree at the expense of making it too difficult for anyone in my age group to buy a house because property taxes keep going up is irresponsible,” Christen said. “To continue to have a town that is thriving, we have to make it so that it’s fiscally responsible to make it so people of my generation, Gen Z, can continue to live in a town like Alton.”

Christen said he favors a merit-based pay scale for teachers, with the highest performing educators earning as much as $150,000 per year. However, he didn’t have much appetite for paying administrators as handsomely.

“Staff who are amounting to pencil pushing without teaching our children, drawing a $100,000 salary without directly contributing to the education of our children, I do not think they should be making those kinds of wages,” Christen said.