Participants
Everyone in the record: the six members present and the one absent, the administrators named on the agenda's central-office roster, the staff who presented, and the people named on the record or in the packet but not present. Name spellings follow the official minutes except where a packet document or the person's own signature settles them differently, and every such divergence is stated in the row rather than resolved silently. Segment counts are of the dialogue file's 639 rows. Nobody spoke from the floor: the chair opened citizens' comments at 0:02:33 and there were no citizens in the room.
| Name | Role | Participation |
|---|
| Heather Whitney | Chair, Claremont School Board | Presided throughout; 192 segments, by far the largest share. Took the consent agenda — which carried the retreat minutes and the school-year calendar changes — without a motion or a vote, twice: "Seeing no objections, I will assume that is approval of the consent agenda" at 0:01:22 and "In the absence of objection, we will approve all items on the consent agenda" at 0:02:33, and closed the meeting the same way — "we could do a German [adjourn] by consensus as well" at 1:44:50. See flag 8. Opened the RSA 198:20-b public hearing on the Dick's Sporting Goods donation and asked for the roll call herself. On the curriculum item she asked the two questions that produced flag 12, about gifted-and-talented programming and Holocaust studies. Pressed the assistant superintendent to state plainly what the board should fund — "we have been failing our teachers and our students with what we have been giving from or [for] support as a district" at 0:54:37. Ruled, correctly, that a motion need not be on the posted agenda to be voted (flag 22). Announced that the district had approached the New Hampshire Department of Education about "hosting a listening session in Claremont". She is the Whitney who is a surname, not the Whitney who is a first name; see the method note. |
| Frank Sprague | Vice Chair, Claremont School Board; Chair, Budget Sub-Committee | 85 segments and the evening's most consequential questioner on money. Opened the ESSER problem at 0:16:06 — "we're going to get to the end of this 10 or $11 million, and we're going to have a fairly long list of could have, should have at the end of that" — and grounded it in the next night's graduation: "tomorrow night I'm going to be sitting in Stephen's high school gym with about 1200 other people… even though it's going to be 65 outside, it's going to be about 110 in there and very poor air quality." Costed the missing high-school HVAC condenser at "probably 3 or $400,000" and said he had raised it with the retiring business administrator "just about every time we talked about Esser". Later opened the food-service question that is flag 5: "2 or 300,000 in some kind of a arrears… that's what Richard told me", and "I don't mean this in a negative way because I know things are chaotic in the business office, but I'd like to know what what if if we had that money, where did it go?" Raised the point of order on the Facebook motion (flag 22), and asked for free-and-reduced-lunch percentages against a pre-Covid baseline. Rendered Greg, Craig and Frank. Strange. elsewhere in this corpus. |
| Bonnie Miles | Board member; Chair, Capital Improvement Committee; board representative, SRVRTC Visioning Committee | 76 segments. Moved acceptance of the Dick's Sporting Goods donation, and was the only person in the room to notice that the grant proposal in the packet asked for twice what arrived: "Well, I was looking at I reading $10,000 here, but this is this is 55. We're doing 5500" at 0:05:38. Reported the Stevens High School roof bids at 1:02:04 — "we received only one bid for the roof replacement at Stevens High School, and it came in at $280,000" — and urged approving a further $90,000 for an adjacent section (flag 18). Reported for the SRVRTC Visioning Committee, including the conflict-of-interest arrangement that is flag 25. Welcomed the incoming business administrator twice: "it's so refreshing to hear you talk about efficiency and transparency. It's like the sun has come out." In this era she is often an elimination-only identification; here the chair names her aloud before her subcommittee report, so that attribution does not rest on elimination. |
| Whitney Skillen | Board member; Chair, Policy Sub-Committee | 24 segments, and the two most procedurally interesting of the night. Reported the Policy Sub-Committee's work at 1:06:25: a second read on two policies, adoption of policy BG and the withdrawal of BGA, BGB, BGC, BGE and BGF, and "Right now, we have eight policies in our hopper… One policy related to public complaints and seven policies related to bullying and student conduct" (flag 16). Moved to dissolve the board's Facebook page at 1:18:36 and withdrew the motion at 1:21:46 after the vice chair's point of order. Questioned whether fingerprinting is really required for substitute teachers — "Federal waste of resources, time and money" — the exchange behind flag 19. Volunteered the traffic-flow solution and named it after herself in the third person: "The Whitney of the school board has identified a very easy solution." Her surname is the worst in this corpus for the transcription: Skillet, Skilling, Miss Gillan. |
| Arlene Hawkins | Board member — elected March 14, 2023; retired elementary principal | 41 segments. Asked what the district's publicist actually does — "I'm curious as to what his role has been, what he has been doing… because we don't have any idea" at 1:15:30 — the question behind flag 13. Proposed "We are hiring" banners for the district's open substitute and bus-driver posts, noting a three-month bus-driver training pipeline and "a backlog with fingerprinting". Defended the fingerprint requirement against a fellow member's objection: "There are many reasons to have fingerprinting. Part of being able to work in schools or volunteer in schools and valid reasons." Pushed hardest on whether a Medicaid identifier can serve as proof of income on a free-and-reduced-lunch application; nobody at the table knew. Cited her New Hampshire School Boards Association new-member training on consolidating district communications. Rendered Hopkins, Harley and early knocking elsewhere in this corpus. |
| Jennifer Gallagher | Board member — elected March 14, 2023 to the one-year seat; Chair, Curriculum Committee | 16 segments. Seconded the motion to come out of the public hearing, per the minutes. Reported the Curriculum Committee had not met — "We haven't met. No." at 1:08:28. Supplied the practical answer on middle-school pick-up traffic. Her most significant contribution is flag 24: offered a conflict-of-interest undertaking before anyone asked for one, at 1:44:09 — "As long as it's if we're taking a vote on any programs that I would be implementing, I would not vote on them." |
| Steven Horsky | Board member; also Chair of the SAU 6 joint board — Absent | Recorded absent in the minutes and not heard on the recording. Named twice by the chair as the board's usual volunteer for collective-bargaining committees — "Steve was on that. Last shot" at 0:28:00 — and the vice chair's "Suspect Steve will do it." He had been elected chair of the SAU 6 joint board on March 30, 2023, six-five by paper ballot, and resigns from the Claremont board on the record on June 21, 2023, two weeks after this meeting. Rendered Hauschka and Steve Gorski elsewhere in this corpus. |
| Michael C. Tempesta | Superintendent of Schools, SAU 6 — attending by Zoom | 27 segments, all remote and all audibly unwell: "I'm sorry, I can't be there. I'm not feeling too well today" at 0:06:16, and later, asked if he was still with the meeting, "I'm virtually and… Barely physically." Gave the only explanation on the record of what the calendar change was: "the first day of school will be a half day, which would allow for kindergarten, open house for parents to come and meet teachers with their students. And then the last day of school would be a half day" (flag 7). Could not say what hours the November 9 parent-teacher conference day would run. Reported meeting David Jack and Mary Henry "for several hours" the previous day and said he was "absolutely a static [ecstatic] at the recent progress that we've caught up on grants". Looked up the board's Facebook page live — "it looks like there's 627 followers" — and explained its original purpose. In 2023 the superintendent is Tempesta; Chris Pratt was principal of Stevens High School on this date and did not become interim superintendent until January 2024. This file renders him Mister Timbuktu, a garble not previously recorded in this corpus. |
| Michael Mike Koski | Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum, Instruction, Innovation & Assessment, SAU 6 | 40 segments. Presented the 2022–23 state assessment and SAT results from 0:43:54, and did not soften them: elementary ELA "at 32% proficient here compared to about a state average of 50"; elementary math "30%, not quite 30% for proficiency"; combined SAT "20, 22, nine, 17, 20, 23, eight, 95" against a New Hampshire average of 1050. Said what he thought the cause was — "we don't have a curriculum where our teachers know where they're going from September to June. And so we don't hit that target because there is no target" — and where responsibility lay: "this is not on our teachers. They are working very hard. We haven't given them the tools that they need." Predicted no measurable gain before the 2024 school year and "within two years we're we're right there". Also the person who said he did not know the terms of the publicist's engagement (flag 13), and who contradicted the vice chair on whether food-service money could be carried over (flag 5). Rendered Mr. Kosky here and my Kosky elsewhere. |
| Stephanie Hurst | SAU 6 — presented as "Curriculum Director" on the agenda and in the minutes; titled "Literacy Specialist, SAU 6" in the framework document in the same packet | 59 segments, the third-largest share of the evening, from 0:29:55. Her surname is never spoken on this recording — the chair introduces "Miss Stephanie" and the dialogue file labels her Stephanie — and it comes from the agenda, the minutes and the framework document, all three of which spell it Hurst. The same packet gives her two different titles, and this page uses both rather than choosing. Presented the draft ELA and Literacy Framework she had led: named every advisory-board member and asked for a round of applause for them, "I facilitated and I led them through the process. But those teachers were really pivotal." Told the board the framework "has been posted for two weeks" on the website, "Per policy" (flag 17). Gave the meeting's most extended argument that the state test is the wrong instrument — "I'm going to tell you our test in New Hampshire needs to be revamped… It doesn't give us what we need to really know what what to do for our students" — and its most quoted image, the fixer-upper house: "We cannot focus on every room at one time. We have to focus on the bathroom first." |
| David Jack | Interim business administration, Municipal Resources Inc. (MRI) | 26 segments, from 0:07:15, covering the gap left by Richard Seaman's retirement on April 14, 2023. Reported that "as of last Friday, we had put in just a little bit under $3 million to be in to be reimbursed for 2.2 of it, we know, or approximately 2.1 of it we know has already been transferred", against a June 2 state deadline. Disclosed the general-fund float that is flag 9: "some of the pieces in the grants we've spent out of the general fund, we have to make those transfers, if you will, back into the grants. And that is being done as we speak." Gave the ESSER obligation dates — ESSER II by September 30, 2023, ESSER III by September 30, 2024 — and the audit report that is flag 2: "The last piece of comment is on your audits. There's nothing really has changed with that." Rendered David Jackson elsewhere in this corpus. |
| Mary Henry | Incoming Business Administrator, SAU 6 — appointed May 11, 2023, starting early July | 23 segments from 0:20:09, attending before her start date and still finishing another district's year: "I really have to get done where I am." Had spent a full day with the business office and named her first target as purchase orders and expenditure tracking — "I don't like to have. Oh, maybe there's 200,000 here, 300,000 there. We need to know where we're at." Set out her own standard at 0:23:00: "one of my big things is transparency. You guys need to know what's going on. You are the top of the district." Gave her own background — school board member at Fall Mountain for 11 years, seven as chair, then business administrator there, then Hillsboro and Winchester — and disclosed that she had worked with David Jack in three of those districts. Promised monthly budget updates once the FY24 year opens. The minutes name her "new business administrator for SAU#6"; her appointment was made on the superintendent's nomination on May 11, 2023. |
| Shaun Laplante | Athletic Director and baseball coach, Claremont Middle School | Two segments, from 0:03:50, presenting inside the public hearing: "So I'm Sean the plant, the middle school athletic director. I wrote a grant. Through Dick's Sporting Goods, through the Sports Matters grant for a batting cage… And then also it's going to go towards football [futsal] goals." His name is spelled three ways across the record. His own grant proposal, its signature block and his district e-mail give Shaun Laplante; the minutes give Shaun Laplante; the agenda gives Shaun Laplante but titles him Assistant Athletic Director where the minutes and his own documents say Athletic Director; the dialogue file labels him Sean LaPlante. This page follows his own documents and the minutes. His two packet documents ask for $10,000 — a used utility vehicle at $4,000, a permanent batting cage at $4,629 and futsal goals at $700 — and record that he had "already secured roughly $10,000 from fundraisers, local vendors, and events". |
| Ben Nester | Director of Special Education, SAU 6 | One segment in the whole recording, at 0:38:03, supplying a word to the curriculum director from the table: "Gallivanting." On the agenda's central-office roster. Named twice more by Stephanie Hurst as her partner on the multi-tiered-system-of-supports handbook — "that's the next thing that Ben and I have been working on" — and as the owner of the tier-four question, "that's all been Nestor's [Nester's] category." He is the board's de facto secretary in this era, with the clerk's seat vacant, though the roll call here was not attributed to him by the transcription. |
| Jeff Small | Director of Technology, SAU 6 | Five segments, all audio-visual cues — "Are you ready?" before the roll call and again before the assessment deck — plus confirming the superintendent was still on the Zoom link. Asked by the chair at 1:19:08 whether he could close the Facebook page on the board's behalf; he said yes, before the motion was withdrawn. Credited by Whitney Skillen with having "done so much work to make the website more easy to navigate". |
| Angela Vivian | Human Resources Director, SAU 6 — on the roster, not heard | Listed on the agenda's and the minutes' central-office roster. Not identifiable as a speaker in the dialogue file. She is the "human resource" the chair says the board will approach about hiring banners at 1:23:09, though she is not named aloud. Appointed HR Director at the SAU 6 meeting of February 16, 2023 on a vote that was not unanimous. |
| Hannah Petrin | Student Representative, Stevens High School — Absent | On the agenda for a student report. The chair announced at 0:02:33: "My assumption that Hanna is Hanna patron is probably at night. Class night. So is not attending." Patron is this transcription stack's standing garble for Petrin. The minutes nonetheless print "Student Representative Report- Hannah Petrin" as though a report were given; no report was given. She is the daughter of Michael Petrin, who chaired this board until the March 14, 2023 election. |
| Steven Holt | District facilities — named, not present | Named four times, always through Bonnie Miles, and he is the source of everything the board knows about the roof. "Mr. Holt has kept us informed" at 1:01:57; he had reported that the additional roof section "is showing signs of membrane failure" and "never got replaced during the renovation"; Miles asks the chair to "check with Mr. Holt to find out… When are they going to start this?" She had also requested a walk-through of Stevens High School with him once students are out — "give me three days and and it's late in the day as possible because we have people that work during the day." Whitney Skillen names him again inside the food-service item: "Mr. Holt has identified some kitchen renovation and repair needs, some that are pretty urgent." The minutes spell him Steven Holt. |
| Eric Zengota | District publicist / communications — named, not present | The subject of flag 13. The board discussed asking him to manage its Facebook page and discovered it could not describe his engagement. Bonnie Miles: "We voted on him and we still don't know everything he's doing." Frank Sprague: "I don't recall voting on him" and "I'd like to know what the arrangement is with Mr..". The assistant superintendent gave the only account on the record — "Eric takes photographs of school events. He creates articles for the newspaper and the website… I'm not sure what agreement is he has with the school district" — and the chair distinguished two roles, a Claremont Community Television appointment and district work. His surname is not spoken correctly at any point: the chair says Mr. Zagora, the vice chair Mr. Zygote. The spelling here is the one this corpus's district documents use. |
| Lori Landry | SAU 6 / district grants — named, not present | Named once, by Mary Henry at 0:21:19: "Lori Landry and I. I know she's working on your grants. Actually, she was our superintendent at Fall Mountain, and I worked with her for 11 years as on the board." She is one of the four people Henry met on her orientation day, alongside David Jack and two people rendered only as "Mike. Mike". This page records the name because it is the only account on the record of who is administering the district's grants during the business-office vacancy; her exact Claremont title is not stated. |
| Chelsea Weatherford | SAU 6 — produced these minutes; named, not present | Not heard on the recording. Named once, when the chair asks Whitney Skillen to "kindly forward those, policy numbers or policy lettering to Chelsea" at 1:08:02. The minutes close "Respectfully submitted by Chelsea Weatherford". Naming the person who produced the minutes was not required on this date; that requirement arrives with 2025, 112:1. |
| Dr. Alex Herzog | Director, Sugar River Valley Regional Technical Center — named, not present | The "Mr. Herzog" of the Visioning Committee report at 1:08:40, given a deliberately non-chairing role: "Mr. Herzog, he's the he'll be the administrative support system. He'll be our light on [liaison]. But it will avoid any conflicts of interest with the public." The minutes render the same point as "Mr. Herzog will be the liaison for the committee to avoid any conflicts of interest." See flag 25. He is not the Herzog on the literacy advisory board — see the method note. |
Andy — the minutes' Mr. Lafierene | Chair-elect, SRVRTC Visioning Committee — named, not present | Elected chair of the Visioning Committee, per Bonnie Miles at 1:08:40: "Andy. Mr.. He is going to be the chair of the visioning Committee. We have voted on that." Frank Sprague adds that three people he contacted are "going to be receiving a letter from Andy, inviting them to participate on the committee". The recording gives only the first name; the minutes give only "Mr. Lafierene". This page does not resolve the surname. It records that this corpus has previously identified an Andy Lafreniere of Ward 3 in the May 3, 2023 minutes, and that the minutes' spelling here is consistent with that name — but "Lafierene" is the district's own rendering and no document in this packet spells it any other way. |
| "Mrs. Franny" | SRVRTC Visioning Committee volunteer — thanked, identification unresolved | Thanked by Bonnie Miles at 1:10:04: "I want to say give a big thank you to Mrs. Franny here, because she has worked very hard with her husband on this project. She's put a lot of time into it, and I think she she should be recognized for that." Franny is the transcription's rendering and is not a name this corpus can confirm. The word here places her in the room, so a member of the public was present at the meeting even though nobody spoke in citizens' comments. This page names nobody in this row; the reference to her husband and the surrounding Visioning Committee context are recorded so a reader can weigh them, not so this page can assert an identification. |
| Richard Seaman | Former Assistant Superintendent for Finance and Operations — named, not present | Retired effective April 14, 2023, and named twice as the source of information the board can no longer confirm. Frank Sprague on the HVAC condenser: "I had mentioned this to Mr. Seaman just about every time we talked about Esser." And, on the food-service balance, "that's what Richard told me… I know it had to have existed because he told us it did. I'm sure we could go back and find the tape where he said that there's hundreds of thousands there post-Covid." See flag 5. Rendered Assistant Superintendent Simmons elsewhere in this corpus. |
| Hope Damon | NH State Representative — named, not present | Named once, by Bonnie Miles at 1:30:03, as a speaker at an off-site event: "hope Damon was there at that at that meeting. Across the street… And she said that for every applicant form that gets filled in and sent, sent in, then the state would pay for the for the food for that child for the year." The chair supplied a figure — "I think it's roughly 1800 more" — and the vice chair tied it to adequacy aid. Both the mechanism and the dollar figure are the board's characterisation of a third party's remarks, not verified here; see flag 20. |
| Courtney Porter | Named as a possible presenter on bullying and school climate — not present | Named once, by the chair at 1:43:51, as someone the board might invite alongside law-enforcement representatives: "we could maybe get Courtney Porter to come in." No affiliation is given on the record and none is asserted here. The same sentence produced flag 24. |
| K–5 Literacy Advisory Board | Named on the record and in the framework document; applauded, not presenting | Named aloud by Stephanie Hurst at 0:31:01 and asked to stand for applause: "We have our K-5 literacy advisory board with Sean Herzog, Kayla Young, Sheila Lewis, Ali Knoll, Amber Hammond and Lisa Holtz." The framework document in the same packet gives their full names and posts: Shawn Herzog, Title I Teacher, Maple Avenue Elementary; Kayleigh Young, 1st Grade, Maple Avenue; Sheila Lewis, 2nd Grade, Disnard; Alison Knoll, 4th Grade, Bluff; Amber Hammond, 3rd Grade, Bluff; Lisa Holtz, 5th Grade, Maple Avenue. Hurst notes there is no kindergarten representative and that Shawn Herzog covered that gap — "Sean Herzog works closely with kindergarten, so she was able to fill in there". Shawn Herzog is not Dr. Alex Herzog of the technical centre, who is named separately in the same meeting. |
| 6–12 ELA Advisory Board | Named on the record and in the framework document; applauded, not presenting | Named aloud at 0:31:36: "we have David Irwin and Courtney still [Steele] there at the middle school, and then we have Sandra [Sondra] Hardin at the high school". The framework gives David Irwin — Academic Dean, Claremont Middle School, Courtney Steele — Lead ELA Teacher, CMS, and Sondra Hardin — Lead ELA Teacher, Stevens High School. Hurst reports vertical alignment work across grades 6–12 and a plan to convene the full K–12 group next year. |
Five further people appear in this meeting's records and are not listed above because neither the recording nor the minutes places them at the meeting: Christine Baker (Principal, Bluff Elementary), Mark Blount (Principal, Maple Avenue Elementary), Melissa Lewis (Principal, Disnard Elementary) and Frank Romeo (Principal, Claremont Middle School) are listed as members of the ELA and Literacy Advisory Board in the packet's framework document, and Josh Lambert is listed there as a Claremont School Board member on the 2022–2023 Curriculum Subcommittee — a documentary confirmation of a board seat this corpus had previously inferred.
Agenda
The official agenda, item by item, against what the record shows was done with each. Quoted agenda wording is from CSB Agenda 6.7.23.docx (1).pdf; quoted dispositions are from the minutes; anything quoted from the recording is identified as speech. Scheduled clock times are printed as the agenda gives them and are not links; a timestamp in "Taken up" links to that moment in the recording. The agenda's timings ran well ahead of the room: the item scheduled for 8:20 p.m. was reached about 75 minutes into a meeting that began at 6:30.
| Taken up | Item | Agenda text / disposition |
|---|
| 0:00:25 | I. Call to Order and Pledge of Allegiance 6:30 PM | Agenda: "6:30 PM Call to Order and Pledge of Allegiance". Minutes: "Meeting called to order by chair Heather Whitney at 6:30PM." On the recording the chair says "All the June 7th, 2023 school board meeting session. All rise" and leads the Pledge at 0:00:37. |
| 0:00:59 | II. Secretary Roll Call of Attendance 6:35 PM | Agenda: "Secretary Roll Call of Attendance of Board Members (Board Members who arrive after the meeting begins will be noted as 'present' at the point in the agenda at which they arrive)". Minutes: "Present: Heather Whitney, Frank Sprague, Bonnie Miles, Whitney Skillen, Jennifer Gallagher, Arlene Hawkins Absent: Steven Horsky". The roll call is on the recording only as answers. The caller's names were not transcribed; the dialogue file carries four rows of Here. Here., Here. and Here is the present. across two unidentified clusters. The board had no elected clerk in 2023, so the reference to a "Secretary" on the agenda describes a function, not an officer. |
| 0:01:11 | II. Consent Agenda vote required | Agenda: "Consent Agenda (vote required) 1. Amendments and Final Approval of board agenda 2. Minutes Approval- May 16, 2023 Retreat & SMART Goals * 3. 2023-2024 School Year Calendar Changes Approval / See Exhibit A (Meeting Minutes from 5/17/23 postponed*)". Minutes: "No objections from any board member on all consent agenda items. All items passed." No motion was made, no member moved or seconded anything, and no vote of any kind was taken — the chair took it twice on the absence of objection, at 0:01:22 and 0:02:33, with a discussion of the calendar between. See flag 8. The two substantive items inside it are flag 7 (the calendar) and flag 10 and flag 15 (the retreat minutes). |
| 0:02:33 | II. Citizens Comments | Agenda: "Citizens Comments". Minutes: "Citizens Comments- No comments". On the recording the whole item is one sentence inside a longer turn: "Now we're opening the floor to citizens comments. Are there any citizens in the audience this evening? Nope. So we'll just move right forward to the student representatives report." Elapsed time, from the words "citizens comments" to "move right forward", is a few seconds. See flag 14. A member of the public does appear to have been in the room — see the "Mrs. Franny" row in Participants — but nobody addressed the board. |
| 0:02:33 | II. Student Representative Report | Agenda: "Student Representative Report- Hannah Petrin". No report was given. The chair on the recording: "My assumption that Hanna is Hanna patron is probably at night. Class night. So is not attending." The minutes nonetheless print the item as "Student Representative Report- Hannah Petrin" with no note of the absence, so the minutes alone would leave a reader believing a report was delivered. |
| 0:02:58 | III. Public Hearing — Dick's Sporting Goods Foundation donation, $5,500 6:45 PM · vote required | Agenda: "6:45 PM Public Hearing: (Vote Required) Presentation By Shaun Laplante Assistant Athletic Director CMS The Dick's Sporting Goods Foundation Donation to the Claremont Middle School Athletics Department in the amount of $5,500.00 to go towards a new permanent batting cage for out back of CMS and futsal goals for the league that was created this year to improve the soccer program." Minutes: "Frank Sprague makes a motion to move into public hearing; roll call vote; Heather Whitney- Yes, Frank Sprague- Yes, Bonnie Miles- Yes, Jennifer Gallagher- Yes, Arlene Hawkins- Yes, Whitney Skillen- Yes." Six Yes, none opposed, all six present members named individually. On the recording the motion and its second arrive merged into one unidentified segment — "I'll make a motion that we move into public hearing. I'll second." — and the roll-call names are lost, so the minutes are the only source for who voted how. See flag 3 and flag 23. |
| 0:05:22 | IV. Close public hearing & return to regular meeting 6:55 PM | Minutes: "Whitney Skillens makes a motion to come out of public hearing; seconded by Jennifer Gallagher; no further discussion; all in favor via voice vote." The order of business went wrong first and was corrected from the floor. Bonnie Miles began moving acceptance of the donation while the board was still in the hearing; an unidentified voice at the table raised a point of order at 0:05:13 — "Point of order. Yeah. I think we have to vote out of the outside of the public. If we want a public hearing and then vote" — and the chair accepted it: "I guess we have to make a vote. You come out of. The public hearing." The dialogue file attributes the following "In a second. I'll second." to the chair's cluster; the minutes name Skillen as mover and Gallagher as seconder, and the minutes are followed here. See the method note on diarization. |
| 0:05:38 | IV. Acceptance of the $5,500 donation | Minutes: "Bonnie Miles makes a motion to accept the donation in the amount of $5,500.00 from Dick's Sporting Goods; seconded by Whitney Skillen; no further discussion; all in favor via voice vote." Miles's motion on the recording carries the discrepancy she had spotted in the packet: "Well, I was looking at I reading $10,000 here, but this is this is 55. We're doing 5500. So making a motion that he that we accept the 5500, you know, accept the 5500 from Dick's Sporting Goods." The chair declares the result at 0:06:03: "The $5,500 is accepted." The minutes record "no further discussion", which is accurate — the only discussion had happened inside the hearing. See flag 3 and flag 4. |
| 0:06:09 | V. Superintendent Report — Finance Transition Update 6:55 PM | Agenda: "Superintendent Report a) Finance Transition Update with David Jack & Mary Henry". Minutes: the superintendent "speaks about meeting with David Jack and Mary Henry, new business administrator for SAU#6"; Jack "provides an update from the last board meeting and the process moving forward with the FY23 budget"; Henry "speaks to the board about the transition". Discussion only; no motion, no vote. The substance runs 23 minutes and produces flag 2, flag 9 and flag 20. The superintendent attended by Zoom. |
| 0:29:36 | VI.1. Curriculum Director Presentation 7:10 PM · discussion | Agenda: "Curriculum Director Presentation (Discussion) Presentation by Stephanie Hurst". Minutes: "Stephanie Hurst presents the ELA Curriculum Frameworks." Discussion only; no adoption vote was taken or sought, though the framework document in the packet carries the line "adopted by the Claremont School Board ENTER DATE HERE" and Hurst reported the framework "has been posted for two weeks" on the website "Per policy". See flag 17. Runs about 13 minutes. |
| 0:43:32 | VI.2. Grade 3–8 NHSAS and Grade 11 School Day SAT results | Agenda: "Presentation of Grade 3-8 NHSAS results and Grade 11 School Day SAT / Possible instructional responses?". Minutes: "Assistant Superintendent Michael Koski presents the test results for this year." Discussion only. The deck is the packet's Claremont NH SAS-School Board. Runs about 18 minutes and produces the exchange in which the chair asks the administration to say where the board's money should go. |
| 1:01:36 | VI.3. School Board Sub-Committees discussion | Agenda: "School Board Sub-Committees (Discussion) Reports by subcommittee chairs if available, consider topics board would like referred to committee for investigation or review", listing six: (a) Capital Improvement — Miles; (b) Budget — Sprague; (c) Policy — Skillen; (d) Curriculum — Gallagher; (e) SRVRTC Visioning — Sprague & Miles; (f) Ad Hoc Parliamentary Procedure — Whitney. Two report having met (Policy, Visioning), one reports on work done by others (Capital Improvement), two report not having met (Budget, Curriculum), and the chair of the sixth says she hopes to disband it "after meeting maybe two more times". None of the six has a posted notice, agenda or minutes anywhere in the district's public document shares — see flag 1. Runs about 11 minutes. |
| 1:13:00 | VII. Other Business 8:20 PM | Agenda: "Other Business a) Volunteers needed to serve on the Collective Bargaining Agreement Committee." The minutes record four further items the agenda does not list: the board's Facebook page; the question of what Eric Zengota's role is; Skillen's motion to dissolve the page, seconded by Miles and then withdrawn; and Hawkins's "We are hiring" banner proposal. No volunteer for the secretaries' bargaining committee was found — "We'll ask again next meeting." See flag 13, flag 19 and flag 22. |
| 1:24:02 | VIII. Future Dates / Future Agenda Items 8:25 PM | Agenda lists the 6/21/23 board meeting, the 7/13/23 SAU 6 meeting, and six future items. The minutes add a seventh future date — "Claremont School Board Meeting- 7/19/23" — which the agenda does not carry, and which the board only settles in the recording's final 45 seconds. The largest single discussion here is the lunch-money debt accounting, which produced flag 5. The board also agreed to schedule a self-evaluation retreat and a presentation of its own goals, and the chair floated meeting in July: "we may end up having July meetings if we're going to slog through and really tackle this." Runs about 20 minutes. |
| 1:44:50 | IX. Adjournment 8:30 PM | Minutes: "No objections by any board member to adjourn the meeting. Meeting adjourned." On the recording: "We're still ahead of time. So, we could do a German [adjourn] by consensus as well. Is there anybody that would object to adjourning the meeting?" As with the consent agenda, no member moved adjournment and no vote was taken. See flag 8. The recording then runs another 45 seconds of the board fixing its July date before it ends. |
Discussion timeline
Chronological, with the concrete material first in each cell — figures, motions, vote counts — before context. Timestamps link to the same moment in the Cablecast recording, and each link's seconds are the dialogue file's own Start (sec) value for the row quoted, so the displayed time and the link cannot disagree. Quotations reproduce the automatic transcript as recorded; see the method footer for the convention.
Thirty-two topics across a one-hour-forty-five-minute meeting. The first six minutes carry the two votes of the evening; the remaining ninety-nine minutes are presentations, subcommittee reports and agenda-setting.
| Time | Topic | What was said | Flags |
|---|
| 0:00:12 | Gavel, Pledge, roll call | The chair counts the room down — "30 coming up on 630" — and opens at 0:00:25: "All the June 7th, 2023 school board meeting session. All rise." An automated voice announces "Recording in progress." The roll survives on the recording only as answers — Here. Here., Here., Here is the present. — because the caller's names were not transcribed. The minutes supply the attendance: six present, Steven Horsky absent. | |
| 0:01:11 | Consent agenda taken without a motion or a vote | "Here we have a consent agenda before us. Is there any request to remove any item of the consent agenda to the regular agenda?" Eleven seconds later, at 0:01:22: "Seeing no objections, I will assume that is approval of the consent agenda." The chair then explains what is in it: "We were unable to have the minutes from the 517 [5/17] meeting. Transcribed so that will be postponed until the next meeting. We do have meeting minutes from the May 16th retreat and attached Smart goals, and we also have some changes to the 2324 [23-24] school year calendar, which is under exhibit A." The agenda's own words for this item are "Consent Agenda (vote required)". No member moved anything; no vote was taken. | MEDIUM MEDIUM MEDIUM OBSERVATION |
| 0:01:54 | The only discussion the 2023–24 calendar received | The chair: "Is there any questions that anybody has regarding the school year calendar changes? It's my understanding that it was an addition of some half days." The superintendent, by Zoom, at 0:02:06: "So the first day of school will be a half day, which would allow for kindergarten, open house for parents to come and meet teachers with their students. And then the last day of school would be a half day." The chair's follow-up — "what are the hours for the parent teacher conference day? On November 9th?" — got "I'm not sure." Nobody stated a total. The calendar document in the packet prints "177 Student Days/185 Teacher Days" in its bottom-right corner; RSA 189:1 requires 180 days or the department's hour equivalents. At the February 15, 2023 meeting, where this calendar was first approved, the figure given on the record was 178. | MEDIUM |
| 0:02:33 | Citizens' comments: no citizens, and no student report | One turn disposes of three agenda items: "In the absence of objection, we will approve all items on the consent agenda. Now we're opening the floor to citizens comments. Are there any citizens in the audience this evening? Nope. So we'll just move right forward to the student representatives report. My assumption that Hanna is Hanna patron [Petrin] is probably at night. Class night. So is not attending." RSA 189:74 requires a school board to provide a public comment opportunity of "no less than 30 minutes"; the elapsed comment period here is measured in seconds, and nobody was turned away because nobody rose. | OBSERVATION |
| 0:02:58 | Entering the public hearing on the $5,500 donation — roll call | "We are going to move into a public hearing and a presentation by Shauna Plant [Shaun Laplante] regarding a $5,500 donation from the Dick's Sporting Goods Foundation. We do need a vote to enter the public hearing. And then would you please remind has to be a roll call. We need to do we have to do a roll call." The motion and second arrive merged into one unidentified segment at 0:03:26 — "I'll make a motion that we move into public hearing. I'll second." — and the roll-call answers that follow are a string of Yes with the names dropped. The minutes name the mover (Sprague) and record all six members individually: Whitney, Sprague, Miles, Gallagher, Hawkins, Skillen, all Yes. On June 7, 2023 this hearing was not a courtesy. RSA 198:20-b then required a prior public hearing for unanticipated funds of $5,000 or more, with newspaper notice at least seven days ahead; the $20,000 threshold in the statute today did not arrive until July 18, 2023. | MEDIUM POSITIVE |
| 0:03:50 | The athletic director presents — a batting cage and futsal goals | "So I'm Sean the plant [Shaun Laplante], the middle school athletic director. I wrote a grant. Through Dick's Sporting Goods, through the Sports Matters grant for a batting cage. A batting cage that's going to go right out back near the the new scoreboard that we just got. And then also it's going to go towards football [futsal] goals. Because that's a league that we just started." He adds at 0:04:11: "we play on Saturdays and we need new goals because they started to there was a little bit of wear and tear… And that $5,500 is going to go to those two items." The whole presentation runs 34 seconds. The chair then asked "Does anybody from the public have any questions for Mr. La Plante?" — of a room with no members of the public in it. | MEDIUM |
| 0:04:45 | A motion made in the wrong place, and a point of order | Bonnie Miles begins moving acceptance while the board is still inside the hearing — "To make a motion that he is the know the month that he's requesting", an unidentified voice supplies 500, and Miles continues "5500. So it is said I like to make motion that we, we give Mr.. Something of where it's." An unidentified voice at the table stops it at 0:05:13: "Point of order. Yeah. I think we have to vote out of the outside of the public. If we want a public hearing and then vote. Vote? Yeah." The chair accepts: "I guess we have to make a vote. You come out of. The public hearing." The minutes record the correction cleanly, naming Skillen as mover and Gallagher as seconder. | |
| 0:05:38 | $5,500 accepted — and the $10,000 that was asked for | Miles, moving acceptance: "Well, I was looking at I reading $10,000 here, but this is this is 55. We're doing 5500. So making a motion that he that we accept the 5500, you know, accept the 5500 from Dick's Sporting Goods." She is reading the packet correctly. The Sports Matter Grant Proposal in the same folder asks for "$10,000 in funding" and itemises a used utility vehicle at $4,000, a batting cage at $4,629 and futsal goals at $700; the donation covers the second and third but not the first. Seconded by Skillen per the minutes; carried on a voice vote. The chair at 0:06:03: "The $5,500 is accepted." The money was already in hand. The remittance advice in the packet is dated 04/28/2023, cheque #000017458, payable to "CLAREMONT MIDDLE SCHOOL ATTN: SHAUN LAPLANTE" — issued about six weeks before this vote. | MEDIUM |
| 0:06:16 | The superintendent, by Zoom and unwell | "I'm sorry, I can't be there. I'm not feeling too well today. So the, Yesterday I met with, David, Jack and Mary Henry for several hours… But I'm absolutely a static [ecstatic] at the recent progress that we've caught up on grants and other types of things." He hands off to "David and to Merritt [Mary]". Asked later whether he is still with the meeting he answers, at 0:27:25, "I am. I'm virtually and… Barely physically." | |
| 0:08:22 | Just under $3 million of grant reimbursements filed against a June 2 deadline | David Jack: "as of last Friday, we had put in just a little bit under $3 million to be in to be reimbursed for 2.2 of it, we know, or approximately 2.1 of it we know has already been transferred. We are waiting. The other pieces came in. Toward the end of that week." The deadline he names at 0:07:48 is "January, June 2nd", and at 0:08:52 he explains the consequence: "you weren't able to put reimbursements for monies that you had spent… after June 2nd. And if you have a six week closure of that ability to do that." The reason for the push was cash: "this week when we have, if you will, a major payroll going out, because this is the time when we actually pay off all contracts… this is the time of year, probably our biggest payroll of the year." | |
| 0:10:46 | Grant costs paid out of the general fund, transfers still to come | "We are we know that some of the pieces in the grants we've spent out of the general fund, we have to make those transfers, if you will, back into the grants. And that is being done as we speak." He adds at 0:11:13: "It's going to take a little bit of time to catch up with all the accounts payable. But certainly our focus has been to ensure the cash flow." Earlier he had said "I know that there was some concern as to whether grants were being fully expended" and named the ESSER II horizon: "The grants that are running out as of 924 or excuse me. 930 of 23, which is the end of September." | MEDIUM |
| 0:12:12 | "The last piece of comment is on your audits" | David Jack, in full: "The last. The last piece of comment is on your audits. There's nothing really has changed with that. We're working with your auditors to catch up with some of the audience [audits], as you know, that have been behind." He could give no date at 0:12:40: "we'll have a better timeline. For that. Hopefully by the end of this, perhaps by your next meeting, we'll have a little better timeline as to what we can and can't do going forward in terms of their availability and our, availability." And at 0:13:07: "we think that it'll happen probably faster than it has in the past. And we'd like to get caught up as soon as possible." No board member asked a question about the audits. The district's fiscal year ends June 30; the federal single audit for the year ended June 30, 2022 was due by March 31, 2023, ten weeks before this meeting. | HIGH |
| 0:15:29 | Tuition billing, and the handover to Mary Henry | "We did we have built we have also collected some additional revenues on our tuitions. The bills have gone out to the different school districts. So we're starting to catch up on that." On the handover, at 0:14:05: "I'm probably going to be able to meet with Mary about 4 to 5 days of partial days, if you will. Before the end of this month… we always don't have that advantage." And on what he thinks Claremont has bought: "the advantage of just having myself here for a couple of days a week when this is not a couple of day a week job, particularly this time of year. But going forward, I think that you have somebody that's very capable." | |
| 0:16:06 | ESSER, a 110-degree gymnasium, and a condenser nobody bought | Frank Sprague, the longest single argument of the evening: "One of my concerns with, with the Esser money specifically has been we're going to get to the end of this 10 or $11 million, and we're going to have a fairly long list of could have, should have at the end of that. And I bring this up because tomorrow night I'm going to be sitting in Stephen's high school gym with about 1200 other people." At 0:16:29: "even though it's going to be 65 outside, it's going to be about 110 in there and very poor air quality. Now HVAC is really in really in the wheelhouse of SR [ESSER] funding… that's really one of the one of the identified interventions that Esser money's intended for." At 0:16:57: "all that's lacking really is the condenser piece that goes in. It's not a cheap item. I think it's probably 3 or $400,000. I had mentioned this to Mr. Seaman just about every time we talked about Esser." And at 0:17:41: "I've brought it up repeatedly, and I'm just hoping that this doesn't get lost and become one of those should and could have with the $11 million that we had at our disposal." He closed: "I don't need a response. I just am putting it out there again." | OBSERVATION |
| 0:19:01 | The two ESSER deadlines, stated on the record | David Jack: "If you're if you're with SR two of it's part of SR two, then it has to be done before September 30th, 2023, if it's part of SR, SR three, and then it gets stretched out to nine, 30, 24." He had set out the mechanic a moment earlier, at 0:18:39: "we had to lay this money out and we had to spend it. Before we could ask for the reimbursement." Sprague had said the same thing about his own understanding at 0:17:21: "now that I fully understand how Esser works, that we have to spend the money and then collect the money after, that's a helpful bit of information that we actually didn't even have before." | |
| 0:20:09 | The incoming business administrator introduces herself | Mary Henry had spent the previous day in the district: "I met with the business office staff. It was a few hours… SAT down with Dave. Mike. Mike, and Lori Landry to discuss things as well." Her first target is purchase orders: "the way we do our ordering in our system and how we track our expenditures. That's something that's fairly simple, because we have it all in our system at our fingertips." At 0:21:00: "I'm about being able to look at my screen and know where I'm at. I don't like to have. Oh, maybe there's 200,000 here, 300,000 there. We need to know where we're at." She gives her own history — 11 years on the Fall Mountain board, "probably I think it's seven of those years. I was the chair", then business administrator there, then Hillsboro, then Winchester — and discloses that she has worked with David Jack in three districts. | |
| 0:22:35 | "It's okay to tell us bad stuff" | Sprague, at 0:22:21: "I want you to feel as comfortable as possible with us… It's okay to tell us bad stuff. We we would rather have you tell us than than not tell us." Henry: "as a board member, I was the same way… there's also some, some obstacles that we have that we should know about." And at 0:23:00: "one of my big things is transparency. You guys need to know what's going on. You are the top of the district, even though you have that view up here, and you may not run the day to day stuff." Bonnie Miles at 0:24:37: "it's so refreshing to hear you talk about efficiency and transparency. It's like the sun has come out." | |
| 0:24:43 | The board asks for a timetable and does not get one | The chair: "when do you anticipate being able to come forward to the board and say, this is what you're looking to do to make changes in the department… Just so we have our expectations tempered… Then I can start plotting it out on my six month agenda." Henry declines to commit, at 0:25:22: "it's like a business plan. You know, it's fluid, too, because we're going to run into bumps… I will say to you that I don't want to give you that tonight because I don't know." What she does commit to is reporting cadence, at 0:25:58: "my biggest goal, is to make sure that you guys get updated on that at least monthly." She was still finishing another district's year: "I really have to get done where I am." | |
| 0:27:30 | Secretaries' bargaining, and a state listening session | The chair to the superintendent: "When are we anticipating starting the secretaries collective bargaining agreement? And do we need to get a volunteer from the board to step up to be part of that?" Tempesta: "we do need volunteers. And we usually start that, in over the summer. So we can we can do that right in July." Then, at 0:28:03: "we did reach out to agents of the New Hampshire New Hampshire Department of Education about hosting a listening session in Claremont. So we are going to try to get dates for that and determine who the appropriate people are to attend." She flagged an ambiguity she wanted resolved before announcing anything: "It was a little unclear to me through the email communication if it was, simply administrators and education leaders in the community, or if it was something that was open to the entire community." | |
| 0:29:55 | The ELA and Literacy Framework — the team, then the process | "I hope you liked the 80s themed, PowerPoint that I've put together" — a board member calls back "Given me saved by the Bell vibes" — then, at 0:30:09: "for the 60 something page document that was sent to you, I hope you can see that that was a labor of love." She names both advisory boards at 0:31:01 and asks for applause, then gives the credit away twice: "it can be The Stephanie Show. Or we can build something that last", and at 0:36:13 "this is not me. This is our teachers that put this together." The four-step process she describes — standards review, research, ten years of district data, high-quality materials — matches the packet slide exactly. | |
| 0:32:52 | "We were taken down the wrong road" | The frankest passage of the presentation: "I know you're familiar with the term science of reading… This research has been around for many years. Many of the books that we're looking at are from the 80s, the 70s. The research has been around, but unfortunately, if you've read sold a story or you've listened to sold a story, you'll you'll read about how we were fold [fooled] as educators." At 0:33:17: "we're smart, educated people, and we were taken down the wrong road just because someone thought they had an idea that was going to make them a lot of money. And that's not been in the best interest of our students." She includes herself: "I taught, you know, Lucy Calkins, I taught guided reading. I used fonts [Fountas] and Pinnell until I knew a better way." Professional development named on the record and in the packet: LETRS, The Writing Revolution and 95 Percent Group. | |
| 0:36:42 | Posted "per policy" — and never adopted | The chair asks whether the framework can go on the SAU 6 web page "so that families can" see it. The answer, at 0:36:42: "the framework has been posted for two weeks on the." — and, at 0:36:49, "Per policy." Hurst adds, "The efficient follow the rules. That's me." The document itself was still a draft. Its cover letter reads "the updated Claremont Curriculum Framework for English Language Arts and Literacy adopted by the Claremont School Board ENTER DATE HERE", and the agenda listed the item as Discussion. No adoption motion was made at this meeting. | OBSERVATION |
| 0:36:56 | The chair on gifted-and-talented and Holocaust studies | "I wonder if there's anywhere in this curriculum for, the gifted and talented students, because I know that we are required by state law to provide programing for gifted and talented. And also, if there's anything that includes, Holocaust studies, I know that we have to sustain New Hampshire as mandated, that we have to provide that as well." The second half is right and the first half is not. Holocaust and genocide content became a required element of New Hampshire's civics and history instruction by 2020, 29:14, effective September 21, 2020. Gifted-and-talented programming is not required by New Hampshire law; RSA 189:29-b requires only an annual narrative report to the Department of Education, and expressly contemplates districts that have no programme — "If no such policies, programs, or procedures exist, the report shall so state." Nobody corrected the statement, and nobody mentioned the report. The answer she received, at 0:37:19, was about the materials' "multiple entry points", not about either requirement. | MEDIUM |
| 0:37:40 | Tiers one to four, and the handbook that follows | Hurst frames the framework as the first layer only: "Think of as layer one education… So layer two, layer three and layer four, which I like to call special education, are all outlined in the handbook." She credits the Director of Special Education with the next piece — "that's the next thing that Ben and I have been working on" — and he supplies a word from the table at 0:38:03: "Gallivanting." At 0:38:44: "where we would like to go next is to really beef up our MTS [MTSS] handbook so that our students are receiving the interventions they need to be successful." | |
| 0:39:43 | Bonnie Miles on implementation, and the answer about rollout speed | Miles had read the whole document: "I don't have a question. I have several comments because I did read through it and I'm very impressed… the balance between literary and informational. That scale changes from the primary to the intermediate grades." Her question was the practical one: "how can we support the implementation of the curriculum with the program materials through that staff development?" The answer, at 0:40:00: "We've partnered with Great Minds, which is the publisher for Wit and Wisdom and Geodes… there's a right and a wrong way to roll it out. They learned early on the wrong way is to fast." And on why a framework matters in a district with turnover, at 0:41:17: "That curriculum framework is something that they can give to a first year teacher, and if she follows nothing else… those students are going to be successful." | |
| 0:43:54 | State assessment results: science, ELA, math | Mike Koski, without softening: science, "The state average in science is about 38% proficient. So we are trending below that… even though that graph may look pretty awful, it's it's pretty comparative to state results." ELA at 0:46:30: "The averages for Ela hover around 50%. They move from over the years from 48 to 5253% state average wise. So they are we are still performing below." Elementary ELA at 0:47:48: "at 32% proficient here compared to about a state average of 50"; middle school "we're at 40% proficient". Elementary math at 0:49:18: "We're 30%, not quite 30% for proficiency overall." The pattern he draws out is a reversal: ELA improves with grade level, math declines. He predicted no visible gain before "probably the 24 school year". | |
| 0:50:01 | SAT: 895 combined against a state average of 1050 | "State average for New Hampshire is 492. English 511. Math is blue, Ela or English writing is red. So we are below those state averages. Our scores dropped a little bit this year compared to last year's groups." Then the combined figure at 0:50:50: "New Hampshire's average is 1050. Where 20, 22, nine, 17, 20, 23, eight, 95. So we're we're a little below that average. But we are definitely within spitting distance." The packet deck confirms the numbers he is reading: "SHS SAT Mean Score combined / NH = 1050 / 917 / 895" for 2022 and 2023, and section means of 464 and 454 in 2022 against 454 and 441 in 2023. A 22-point year-on-year fall, and 155 points below the state mean. He attributed part of it to a slow national recovery: "It's still a slow Covid recovery… We haven't yet gotten back to that 2018 level statewide." | |
| 0:52:35 | Sprague on aptitude versus achievement testing | "back in the day when the only kids that took SATs were college bound kids… I used to make the distinction in saying that the act is an achievement test that measures what you know, and the SAT measures how well you figure things out based on what you know." Koski: "the general SAT is still an aptitude test. They also have specific content area tests, which are more like an achievement test." Sprague's point at 1:00:38 was diagnostic value: "you can have the best curriculum in the world, but if the assessment doesn't give you what your, your data teams need to drill into to find out, okay, where are we falling down?" And his closing image, at 1:01:05: a dysfunctional curriculum "was not a symphony, but an umpire. D [an open D]… where everybody's playing off their own sheet of music." | |
| 0:53:51 | The chair asks what the board should actually fund | "what I'm hearing you say, just to be sure, is that you feel that currently our class matrix is okay, that the number of instructor, educators that we have in positions are okay, that what we're really lacking is the foundation and the framework." At 0:54:37: "we have been failing our teachers and our students with what we have been giving from or [for] support as a district." Koski agreed and explained why, at 0:54:50: "we don't have a curriculum where our teachers know where they're going from September to June. And so we don't hit that target because there is no target. Right? There's some vague definitions of things. Some are outdated." The chair drew the budget conclusion aloud at 0:55:20: "when we're looking at our budget, come budget time, that's what the board should be focusing on… That's where the dollars should be going." Koski: "I would, I would agree." | |
| 0:55:55 | "We have to focus on the bathroom first" | Hurst, unprompted: "I have a hard time. Sitting still over here when I can think of things to say. So I just wanted to clarify if we if we bought a house that was a fixer upper… this house needs all kinds of work in every room. We cannot focus on every room at one time. We have to focus on the bathroom first." Then the sharpest thing said about the state test all evening, at 0:57:48: "I'm going to tell you our test in New Hampshire needs to be revamped. And we looked at if you wanted to work on something as a board, that would be fantastic for you to do because it's it's an awful test. It doesn't give us what we need to really know what what to do for our students." And the honest forecast at 0:59:16: "You might see a little dip, but then likely a decline over the course of the next five years. This is going to take a lot of resources." She also gave a concrete instance: on writing conventions, "they have 65% of students scored a two. Can't get any higher on conventions." | |
| 1:01:36 | Capital Improvement Committee: one bid, $280,000, and a $90,000 addition | Bonnie Miles, reporting: "Mr. Holt has kept us informed… And I know all of you know this, but so the public is aware that we received only one bid for the roof replacement at Stevens High School, and it came in at $280,000. They also said that they included an additional roof section adjacent to the one that they're working on. And he saw that it's not leaking yet. It is showing signs of membrane failure. And, it never got replaced during the renovation." Her recommendation, at 1:02:51: "I think that we should give him the, approve that extra $90,000 to get that other piece of roof done, because we're looking at problems and they're there. They don't have to set everything up. So we've saved money in that, in that respect." The arithmetic is done aloud at Sprague's request, at 1:04:11: "The weather God weather God. They came in at 280"; "they included an additional roof section was Jason. And that's for $90,000"; and at 1:04:33 "the budget was 350. And this now we're looking at 370" — "Two 20,000 more okay. But it's not going to go away." The contractor's name is not recoverable from the transcript; weather God is the transcription's rendering and no packet document names the bidder. | OBSERVATION |
| 1:03:30 | No vote on the $90,000 — the chair sends it to the next agenda | The chair does not put the additional roof money to a vote. "I will reach out to Mike and see if that needs to be put on our next agenda or as far as voting for approval" at 1:03:37, and at 1:04:50 "I'll make sure that's, that I speak to Mike about that and also make sure it's on our next agenda." Miles pressed on timing — "probably check with Mr. Holt to find out. Or maybe Mike would know. When are they going to start this? Do they need to? How soon do they need to know? Waiting for the next agenda. Is that going to be too late?" The minutes record the same outcome: "Heather Whitney to reach out to Superintendent Tempesta to see if this needs to be added to the next agenda for possible vote from the school board." The board also took up a fence at Disnard Elementary and building walk-throughs at Stevens and Maple Avenue. | |
| 1:06:09 | Budget and Policy subcommittees | Budget, in the chair's words: "The budget subcommittee chair, we don't have we haven't had any meetings, and we're going to be eating [meeting], I think, to be setting those up with Miss Henry." The minutes render it "Have not met yet." Policy, from Whitney Skillen at 1:06:25: a second read on two policies and adoption of policy BG, "and with the adoption of policy BG we need to withdraw the old policies that will become obsolete. But per our policy adoption revision policy, that has to be voted on." She lists them at 1:06:50: "BG a BGBBG, c, b, g e and b g, F" — the minutes give BGA, BGB, BGC, BGE and BGF. The chair asked her to send the letters to the minutes-taker "With a reminder that we must have a vote to remove them before adopting BG." | HIGH |
| 1:07:47 | Eight policies in the hopper — seven of them on bullying and student conduct | Skillen: "the policy committee has created for ourselves an activity tracker where we are starting to prioritize and list the order in which we're going to tackle the review and update of various policies. Right now, we have eight policies in our hopper, which will take us probably through August or maybe September. One policy related to public complaints and seven policies related to bullying and student conduct." This is the subcommittee's own account of having met and organised its work — an activity tracker, a priority order and a nine-month horizon — and it is the only public record that any of it happened. Jennifer Gallagher then reported for Curriculum at 1:08:28: "We haven't met. No." | HIGH OBSERVATION |
| 1:08:40 | SRVRTC Visioning Committee: a chair elected, and a conflict designed out | Bonnie Miles: "Andy. Mr.. He is going to be the chair of the visioning Committee. We have voted on that, and it would be better because Mr. Herzog, he's the he'll be the administrative support system. He'll be our light on [liaison]. But it will avoid any conflicts of interest with the public. So we thought that would be better." The minutes: "Mr. Lafierene is going to be the chair of the committee. Mr. Herzog will be the liaison for the committee to avoid any conflicts of interest." Miles adds at 1:09:08: "there is a study going on. That's due by September there. We have some money, to fund this. And last week we met. And in increased the roster of shareholders [stakeholders]… I think it was the most productive meeting we have had." Three ninety-minute summer sessions were planned with dates undetermined, working with "the Southern Regional Education Board". | HIGH POSITIVE |
| 1:10:57 | Widening the stakeholder roster — and a vacancy in Newport | Sprague: "we were looking for our, folks in the greater Claremont and Newport community who who have different affiliations with business or the public or, public service… I had three people that I have contacted warning them that they're going to be receiving a letter from Andy, inviting them to participate on the committee." At 1:11:44: "We're looking for a much larger the community college and, Laval's and the Claremont Development Committee and all these shareholders to add input into what, what the direction should be." Koski: "it feels like the group is really starting to form and organize with a with a direction and purpose… It's going to kind of crystallize what what we think the CTE, building would be best used for." Miles closed with a regional appeal at 1:12:01: "Newport, they don't still don't have an automotive instructor for next year. So let's put the word out there." | |
| 1:12:28 | The Ad Hoc Parliamentary Procedure subcommittee, and what it is for | The chair, on her own subcommittee: "I'm hoping that we'll be able to disband it. And after meeting maybe two more times, and my goal is to come up with a policy that outlines the yearly duties and really defines what the roles of the chair are. So in perpetuity, we will make sure that our agendas are more efficient, that they, they focus on, academic achievement." At 1:13:00 she gives the reason: "in the past we've had issues with kind of agendas that aren't aligned with what the board should be focusing on. And so I want to kind of codify that and have it be a policy." The plan was to hand the product to the Policy subcommittee: "then we'll dump it on the policy committee here, see what you think." | HIGH |
| 1:13:45 | No volunteer for the secretaries' bargaining committee | The chair: "we are looking for a volunteer to serve on the collective bargaining committee… I know that Steve has done that in the past." Sprague: "Which which is just secretary." The chair: "Usually it's what about three meetings"; Koski, "probably three simpler contract." Nobody volunteered — "if there's anyone that's interested in kind of dipping their toe in to collective bargaining, we do need of all we do need a volunteer. We'll ask again next meeting." Sprague at 1:14:12: "Suspect Steve will do it" — Steven Horsky, who was absent, and who resigns from the board two weeks later. | |
| 1:14:30 | "We voted on him and we still don't know everything he's doing" | The Facebook page needs a manager, and the board reaches for the district's publicist — then discovers it cannot describe his engagement. The chair at 1:14:41: "I'm curious whether or not Mr. Zagora or I don't know if we have the. Is he is he the publicist or liaison if he would be interested in maybe assuming or if that is a reasonable expectation to be made?" Koski at 1:15:10: "I'm not sure what agreement is he has with the school district and if that would include that." Sprague: "I'd like to know what the arrangement is with Mr.." Hawkins at 1:15:30: "I'm curious as to what his role has been, what he has been doing, and maybe he can come and explain it to us and show us. And because we don't have any idea." Miles at 1:15:46: "We voted on him and we still don't know everything he's doing." Sprague: "I don't recall voting on him." The chair distinguished two appointments — a Claremont Community Television seat and district work — and Koski gave the only description of the work at 1:16:29: "Eric takes photographs of school events. He creates articles for the newspaper and the website… but that's what he's been doing." | MEDIUM |
| 1:17:00 | What the board's Facebook page is, and what it cannot be | The chair sets the constraint herself: "It has been essentially just posting, often reposting what's already been posted on the six [SAU 6] website. We can't really use it as an opinion page. Anything that we put on there would have to be a group statement from the board." Skillen at 1:18:17: "it produces redundant communications if we're only reposting information that's available on the website." Hawkins cited her NHSBA new-member training. The superintendent, looking at the page live at 1:19:16: "it looks like there's 627 followers. But again, it is a place where… People can also post." Hawkins at 1:20:29: "when was the last time something was posted from the school board?" — the answer, from the chair, was the deliberative session, four months earlier. "I'd hate to alienate 600 people." | |
| 1:18:36 | A motion made, seconded, and then withdrawn on a point of order | Skillen: "I will I'll make a motion for the Claremont School Board to dissolve our school board Facebook page and use the school, the official school website, as our primary mode of communication with the community." Miles seconds at 1:18:49 and adds a courtesy — "there should be another Facebook post reminding people that we are going to use the school website, that maybe that could be a goodbye Facebook post so they know where to find us." Then Sprague, at 1:21:23: "Just a point of order. I am going to I would if we vote on this I'm going to abstain because we don't. It's not on the agenda anywhere." The chair: "We can. Still I don't think we have to." Sprague: "But I'm still going to abstain." The chair then offered the deferral anyway at 1:21:37 — "if people feel more comfortable, we can put it on the agenda for next meeting. Let's do that" — and Skillen at 1:21:46: "I'll withdraw my motion." The chair's reading of the law was correct. RSA 91-A:2, II requires notice of the time and place of a meeting; it does not require a posted agenda, and it does not confine a public body to items listed on one. | POSITIVE |
| 1:22:09 | Hiring banners — and a member calls the fingerprint requirement a waste | Hawkins: "I've been hearing a lot about the fact we don't have subs, we don't have bus drivers… as I drive around town and other places, I see banners up with, we are hiring." At 1:22:56: "we talked about the bus driver training. It's three months. I've talked to people about subbing and they say, well, there's a backlog with fingerprinting, but if we make an assertive effort now, maybe come the fall we'll have more people." Skillen at 1:23:13: "Is it an essay [SAU] to require fingerprinting for a substitute teacher." Then, at 1:23:21: "Why can't you just do a background check without fingerprints? With your Social Security number?" and at 1:23:28 "Federal waste of resources, time and money." Koski, answering, at 1:23:36: "Person who came from out of state. And it wasn't recorded in the state of New Hampshire. And that's happened." Hawkins at 1:23:45: "There are many reasons to have fingerprinting. Part of being able to work in schools or volunteer in schools and valid reasons." Nobody named the statute. | OBSERVATION |
| 1:24:02 | Future dates, and a self-evaluation retreat | The chair runs the list: the June 21 board meeting, the July 13 SAU 6 meeting, the lunch-money debt accounting, a food-service vendor vote she had "saw on the working agenda", middle-school traffic flow, a fourth-grade civics trip to Concord, a celebration of achievement, and — at 1:25:25 — a self-evaluation retreat "to discuss how we can improve as a board to serve our community and our district, and also to add a presentation of what our retreat goals were and how we're going to attempt as a board to meet those goals." She estimated the time needed: "I think we really need to set aside almost 45 minutes of war [more] time to kind of go through this, because we're going to have to assign subcommittees." Both the celebration of achievement and the self-evaluation retreat are traced back to "our Claremont School Board retreat" — the May 16 session whose minutes were approved on the consent agenda 82 minutes earlier. | MEDIUM |
| 1:26:21 | Free-and-reduced lunch: the number the district is paid on | Sprague: "we heard, the speakers talk about how important it is that our aid a lot of our it is based on free and induced [reduced] lunch numbers. So I'd like to know where we are. We actually are hiring. We actually are paying someone to make sure that that happens, that we have fine [F&R] numbers. I'd like to know what they are." At 1:26:44: "we can't compare them to the last several years because I think everybody had free lunch during Covid. So I'd like to know what the free and reduced lunch percentage is this year and what it was, and maybe what 19 is that pre. Covid 1918." And at 1:27:12: "it's really important that we have that everybody who is eligible those those out. And since we have somebody that's what their job description is I'd like to know how we're performing in that area." | OBSERVATION |
| 1:27:31 | Lunch debt, Medicaid certification, and a policy "with teeth" | The chair: "I know that we have been dropping statistically, over the last ten years we've been dropping. And I also know that, the legislature voted down having automatic reporting of Medicaid… anybody who is receiving Medicaid services with school age children, they automatically get free and reduced lunch. But our legislation legislature has voted that down." On the debt itself, at 1:28:27: "there's there's not a lot of teeth that the district has to you can't force somebody to pay, knowing that we're going to feed the child regardless. So there's really not a lot of mechanisms. We do have a policy in place currently, how to respond to, a child that is sent to school without lunch and without payment for lunch… our policy does have teeth, but we as a board would probably want to revisit that and see if we want to, suggest that it be applied more frequently than it is being applied." Hawkins pressed three times on whether a Medicaid identifier proves income eligibility; nobody knew. Tempesta at 1:29:23: "I don't know if they're they're qualifying for free and reduced is contingent on having a medicaid identifier. I'm just not sure." | OBSERVATION |
| 1:30:03 | "For every applicant form that gets filled in… the state would pay" | Bonnie Miles, relaying a state representative's remarks from an off-site meeting: "hope Damon was there at that at that meeting. Across the street… And she said that for every applicant form that gets filled in and sent, sent in, then the state would pay for the for the food for that child for the year. I can't remember what the dollar amount was." The chair supplies one at 1:30:31: "I think it's roughly 1800 more." Miles at 1:30:33: "you get, you know, 20 or 30 parents, that's a lot of money. Or even if they know they're not going to use it, if they just fill it out and send it in, then we can get that much more money." Sprague ties it to the aid formula at 1:30:46: "it's part of our adequacy funding." The figure and the mechanism are the board's characterisation and are not verified here; see flag 20. | OBSERVATION |
| 1:31:19 | "Our issues with bullying in the schools and a negative culture" | The chair, setting up the summer's work: "one of our goals, at the retreat was climate and culture goals. And I think that if we want to tackle, our issues with bullying in the schools and, a negative culture that is not supporting learning and feelings of safety for all of our students, then we would have to, as a board, to commit to spending the summer doing a lot more than we normally do." Hawkins at 1:33:25: "at the retreat, we talked about the need to get together again, to continue the work we started, and also to focus on reinforcing a positive culture climate… So I'll I'll travel and come back." The chair concluded that student achievement was in the administration's hands and the board's own summer work should be climate and culture, at 1:34:22: "the impact that we have is to give the administrative team a direction. And we've clearly done that." | OBSERVATION |
| 1:34:58 | A July meeting, and "the Whitney solution" | Miles: "if we're going to meet in July… they say the first two weeks of July or the big vacation weeks. So if we're going to do that, maybe we should do that sometime in the second part of July." Sprague: "We could have instead of having the first week in July, we could just meet in the third week." On middle-school traffic, Skillen at 1:35:54: "there's a lane that runs around the back of the middle school. It's like a really no brainer solution… that should not be more than a 15 minute discussion in my opinion." Gallagher supplies the operational version at 1:36:42: "instead of winding all around the road and through the parking lot, parents would just be instructed like first in, first out, put up a sign with your last name, and then they call your kid out." Sprague twice said it was not the board's problem — "It's not the school board's problem. And I think the school administration should solve it. Collaborate with the police." Skillen, at 1:37:07: "The Whitney of the school board has identified a very easy solution… You're welcome." | |
| 1:37:26 | "Where did it go?" — $200,000 to $300,000 of federal food-service money | Sprague, pushing the lunch item into the budget year: "we are running according to the last time I asked, what do we have, 2 or 300,000 in some kind of a arrears? No, it's we were collecting money all during Covid for lunches, and there's quite a substantial bunch of cash, from what I understood." Koski at 1:37:58: "I'm not aware of that", and at 1:38:21, "But we wouldn't be able to carry that over." Sprague at 1:38:28: "last time I asked her was either 2 or 300,000 built up there? That's what Richard [Seaman] told me." Skillen at 1:38:42: "if that is true there. Mr. Holt has identified some kitchen renovation and repair needs, some that are pretty urgent." Sprague at 1:39:02: "I know it had to have existed because he told us it did. I'm sure we could go back and find the tape where he said that there's hundreds of thousands there post-Covid. But then he clarified to the board that that money has to be used for kitchen related purposes." Then, at 1:39:38: "I don't mean this in a negative way because I know things are chaotic in the business office, but I'd like to know what what if if we had that money, where did it go?" And at 1:39:54: "it's supposed to be used for very specific purposes. As it comes from what, the USDA or wherever it comes from." The chair: "Federal money. Yeah." | MEDIUM |
| 1:39:29 | The proposal to pay lunch debt out of the food-service fund | Inside the same exchange, Sprague names what he had in mind for the money: "I was thinking that part of that could be, taking care of the debt. That's why I was curious what the debt is." Nobody responded to the idea, and the item was set down for an August meeting — Hawkins at 1:38:59, "Discuss it in August. Meeting to be spent. Is that correct?" The record contains no caution that the two uses are treated differently under federal rules: equipment and repairs for the kitchen are an improvement of the food service, while writing off uncollectible meal charges is a bad debt. | MEDIUM |
| 1:41:05 | Bullying, "extreme cases", and a police briefing for the board | Gallagher asks whether the board is "still hoping to tackle bullying and school climate in July?" The chair's answer is the longest single passage of the closing stretch: "we kind of were talking about how complex the problem is and that it's not only what's in school, but it's what's in home, and also what the law enforcement response is when there's extreme cases, which unfortunately, we have extreme cases." At 1:41:36: "the only thing that the board has the ability to do is to create policy. But for us to create effective policy, we need to know what the resources are out there and perhaps kind of coming up with a decision tree or an outline for principals and other administrators to use. So the application of discipline is equal or application of interventions is system wide and applied universally." She had arranged for county law enforcement and "the chief of police" to brief the board, and reported at 1:43:10 that changed state juvenile legislation meant "a lot of the stuff is being shipped, shipped back into the school, and we really don't have the resources." | OBSERVATION |
| 1:43:51 | A member declares a conflict before anyone raises one | The chair, thinking aloud about who might present on bullying: "we could maybe get Courtney Porter to come in. And, Jen, I know you're a resource unto yourself. And I don't know what kind of a weird conflict of interest that would be. I'm not 100% sure." Gallagher answered immediately, at 1:44:09: "As long as it's if we're taking a vote on any programs that I would be implementing, I would not vote on them, okay." The chair moved straight on to logistics. Nothing in New Hampshire law compelled that undertaking, which is why it appears here as a positive rather than as compliance. | POSITIVE |
| 1:44:36 | Adjournment by consensus, and the July date | The chair, turning to the administrators: "Is there anything that admin team wants to add? I mean, you're we should be including you more. Quite frankly, you're here." Sprague: "I think we should let them go home." Then, at 1:44:50: "We're still ahead of time. So, we could do a German [adjourn] by consensus as well. Is there anybody that would object to adjourning the meeting?" No member moved adjournment; no vote was taken; the minutes record "No objections by any board member to adjourn the meeting." The last 45 seconds are the board fixing its July date — Gallagher, "Wednesday, third Wednesday", and the chair at 1:45:29: "So I have July 9th, 19th would be our." The recording ends on Gallagher's "That would be lovely." | MEDIUM |
Items flagged for review
Flags are a reviewer's aid generated by comparing this meeting against the state and federal law in force on June 7, 2023 — not against today's law. Six provisions used below have since changed, and each flag that relies on one says so. The most important is RSA 198:20-b: the threshold above which a school board must hold a prior public hearing on unanticipated funds was $5,000 on this date, and was raised to $20,000 by 2023, 38:1, effective July 18, 2023 — six weeks after this meeting. Reading the current text back onto this date would turn a required hearing into an optional courtesy and invert the finding. The other five: the school-year rule was Ed 306.18 in 2023 and was renumbered to Ed 306.15 effective December 13, 2024; RSA 91-A:2, II gained its start-time, end-time and minutes-producer requirements only in 2025, though its mover-and-seconder clause has been in force since January 1, 2019 and does apply here; RSA 189:11 was amended three times effective July 1, 2023, three weeks after this meeting, so the 2020 text is the one cited; RSA 193-F:4 was amended in 2025, so this page cites the chapter rather than quoting the current enumerated requirements; and 2 CFR part 200 was revised effective October 1, 2024. Flags are not findings of violation and nothing here is legal advice. Each cites the rule it rests on; where no verified rule applies, the item is recorded as an observation or as a speaker's characterisation. Twenty-five flags follow, ordered by severity: two HIGH, eleven MEDIUM, eight OBSERVATION and four POSITIVE.
HIGH Six board subcommittees reported to this meeting and at least three had met; none of them has a posted notice, agenda or minutes anywhere in the district's public shares
The agenda's item VI.3 lists six subcommittees, and the reports run from 1:01:36 to 1:13:00. Three of them describe work that can only have been done in meetings. The Policy Sub-Committee has "created for ourselves an activity tracker where we are starting to prioritize and list the order in which we're going to tackle the review and update of various policies", has eight policies queued through August or September, and has settled a plan to adopt policy BG and withdraw five others. The SRVRTC Visioning Committee — "last week we met… I think it was the most productive meeting we have had" — elected a chair ("We have voted on that"), enlarged its stakeholder roster, holds district money, is producing a study "due by September", and scheduled three ninety-minute summer sessions. The Ad Hoc Parliamentary Procedure Sub-Committee expects to finish "after meeting maybe two more times". The Capital Improvement Committee reported the roof bids and is arranging school walk-throughs. Only the Budget and Curriculum subcommittees reported not having met.
RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d) defines "public body" to include any board of a school district "or any committee, subcommittee, or subordinate body thereof, or advisory committee thereto" — the trailing clause is the operative one, and it captures every body named above, the Visioning Committee included. A public body must post notice of the time and place of each meeting at least 24 hours ahead, and its minutes must be "promptly recorded and open to public inspection not more than 5 business days after the meeting", under RSA 91-A:2, II. Nothing of the kind exists. This project's survey of the district's Meeting Documents share, current to August 28, 2026, records that the first subcommittee packet ever posted to that share was an August 19, 2026 Policy Sub-Committee folder — more than three years after this meeting. No subcommittee notice, agenda or set of minutes for 2023 was located in any district share.
Why HIGH and not MEDIUM. Applying the severity rule this project uses: this is the unmitigated limb. Public bodies met, no minutes exist in any district share, and nothing on the record explains the absence — no member says minutes exist elsewhere or are coming, and the question is never raised. The subcommittees' own reports are the only public account of their work, and they reach the public only because a board member happened to summarise them aloud at a televised meeting.
Sources: RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d) (a committee, subcommittee, subordinate body or advisory committee of a school board is itself a public body); RSA 91-A:2, II (24-hour notice; minutes open to inspection within 5 business days); CSB Meeting Minutes 6.7.23 (the six subcommittee reports).
HIGH The district's audits were behind with no timeline, and the federal single audit for the year ended June 30, 2022 was already past its due date
The whole of what the board was told about its audits is four sentences from its contracted business administrator at 0:12:12: "The last piece of comment is on your audits. There's nothing really has changed with that. We're working with your auditors to catch up with some of the audience [audits], as you know, that have been behind." He could not say when — "we'll have a better timeline. For that. Hopefully by the end of this, perhaps by your next meeting" — and offered only that "we think that it'll happen probably faster than it has in the past." The phrase "as you know" is the significant one: the delay was already familiar to this board. No member asked a follow-up question.
The deadline is not discretionary. Claremont's fiscal year ends June 30. A non-federal entity that expends $750,000 or more in federal awards in a year must have a single audit, and must submit the reporting package within the earlier of 30 days after receiving the auditor's report or nine months after the end of the audit period — for the year ended June 30, 2022, that is March 31, 2023, ten weeks before this meeting. That the district crossed the expenditure threshold is not in doubt on this record: the same speaker reports "just a little bit under $3 million" of grant reimbursements filed in a fortnight, against ESSER awards the vice chair sizes at "10 or $11 million". New Hampshire separately requires an annual audit by independent public accountants under RSA 21-J:19.
What the record does and does not establish. It establishes that audits were behind on June 7, 2023 and that no completion date could be given. It does not establish which years were outstanding — nobody said, and nobody asked. This project's reporting record has the FY2022 audit as not issued until 2025, and contemporaneous news coverage of the eventual audits is listed in the appendix; neither is evidence from this meeting, and both are identified as such.
Sources: 2 CFR 200.512(a)(1) (single-audit reporting package due the earlier of 30 days after receipt of the auditor's report or nine months after period end); 2 CFR 200.501 (single audit required at $750,000 of federal expenditures; the $1,000,000 threshold applies only to fiscal years beginning on or after October 1, 2024 and is not the threshold for FY2022); RSA 21-J:19 (audits by independent public accountants).
MEDIUM The $5,500 gift was over the threshold then in force, so the public hearing was required — and nothing in the record shows the seven days' newspaper notice the same provision requires
The threshold on this date was $5,000, not $20,000. RSA 198:20-b, III(a), as it stood from 2005 until July 18, 2023, read: "For unanticipated funds in the amount of $5,000 or more, the school board shall hold a prior public hearing on the action to be taken. Notice of the time, place, and subject of such hearing shall be published in a newspaper of general circulation in the relevant municipality at least 7 days before the meeting is held." The 2023 session raised that figure to $20,000 by 2023, 38:1, effective July 18, 2023 — six weeks after this meeting. A $5,500 gift is therefore over the threshold that governed here, and the hearing the board held at 0:02:58 was not a discretionary courtesy but a statutory precondition to accepting the money.
The hearing itself was properly done. A motion was made to enter it, a roll call was taken, and the minutes record all six present members by name voting Yes; the presenter spoke; the board voted itself out of the hearing before voting on acceptance, after a point of order corrected the order of business; and both motions carry a named mover and seconder. That is the sequence the statute contemplates.
What is missing is the notice. The same subparagraph requires publication in a newspaper of general circulation at least seven days ahead. The eleven-document packet contains no affidavit of publication, no clipping and no reference to one; nothing on the recording mentions a published notice; and the minutes do not record one. The agenda does describe the hearing in full, including the donor and the amount — but an agenda posting is not newspaper publication, and the statute names the latter specifically. This is a documentation gap, not a demonstrated omission: a notice may well have been published and simply not filed with the packet, and this page makes no finding that it was not. The point for a reviewer is that the district's own public record of a hearing it was legally required to hold does not contain the one document that would show the hearing was validly noticed. The absence is more conspicuous because no member of the public attended — the chair had established minutes earlier that there were no citizens in the room, and then asked, inside the hearing, "Does anybody from the public have any questions for Mr. La Plante?"
Sources: RSA 198:20-b, III(a) as codified before the 2023 amendment — "$5,000 or more… prior public hearing… published in a newspaper of general circulation… at least 7 days before the meeting is held"; RSA 198:20-b (current text, $20,000; source note "2005, 188:1, eff. Aug. 29, 2005. 2023, 38:1, eff. July 18, 2023"); CSB Agenda 6.7.23 (item III, the noticed hearing); CSB Meeting Minutes 6.7.23 (the roll call).
MEDIUM The cheque was issued on April 28, made payable to the middle school rather than the district, and accepted by the board six weeks later
The packet document Dicks Sporting Goods $5,500 is a remittance advice and cheque image, not a pledge letter. It shows cheque #000017458, dated 04/28/2023, for $5,500.00, drawn by The Dick's Sporting Goods Foundation on Wells Fargo Bank, N.A., against invoice #119353 dated 02/09/2023. The payee line reads "CLAREMONT MIDDLE SCHOOL ATTN: SHAUN LAPLANTE", at the school's own street address, and the cheque is marked "VOID AFTER 180 DAYS". The board accepted the gift on June 7 — about six weeks after the cheque was cut and roughly four months after the invoice date.
Two things follow. First, RSA 198:20-b requires a prior public hearing "on the action to be taken". The board did hold its hearing before its acceptance vote, so the sequence at the meeting was correct; but the funds had been in the district's hands, in some form, for weeks beforehand, and neither the recording nor the minutes says where they were held in the interval or whether any of it had been committed. Second, RSA 197:23-a places custody of school district money in the district treasurer, who "shall pay out the same only upon orders of the school board" and keeps books independent of the board's. A cheque payable to a school and addressed to a named employee sits awkwardly with that scheme, and nothing on the record describes how it was routed into district accounts.
Mitigation on the record: the gift was disclosed in full on the posted agenda with the donor and amount named, it was presented publicly by the person who solicited it, the board voted on it in open session, and the one board member who read the packet closely caught and stated on the record that the underlying proposal had asked for $10,000 rather than $5,500. Nothing here suggests concealment; the question is one of custody and timing.
Sources: Dicks Sporting Goods $5,500 (remittance advice and cheque image, dated 04/28/2023); RSA 197:23-a (treasurer's custody of district money; payment only on orders of the school board); RSA 198:20-b, III(a) as then in force (a prior public hearing on the action to be taken).
MEDIUM Between $200,000 and $300,000 of federal child-nutrition money that the vice chair was told existed could not be accounted for at the table
From 1:37:26 the vice chair tries to establish what happened to a balance the previous business administrator had described to the board: "we were collecting money all during Covid for lunches, and there's quite a substantial bunch of cash, from what I understood… last time I asked her was either 2 or 300,000 built up there? That's what Richard told me." He is precise about the constraint on it: "he clarified to the board that that money has to be used for kitchen related purposes", and "it's supposed to be used for very specific purposes. As it comes from what, the USDA or wherever it comes from." The chair confirms, "Federal money. Yeah."
The administration could neither confirm nor locate it. The assistant superintendent: "I'm not aware of that", then "But we wouldn't be able to carry that over" — a proposition the vice chair disputed and which nobody resolved. The vice chair's closing question is the flag: "I don't mean this in a negative way because I know things are chaotic in the business office, but I'd like to know what what if if we had that money, where did it go?" It was not answered; the item was set down for an August meeting.
Revenues of a nonprofit school food service "are to be used only for the operation or improvement of such food service" under 7 CFR 210.14(a), and the same section caps net cash resources at three months' average expenditures unless the state agency approves more. Those two rules are why the money cannot simply be swept, and also why a balance of this size is a matter the board is entitled to see reconciled. Separately, a district expending federal awards must maintain records that identify their source and application, and effective internal control over them, under 2 CFR 200.302 and 200.303. The record here does not establish that any money is missing. It establishes that a sitting board member was told a six-figure restricted federal balance existed, that no one present could say whether it still did, and that a member of the board describes the office responsible for answering as chaotic.
Read alongside flag 9 — grant costs paid out of the general fund with the transfers back still in progress — and flag 2 — audits behind with no timeline — this is the third statement in one meeting that the district's federal-funds accounting could not currently answer a direct question.
Sources: 7 CFR 210.14(a)–(b) (nonprofit school food service revenues usable only for the operation or improvement of the food service; net cash resources limited to 3 months' average expenditures); 2 CFR 200.303 (effective internal control over federal awards); RSA 197:23-a (treasurer's independent books of district money).
MEDIUM The proposal to spend food-service money on unpaid lunch debt would be an unallowable use, and nobody in the room said so
Inside the same exchange, at 1:39:29, the vice chair explains what he wanted the balance for: "I was thinking that part of that could be, taking care of the debt. That's why I was curious what the debt is." The context is the lunch-debt accounting he had asked to be scheduled, and the chair's earlier description of a district policy on children sent to school without lunch money.
The two uses discussed in that exchange are treated very differently. Whitney Skillen's suggestion in the same minute — that the money go to kitchen renovation and repair needs "some that are pretty urgent" — is squarely an "improvement of such food service" under 7 CFR 210.14(a). Applying the same money to uncollectible meal charges is not: 2 CFR 200.426 makes bad debts, "debts determined to be uncollectable, including losses… and related collection costs, and related legal costs, arising from such debts", unallowable costs to a federal award. Unpaid meal charges that a district writes off must be restored to the nonprofit school food service account from non-federal sources.
Nothing was decided; the item was deferred to August. The flag is that a specific and reasonable-sounding proposal to spend restricted federal money went unchallenged in a room containing a superintendent, an assistant superintendent, a contracted business administrator and an incoming business administrator, and reaches the August agenda without the caution attached.
Sources: 2 CFR 200.426 (bad debts and related collection and legal costs are unallowable); 7 CFR 210.14(a) (food service revenues usable only for operation or improvement of the food service). Vintage note: 2 CFR part 200 was revised effective October 1, 2024; the bad-debt rule at 200.426 is materially unchanged from the text in force in June 2023, but a reviewer relying on exact wording should consult the 2023 annual edition.
MEDIUM The 2023–24 calendar in the packet prints 177 student days — three short of the statutory 180 — and the board approved changes to it on the consent agenda with no day count stated and no hour-equivalent shown
The packet's 23-24 School Year Calendar ends with the line "177 Student Days/185 Teacher Days". RSA 189:1 requires that "The school board of every district shall provide standard schools for at least 180 days in each year, or the equivalent number of hours as required in the rules of the department of education." The rule supplying those equivalents in June 2023 was Ed 306.18 (School Year) — at least 945 hours of instructional time in each elementary school, 450 in kindergarten, and 990 in each middle and high school.
What was said about it. The whole discussion runs 39 seconds. The chair: "It's my understanding that it was an addition of some half days." The superintendent: "the first day of school will be a half day, which would allow for kindergarten, open house for parents… And then the last day of school would be a half day." That is consistent with the document, which counts August at 1.5 student days and June at 8.5. No total was stated, no hour figure was mentioned, and the 180-day requirement was not raised. The item then passed inside a consent agenda taken without a motion or a vote (flag 8).
This is a gap in the showing, not a demonstrated shortfall. RSA 189:1 is satisfied by either limb, and 177 days at a normal instructional day length would comfortably exceed 945 or 990 hours — so the calendar is very likely lawful on the hours basis. What the record lacks is anyone saying so. The board approved a calendar three days below the figure named in the statute without a member, the superintendent or the document itself addressing which limb the district was relying on. The trend is also worth a reviewer's attention: when this same calendar was first approved "as presented" at the February 15, 2023 meeting, the only figure given on the record was the superintendent's "we have 178 student days" — and the calendar document was not in that packet at all. The half-day changes approved here take it to 177. Note also that the document marks June 13 as the "Tentative Last Day of School", so storm-day make-ups could move the total in either direction.
Sources: RSA 189:1 ("at least 180 days in each year, or the equivalent number of hours as required in the rules of the department of education"; last amended 2011, 42:1, eff. July 8, 2011, so this text governed on the meeting date); N.H. Admin. Code Part Ed 306, Minimum Standards for Public School Approval — the school-year rule was Ed 306.18 in June 2023 (945 hours elementary, 450 kindergarten, 990 middle and high), renumbered to Ed 306.15 effective December 13, 2024; NHDOE, Ed 306 minimum-standards revision side-by-side, March 2023 (identifies the then-current rule as Ed 306.18, School Year); 23-24 School Year Calendar (the "177 Student Days/185 Teacher Days" line).
MEDIUM The consent agenda was marked "(vote required)" on its own face and was disposed of without a motion, a seconder or a vote — as was the adjournment
The agenda reads "Consent Agenda (vote required)" and lists three items beneath it, including the approval of the retreat minutes and of the school-year calendar changes. What happened instead, at 0:01:11: "Is there any request to remove any item of the consent agenda to the regular agenda?" then, eleven seconds later, "Seeing no objections, I will assume that is approval of the consent agenda." After the calendar discussion the chair repeated the formula at 0:02:33: "In the absence of objection, we will approve all items on the consent agenda." The minutes record it as "No objections from any board member on all consent agenda items. All items passed." The adjournment went the same way at 1:44:50: "we could do a German [adjourn] by consensus as well. Is there anybody that would object to adjourning the meeting?"
RSA 91-A:2, II requires that "The names of the members who made or seconded each motion shall be recorded in the minutes" — a clause in force since 2018, 244:1, eff. January 1, 2019, and therefore applicable to every meeting in this corpus. Where no motion is made there is nothing for the minutes to record, so the minutes here are accurate as far as they go; the defect is upstream of them. Unanimous consent is a recognised parliamentary device and no New Hampshire statute forbids it, which is why this is graded MEDIUM. But the consequence for the public record is concrete: the two decisions of the evening that will matter longest — approving a 177-day school calendar and approving the minutes of an off-site board retreat — passed with no member's name attached to either, no count, and no roll. A resident reading the minutes cannot tell who supported them, and the board itself later had to be reminded, in the Policy Sub-Committee report, "that we must have a vote to remove them before adopting BG."
The contrast within the same meeting is instructive. Every motion taken inside the RSA 198:20-b public hearing was moved, seconded and named in the minutes, and the entry vote was a recorded roll call — see flag 23. The board plainly knows how to do this; it did not do it for the consent agenda or the adjournment.
Sources: RSA 91-A:2, II (minutes to include names of members, subject matter and final decisions; "The names of the members who made or seconded each motion shall be recorded in the minutes" — 2018, 244:1, eff. Jan. 1, 2019. The start-time, end-time and minutes-producer clauses in the current text were added by 2025, 112:1, eff. Aug. 22, 2025 and are not applied to this meeting); CSB Agenda 6.7.23 ("Consent Agenda (vote required)").
MEDIUM Grant-funded costs were paid out of the general fund with the transfers back still in progress, and accounts payable were behind
The contracted business administrator, at 0:10:46: "we know that some of the pieces in the grants we've spent out of the general fund, we have to make those transfers, if you will, back into the grants. And that is being done as we speak." And at 0:11:13: "It's going to take a little bit of time to catch up with all the accounts payable. But certainly our focus has been to ensure the cash flow." The context was a scramble to file "just a little bit under $3 million" of reimbursement claims against a June 2 state cut-off, ahead of "probably our biggest payroll of the year".
Federal reimbursement grants are designed to be spent first and claimed after — the vice chair says as much at 0:17:21: "now that I fully understand how Esser works, that we have to spend the money and then collect the money after, that's a helpful bit of information that we actually didn't even have before." So paying from the general fund and reclassifying afterwards is not itself irregular. What raises a control question is the combination: charges sitting in the wrong fund for an unstated period, a backlog of accounts payable, an audit programme behind schedule (flag 2), and a six-figure restricted balance nobody could locate (flag 5) — all described in the same 90 minutes, by four different people, without a single board question about reconciliation.
2 CFR 200.302 requires a recipient's financial management system to permit the identification, in its accounts, of all federal awards received and expended, and records that identify the source and application of funds; 2 CFR 200.303 requires effective internal control over federal awards. The incoming business administrator named the same problem in her own words at 0:21:00 — "I don't like to have. Oh, maybe there's 200,000 here, 300,000 there. We need to know where we're at" — and made monthly budget reporting her stated goal.
Sources: 2 CFR 200.303 (effective internal control over federal awards); 20 U.S.C. §1225(b) (GEPA/Tydings: formula funds remain available for obligation one additional fiscal year — the mechanism behind the ESSER II and III dates given at 0:19:01). Vintage note: 2 CFR part 200 was revised effective October 1, 2024; a reviewer relying on exact wording for a 2023 transaction should consult the 2023 annual edition.
MEDIUM A quorum of the board spent three hours at a restaurant setting district goals, and the only public record of it surfaced 22 days later inside this meeting's packet
The consent agenda approved "Minutes Approval- May 16, 2023 Retreat & SMART Goals". The document behind it is in this packet, and its own heading reads: "Claremont School Board Retreat Minutes… 16:00-19:00 @ Teal Lantern Present: Mike Koski, Heather Whitney, Frank Sprague, Whitney Skillen, Arlene Hawkins, Jennifer Gallagher, Bonnie Miles." That is six of the board's seven members — a quorum — plus the assistant superintendent, for three hours at a Claremont restaurant.
What they did there was district business in the ordinary sense. The minutes record a presentation on the strategic plan and state assessment results, seven "current progress toward goals" items including the K–5 ELA implementation and a move to six periods at Stevens High School in 2025, the administration's top three priorities, a group discussion defining achievement, budget and climate and culture for board use, and the creation of "three SMART goals focused on student achievement, budget goals, climate and culture", recorded by Whitney Skillen. The board treated it as binding on itself: the chair refers back to "our Claremont School Board retreat" three times during this meeting when setting the summer agenda, and Arlene Hawkins says "at the retreat, we talked about the need to get together again, to continue the work we started."
Under RSA 91-A:2, I a meeting is the convening of a quorum of a public body "for the purpose of discussing or acting upon a matter or matters over which the public body has supervision, control, jurisdiction or advisory power" — a definition this session meets on its face. RSA 91-A:2, II then requires notice of the time and place posted in two places or published at least 24 hours ahead, and minutes "promptly recorded and open to public inspection not more than 5 business days after the meeting."
What the record shows and does not show. The minutes exist, and they were approved — that is the mitigating fact, and it is why this is MEDIUM rather than HIGH. Nothing in them, in this meeting's packet, in the recording, or in the district's public shares records a notice for the retreat, and nothing indicates that the minutes were available for inspection before they appeared with this packet, 22 days after the meeting they describe and well past five business days. A separate Drive title search for a retreat folder returned nothing from this session's access, though this project's survey of the 2023 Meeting Documents share records a folder named "23. Claremont Board Retreat" in it. This page does not assert that the retreat was unnoticed; it records that no notice has been located and that the minutes reached the public share late.
Sources: RSA 91-A:2, I and II (definition of meeting; 24-hour notice; minutes open to inspection within 5 business days); RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d) (a school district board is a public body); Claremont School Board Retreat Minutes… @ Teal Lantern (attendance and subject matter); CSB May2023 Goals (the SMART goals produced there).
MEDIUM Three weeks after the May 17 meeting its minutes still did not exist, because nobody had transcribed them
The chair, at 0:01:22: "We were unable to have the minutes from the 517 [5/17] meeting. Transcribed so that will be postponed until the next meeting." The agenda carries the same thing in a footnote: "(Meeting Minutes from 5/17/23 postponed*)". The next meeting was June 21 — 35 days after the meeting whose minutes were awaited.
RSA 91-A:2, II requires minutes to be "promptly recorded and open to public inspection not more than 5 business days after the meeting". Five business days from Wednesday May 17 is Wednesday May 24. On June 7, twenty-one days after the meeting, no minutes existed in any form — not draft, not unapproved, none. The statute is satisfied by a draft; the difficulty here is that there was nothing to inspect. A May 17, 2023 board meeting did take place: this project's survey of the district's 2023 Meeting Documents share records a packet folder for it, "12. CSB 5.17.23", though no recording of that meeting exists in this corpus.
Why MEDIUM and not HIGH. Applying this project's severity rule, this is the mitigated limb: the delay is disclosed on the record by the chair, in public, with a stated cause and a stated remedy — the item is carried to the next meeting rather than dropped. That is materially different from a years-old gap nobody accounts for. The deadline was still missed, and the cause the chair gives — that the minutes had not been "transcribed" — points at a capacity problem in the office that produces them rather than at any decision of the board.
Sources: RSA 91-A:2, II (minutes promptly recorded and open to public inspection not more than 5 business days after the meeting); CSB Agenda 6.7.23 ("Meeting Minutes from 5/17/23 postponed*").
MEDIUM The chair told the board that state law requires gifted-and-talented programming. It does not — and the reporting duty that does exist was not mentioned
At 0:36:56, questioning the curriculum director on the new ELA framework: "I wonder if there's anywhere in this curriculum for, the gifted and talented students, because I know that we are required by state law to provide programing for gifted and talented. And also, if there's anything that includes, Holocaust studies, I know that we have to sustain New Hampshire as mandated, that we have to provide that as well."
The Holocaust half is right. Instruction addressing "How intolerance, bigotry, antisemitism, and national, ethnic, racial, or religious hatred and discrimination have evolved in the past, and can evolve, into genocide and mass violence, such as the Holocaust, and how to prevent the evolution of such practices" is a required element of the civics and history instruction New Hampshire mandates, added by 2020, 29:14, effective September 21, 2020 — in force at this meeting.
The gifted-and-talented half is not. New Hampshire does not require districts to provide gifted-and-talented programming. RSA 189:29-b, added by 2021, 139:1, requires only that "every New Hampshire public school shall submit to the department of education… an annual narrative report detailing the policies, programs, and procedures that are in place to identify and accommodate the unique needs of gifted and talented students" — and expressly contemplates districts with none: "If no such policies, programs, or procedures exist, the report shall so state." The mandatory verb attaches to the report, not to the programme.
Two things follow, and they cut in opposite directions. The chair's error is in the direction of doing more than the law requires, not less, so no duty was excused by it; that is why this is MEDIUM rather than HIGH. But it is a statement of law by the presiding officer, made to the administration during a curriculum review, and it went uncorrected by a superintendent, an assistant superintendent and a curriculum director who were all present. Meanwhile the obligation that is mandatory — the annual narrative report — was named by nobody, and this record contains no indication of whether Claremont files it. The answer the chair received, about the reading materials' "multiple entry points", addressed neither point.
Sources: RSA 189:29-b (annual narrative report on identification and accommodation of gifted and talented students; "If no such policies, programs, or procedures exist, the report shall so state"; 2021, 139:1, eff. July 23, 2021); RSA 189:11 (Holocaust and genocide content required within mandated civics and history instruction; added 2020, 29:14, eff. Sept. 21, 2020). Vintage note: RSA 189:11 was amended three times effective July 1, 2023 — 2021, 157:1; 2022, 116:1; and 2023, 226:1 — three weeks after this meeting, and again in 2024 and 2025. The 2020 provision cited here is the one in force on June 7, 2023; the current subparagraph lettering is not asserted for that date.
MEDIUM The board voted to appoint a district publicist and could not, a year or more later, describe what he does or on what terms
The item arose sideways, from the question of who should manage the board's Facebook page, and it produced the plainest admission of the evening. The chair at 1:14:41: "I'm curious whether or not Mr. Zagora [Zengota] or I don't know if we have the. Is he is he the publicist or liaison… or if that is a reasonable expectation to be made?" The assistant superintendent at 1:15:10: "I'm not sure what agreement is he has with the school district and if that would include that." Arlene Hawkins at 1:15:30: "I'm curious as to what his role has been, what he has been doing, and maybe he can come and explain it to us and show us. And because we don't have any idea." Bonnie Miles at 1:15:46: "We voted on him and we still don't know everything he's doing." The vice chair, at 1:15:51: "I don't recall voting on him."
The confusion was partly about which of two appointments was in question — Miles thought the board's vote was "TV for CCTV", and the chair distinguished a Claremont Community Television seat from district work: "There are two different roles." But the assistant superintendent's answer settles that the gap is real on the district side too: the only account anyone could give of the engagement is a description of activity — "Eric takes photographs of school events. He creates articles for the newspaper and the website" — with the terms unknown to the administrator answering. The minutes record the board's conclusion flatly: "The board would like to know what Eric Zengota's role is for the district."
No verified New Hampshire provision makes this a violation, which is why the flag rests on the board's own account rather than on a statute. It is graded MEDIUM as a control weakness: a governing body that has voted on an appointment, and whose senior administrator cannot state its scope, cannot exercise oversight of it, cannot assess whether the work is being performed, and cannot answer a resident who asks. That matters more than usual here because this project's records identify the post as one funded in part through federal grant money routed via the SAU — a characterisation drawn from the project's briefing, not from anything said at this meeting, and flagged as such.
Sources: CSB Meeting Minutes 6.7.23 ("The board would like to know what Eric Zengota's role is for the district."); 2 CFR 200.303 (internal control over federal awards) — cited as the standard that would apply if the engagement is federally funded, which this meeting's record does not establish.
OBSERVATION The noticed citizens'-comment period lasted a few seconds; RSA 189:74 sets a 30-minute floor whose meaning the text does not settle
The entire item is one clause inside a longer turn at 0:02:33: "Now we're opening the floor to citizens comments. Are there any citizens in the audience this evening? Nope. So we'll just move right forward to the student representatives report." The minutes: "Citizens Comments- No comments."
RSA 189:74 requires a school board to "provide the opportunity for the public to comment on school district matters at a meeting of the school board held under RSA 91-A:2", and says "The public comment period shall be for no less than 30 minutes." The statute does not say whether the 30 minutes measures the opportunity or the elapsed time, and no New Hampshire decision resolving that has been located for this page. Nobody was turned away here — the chair looked at the room, found no one waiting, and moved on. On the "opportunity" reading the board complied. On a strict elapsed-time reading it did not, and neither did most meetings in this corpus. There is a wrinkle: at least one member of the public does appear to have been present, since a board member later thanks "Mrs. Franny here" for her Visioning Committee work; she did not address the board and was not invited to by name.
Sources: RSA 189:74 (school board public comment period, no less than 30 minutes; 2022, 333:1, eff. Sept. 6, 2022).
OBSERVATION The retreat minutes the board approved are dated May 16, 2020, three years before the retreat they describe
The packet document is titled "Claremont School Board Retreat Minutes May 16, 2020 4_00-1900 @ Teal Lantern", and its first line repeats the year. The consent-agenda item that approved it reads "Minutes Approval- May 16, 2023 Retreat & SMART Goals", and the chair on the recording says "We do have meeting minutes from the May 16th retreat and attached Smart goals".
The document is from 2023, and the internal evidence settles it beyond argument. The attendance list is "Mike Koski, Heather Whitney, Frank Sprague, Whitney Skillen, Arlene Hawkins, Jennifer Gallagher, Bonnie Miles" — but Arlene Hawkins and Jennifer Gallagher were not elected to this board until March 14, 2023, and Heather Whitney did not become chair until April 5, 2023. The content is equally decisive: "Implementation of new ELA program K-5 Fall of '23", "Pilot of new math curriculum Fall of '23", "Moving to 6 periods vs 4 blocks @ SHS in 2025", and a reference to teacher salary "much improved for teachers with recent contact [contract]" — the two-year agreement approved in January 2023. The SMART goals filed with it are headed "Claremont School Board Goals 2023" and every goal is expressed for "SY 23-24".
Why it is worth recording rather than quietly correcting. This is the district's public record of a meeting of a quorum of its board (see flag 10), it was formally approved by that board, and it carries a date three years wrong on its face and in its file name. Anyone searching the district's shares by date will not find it; anyone reading it without checking the roster will place a 2023 discussion in the first weeks of the pandemic. No one at the meeting mentioned the discrepancy, and the minutes of this meeting reproduce the correct 2023 date without noting that the document does not.
Sources: Claremont School Board Retreat Minutes May 16, 2020 4_00-1900 @ Teal Lantern (1).pdf — the date in the title is the district's; CSB May2023 Goals ("Claremont School Board Goals 2023"); CSB Meeting Minutes 6.7.23 ("Minutes Approval- May 16, 2023 Retreat & SMART Goals").
OBSERVATION The chair described "extreme cases" of bullying and a school culture "not supporting… feelings of safety", while seven bullying and student-conduct policies sat unreviewed in a subcommittee queue
Two statements made an hour apart set the frame. The Policy Sub-Committee chair at 1:07:47: "Right now, we have eight policies in our hopper, which will take us probably through August or maybe September. One policy related to public complaints and seven policies related to bullying and student conduct." The board chair at 1:31:19: "if we want to tackle, our issues with bullying in the schools and, a negative culture that is not supporting learning and feelings of safety for all of our students, then we would have to, as a board, to commit to spending the summer doing a lot more than we normally do." And at 1:41:11: "what the law enforcement response is when there's extreme cases, which unfortunately, we have extreme cases."
The chair's stated plan is a reasonable one — a police and juvenile-justice briefing for the board, then "a decision tree or an outline for principals and other administrators to use" so that "the application of… interventions is system wide and applied universally", on the correct premise that "the only thing that the board has the ability to do is to create policy." She also identified a genuine external pressure: changed state juvenile legislation meaning "a lot of the stuff is being shipped, shipped back into the school, and we really don't have the resources."
Why this is an observation and not a rule-based flag. New Hampshire's Pupil Safety and Violence Prevention Act, RSA chapter 193-F, requires every district to adopt and implement a bullying policy containing specified elements and to report substantiated incidents to the Department of Education. The record here does not establish that Claremont lacks such a policy — it establishes that seven policies in that family were queued for review with a nine-month horizon, and that the board's own chair thought the underlying problem serious. RSA 193-F:4 was amended by 2025, 57:1, effective August 1, 2025, so the enumerated requirements in the section as served today are not all the requirements in force in June 2023; this page therefore cites the chapter as the applicable framework rather than quoting the current list against a 2023 meeting.
Sources: RSA ch. 193-F, Pupil Safety and Violence Prevention Act (district bullying policy and reporting framework) — cited at chapter level: RSA 193-F:4's enumerated policy elements were amended by 2025, 57:1, eff. Aug. 1, 2025, after this meeting; CSB Meeting Minutes 6.7.23 (Policy Sub-Committee report).
OBSERVATION The ELA framework was published to families two weeks before the board saw it, and its own adoption line still reads "ENTER DATE HERE"
When the chair asked at 0:36:32 whether the framework could go on the SAU 6 web page "so that families can" see it, the answer was that it already had: "the framework has been posted for two weeks on the." — and, asked why, "Per policy." The presenter added, "The efficient follow the rules. That's me."
The document in the packet is headed "DRAFT English Language Arts and Literacy Framework", and its cover letter reads: "We are pleased to present the updated Claremont Curriculum Framework for English Language Arts and Literacy adopted by the Claremont School Board ENTER DATE HERE." The agenda listed the item as Discussion, and no adoption motion was made or sought at this meeting or recorded in the minutes.
None of that is irregular on its face, and the posting is a point in the district's favour rather than against it — a 64-page curriculum framework published for public review two weeks ahead of the board discussion is more notice than most curriculum items in this corpus receive, and it was done because a district policy required it. The observation is narrower: the district published to families a document whose own text represents it as already adopted by the board, at a point when the board had not adopted it and, on this record, still had not. A reviewer following the adoption should look for the vote at a later meeting; this page found none through June 7, 2023.
Sources: DRAFT English Language Arts and Literacy Framework ("adopted by the Claremont School Board ENTER DATE HERE"); CSB Agenda 6.7.23 (item VI.1 listed as "(Discussion)").
OBSERVATION One bid arrived for a $280,000 roof replacement, and a further $90,000 was urged on the strength of the same contractor being on site
Bonnie Miles, reporting for the Capital Improvement Committee at 1:02:04: "we received only one bid for the roof replacement at Stevens High School, and it came in at $280,000." Her recommendation for the adjacent section, at 1:02:51: "I think that we should give him the, approve that extra $90,000 to get that other piece of roof done, because we're looking at problems and they're there. They don't have to set everything up. So we've saved money in that, in that respect." The budgeted figure was $350,000, so the combined $370,000 is $20,000 over — "Two 20,000 more okay. But it's not going to go away. But you know these problems don't fix themselves."
New Hampshire imposes no general competitive-bidding statute on school districts, so a single-bid award is not unlawful by itself and this page cites no state provision against it. The federal procurement standards at 2 CFR 200.318–.327 — which do require full and open competition and documentation of the basis for contractor selection — apply only to procurements under a federal award, and nothing in this record states how the roof is funded; no packet document addresses it and no one at the table said. Neither the recording nor the minutes mentions district purchasing policy, how the RFP was advertised, or why only one bidder responded.
Two features are worth a reviewer's note regardless of the funding source. The added scope was described as a change to an existing job rather than a separately priced piece of work — the argument for it is mobilisation savings, "because they're there" — and no second price for that scope exists anywhere in the record. And the board did not vote on it: the chair sent it to the next agenda ("I'll make sure that's, that I speak to Mike about that and also make sure it's on our next agenda"), which is the correct handling for an item not before the meeting. The contractor is not identifiable from this record; the transcript renders the name "The weather God weather God" and no packet document names the bidder.
Sources: 2 CFR 200.318–.327 (federal procurement standards: full and open competition; documentation of the selection basis) — cited as the standard that would apply if federal funds are used, which this record does not establish; CSB Meeting Minutes 6.7.23 (the one bid at $280,000 and the additional $90,000).
OBSERVATION A board member called the fingerprint requirement for substitute teachers a "federal waste of resources", and nobody named the state statute that imposes it
The exchange runs from 1:23:13, prompted by Arlene Hawkins's report that would-be substitutes told her "there's a backlog with fingerprinting". Whitney Skillen: "Is it an essay [SAU] to require fingerprinting for a substitute teacher." Then: "Why can't you just do a background check without fingerprints? With your Social Security number?" And, at 1:23:28: "Federal waste of resources, time and money."
The requirement is New Hampshire's own, not an SAU rule and not a federal imposition. RSA 189:13-a requires a criminal history records check for school employees, selected applicants, designated volunteers, substitute teachers, and contractors and their employees who provide services directly to students; the applicant "shall submit with the release form a complete set of fingerprints taken by a qualified law enforcement agency", and the check runs against state records "and through the Federal Bureau of Investigation". A name-and-Social-Security-number check would not satisfy it — which is precisely the gap the assistant superintendent gestured at in reply: "Person who came from out of state. And it wasn't recorded in the state of New Hampshire. And that's happened."
Nothing was decided and nothing was proposed, which is why this is an observation rather than a flag of any process failure. Arlene Hawkins gave the substantive answer — "There are many reasons to have fingerprinting. Part of being able to work in schools or volunteer in schools and valid reasons" — and the item moved on. It is recorded here because the correct answer to a member's direct question about a legal requirement was available and was never given, and because the district's hiring difficulty in the same discussion turns partly on the same requirement.
Sources: RSA 189:13-a (criminal history records check; complete set of fingerprints; state records and FBI; applies to substitutes, designated volunteers and contractors' employees). Vintage note: this section was amended twice in 2023 — 2023, 55:1, eff. July 31, 2023 and 2023, 164:1–2, eff. Sept. 26, 2023 — both after this meeting. The fingerprint requirement itself dates from 1993, 324:1 and was in force on the meeting date; the current text's detail is not asserted for June 7, 2023.
OBSERVATION Three claims about free-and-reduced lunch, Medicaid certification and adequacy aid were made from the table, and none was verified in the room
The exchange from 1:26:21 produced three propositions the board acted on as settled:
One. The chair, at 1:27:31: "the legislature voted down having automatic reporting of Medicaid. What some states do is anybody who is receiving Medicaid services with school age children, they automatically get free and reduced lunch. But our legislation legislature has voted that down to make that an automatic supply. So you still have to apply." Two. Bonnie Miles, at 1:30:03, relaying a state representative: "for every applicant form that gets filled in and sent, sent in, then the state would pay for the for the food for that child for the year" — with the chair supplying "roughly 1800 more". Three. The vice chair, at 1:30:46: "it's part of our adequacy funding."
The third is broadly right in structure: New Hampshire's adequate-education grants do carry a differentiated per-pupil amount for pupils eligible for free or reduced-price meals, so free-and-reduced counts do drive district aid, and the vice chair's operational concern — "we actually are paying someone to make sure that that happens, that we have fine [F&R] numbers. I'd like to know what they are" — is well founded. The dollar figure is a different matter and is not asserted here. The per-pupil amounts in RSA 198:40-a today are the product of post-2023 amendments and are not the amounts that applied to the 2023–24 year; quoting the current statute against this meeting would give a wrong number. A reviewer wanting the figure that governed should use the Department of Education's adequacy explainer for the relevant year rather than the statute as served today.
The first two claims are unverified on this record. Nobody in the room could answer Arlene Hawkins's repeated and precise question — whether a Medicaid identifier is itself acceptable proof of income eligibility on an application. The superintendent: "I don't know if they're they're qualifying for free and reduced is contingent on having a medicaid identifier. I'm just not sure." The board agreed a communications push on the strength of a per-child dollar figure nobody present could source, which is the point of recording it: the underlying idea — get eligible families to file the form — is sound; the arithmetic offered for it was hearsay twice removed.
Sources: RSA 198:40-a (differentiated aid, including for pupils eligible for free or reduced-price meals) — cited for the existence of the category only. The current per-pupil dollar amounts post-date this meeting and are deliberately not quoted here.; CSB Meeting Minutes 6.7.23 (the lunch-debt accounting request).
OBSERVATION A named, ESSER-eligible capital need was raised for at least the fourth time, with sixteen weeks left on the ESSER II obligation deadline
Frank Sprague at 0:16:06: "we're going to get to the end of this 10 or $11 million, and we're going to have a fairly long list of could have, should have at the end of that." The specific: the Stevens High School gymnasium, where he expected to sit the following night "with about 1200 other people… even though it's going to be 65 outside, it's going to be about 110 in there and very poor air quality." He identified both the eligibility — "HVAC is really in really in the wheelhouse of SR [ESSER] funding… one of the identified interventions that Esser money's intended for" — and the scope: "A lot of the system was installed, and all that's lacking really is the condenser piece that goes in… I think it's probably 3 or $400,000." And the history: "I had mentioned this to Mr. Seaman just about every time we talked about Esser. I think I brought this up, and I'm bringing it up again… I've brought it up repeatedly."
The clock was audible in the same discussion. David Jack, at 0:19:01: "If you're if you're with SR two [ESSER II] of it's part of SR two, then it has to be done before September 30th, 2023, if it's part of SR, SR three, and then it gets stretched out to nine, 30, 24." Sixteen weeks separated this meeting from the first of those dates. The answer Sprague received was that it had been written down: "I've written that down. I know that we've had some discussions regarding facilities… we have to make it fit, if you will." The incoming business administrator added her own experience — "I've done big HVAC projects with. When I was in Hillsboro. That is a beast to take on" — and undertook to "talk to facilities and we'll look into what the plans were, because I don't know."
No rule was broken. A district is entitled to spend ESSER money on its own priorities, and the requester expressly asked for nothing: "I don't need a response. I just am putting it out there again." The observation is about the record: a board member identified an eligible, costed, safety-adjacent capital need repeatedly over more than a year, against a one-time federal allocation with a hard obligation deadline, and left this meeting with no owner, no cost estimate from the administration and no place on any agenda.
Sources: 20 U.S.C. §1225(b) (GEPA/Tydings Amendment: federal education formula funds remain available for obligation one additional fiscal year — the mechanism behind the September 30 dates).
POSITIVE The board deferred a motion because it was not on the posted agenda — which New Hampshire law did not require it to do
A motion to dissolve the board's Facebook page was made and seconded at 1:18:36. Then Frank Sprague, at 1:21:23: "Just a point of order. I am going to I would if we vote on this I'm going to abstain because we don't. It's not on the agenda anywhere." The chair's reply was legally correct — "We can. Still I don't think we have to" — and she was right: RSA 91-A:2, II requires notice of the time and place of each meeting, posted in two places or published at least 24 hours ahead. It does not require a posted agenda, and it does not confine a public body to items appearing on one. The board could have voted.
It did not. The chair offered the deferral herself at 1:21:37 — "if people feel more comfortable, we can put it on the agenda for next meeting. Let's do that" — and the mover withdrew: "I'll withdraw my motion." The minutes record the whole sequence, mover and seconder named: "Whitney Skillen makes a motion to dissolve the Claremont School Board facebook page and to use the SAU#6 website; seconded by Bonnie Miles; Whitney Skillen withdraws the motion."
The result is that a decision affecting the board's principal public-facing communications channel, with 627 followers, was moved to a meeting at which residents could see it coming. That is a transparency practice above the statutory floor, chosen deliberately after the law was correctly stated in the room. It is also, on the same record, the only motion of the evening whose mover and seconder are both named in the minutes and both recoverable from the recording.
Sources: RSA 91-A:2, II (notice of the time and place of each meeting; no posted-agenda requirement); CSB Meeting Minutes 6.7.23 (motion, second and withdrawal, with names).
POSITIVE The public hearing's entry vote was a recorded roll call and every motion inside the hearing carries a named mover and seconder
The chair asked for the roll call before anyone reminded her: "We do need a vote to enter the public hearing. And then would you please remind has to be a roll call. We need to do we have to do a roll call." The minutes record the result member by member: "Frank Sprague makes a motion to move into public hearing; roll call vote; Heather Whitney- Yes, Frank Sprague- Yes, Bonnie Miles- Yes, Jennifer Gallagher- Yes, Arlene Hawkins- Yes, Whitney Skillen- Yes." The motion to leave the hearing names Skillen as mover and Gallagher as seconder; the acceptance motion names Miles as mover and Skillen as seconder.
RSA 91-A:2, II requires minutes to include "the names of members, persons appearing before the public bodies, a brief description of the subject matter discussed and final decisions", and — since 2018, 244:1, effective January 1, 2019 — "The names of the members who made or seconded each motion shall be recorded in the minutes." For this item the minutes satisfy that requirement completely, and they do so for a hearing that the version of RSA 198:20-b then in force actually required (see flag 3), on a gift that exceeded the threshold. The order-of-business error mid-hearing was caught by a point of order from the table and corrected before either vote, and the minutes record the corrected sequence rather than the muddle.
This is worth setting beside flag 8. The same board, on the same night, disposed of its consent agenda and its adjournment with no motion and no names at all. The difference is not capability; it is which items the board treats as requiring the formalities.
Sources: RSA 91-A:2, II (minutes content; mover and seconder named — 2018, 244:1, eff. Jan. 1, 2019); RSA 198:20-b, III(a) as then in force (prior public hearing required at $5,000 or more); CSB Meeting Minutes 6.7.23 (the roll call and both motions).
POSITIVE A member volunteered a recusal undertaking before anyone asked her for one
At 1:43:51 the chair, listing people who might brief the board on bullying and school climate, thought aloud: "And, Jen, I know you're a resource unto yourself. And I don't know what kind of a weird conflict of interest that would be. I'm not 100% sure." Jennifer Gallagher answered without pause, at 1:44:09: "As long as it's if we're taking a vote on any programs that I would be implementing, I would not vote on them, okay."
No New Hampshire statute compelled that. The state's mandatory recusal provisions for local officials attach to land-use boards, not to school boards; a school board member's conflict obligations run through common-law duty, district policy and their own judgment. Gallagher identified the exposure herself, stated the limit she would observe, and drew it in the right place — participation in the discussion, abstention on any vote touching work she would carry out. That is the standard a conflicts policy would set, offered unprompted and on the record where a resident can hold her to it.
The board did the same thing structurally on a different item the same evening: see flag 25.
Sources: RSA 91-A:2, II (the minutes requirement against which a member's stated undertaking becomes part of the public record). No New Hampshire statute imposing a general recusal duty on school board members was located for this page; the undertaking is therefore recorded as voluntary practice, not as compliance.
POSITIVE The Visioning Committee was structured to keep the tech centre's own director out of its chair
Bonnie Miles, reporting at 1:08:40 on the committee studying the future of the Sugar River Valley Regional Technical Center: "Andy. Mr.. He is going to be the chair of the visioning Committee. We have voted on that, and it would be better because Mr. Herzog, he's the he'll be the administrative support system. He'll be our light on [liaison]. But it will avoid any conflicts of interest with the public. So we thought that would be better." The minutes put it in one sentence: "Mr. Lafierene is going to be the chair of the committee. Mr. Herzog will be the liaison for the committee to avoid any conflicts of interest."
Dr. Alex Herzog is the technical centre's director. A committee examining what the centre should become, how it is funded and whether it is meeting regional needs is not one its own director should chair, and the board recognised that without being prompted and without a rule requiring it. Putting a community member in the chair while keeping the director as staff support preserves his expertise without giving him control of the agenda — and the stated reason was public perception, "to avoid any conflicts of interest with the public", which is the right reason.
The same report shows the committee widening rather than narrowing its input: "last week we met. And in increased the roster of shareholders [stakeholders], we got quite a few names", with the vice chair recruiting "folks in the greater Claremont and Newport community who who have different affiliations with business or the public or, public service", and a deliberate reach across the district line — "we threw in a couple of names from Newport. I mean, they're just as important as we are." That openness sits uneasily beside the fact that none of the committee's meetings appears in any public record; see flag 1.
Sources: CSB Meeting Minutes 6.7.23 ("Mr. Herzog will be the liaison for the committee to avoid any conflicts of interest").
Appendix — source files
Official and public sources
- Remote video: School Board Meeting 6/7/23 (Cablecast show 15123) — the dialogue transcript runs from 0:00:12 to 1:45:36 and covers the public meeting end to end
- Packet folder: 13. CSB 6.7.23 (11 documents, all listed below, all read for this page)
- Minutes: 8. CSB Meeting Minutes 6.7.23.docx.pdf — five pages, submitted by Chelsea Weatherford. Naming the person who produced the minutes was not required on this date; that requirement was added by 2025, 112:1
- No newspaper notice of the RSA 198:20-b public hearing is in the packet or anywhere else in the district's shares located for this page, and none is mentioned on the recording or in the minutes — see flag 3. The provision then in force required publication in a newspaper of general circulation at least seven days before the hearing
- No notice, agenda or minutes exists for any of the six board subcommittees named on this meeting's agenda — see flag 1. This project's survey of the district's Meeting Documents share, current to August 28, 2026, records that the first subcommittee packet ever posted there was an August 19, 2026 Policy Sub-Committee folder
- No minutes existed for the May 17, 2023 board meeting as of this meeting — the chair says so on the record and the agenda footnotes it. A packet folder for that meeting, "12. CSB 5.17.23", is recorded in this project's survey of the district's 2023 Meeting Documents share; there is no recording of it in this corpus. See flag 11
- No notice for the May 16, 2023 board retreat was located. A Drive title search for
Retreat and for CSB 5.17.23 from this session returned no results; this project's survey of the 2023 Meeting Documents share records a folder named 23. Claremont Board Retreat in it. The only retreat document located for this page is the copy filed in this meeting's own packet. See flag 10
- No posting date for these minutes is shown on the document or in the Drive metadata available here, so this page makes no claim about the five-business-day inspection deadline for this meeting's minutes
Packet documents
Names are reproduced exactly as they appear in the district's Drive folder. Any typo or wrong date in a file name is the district's, not this page's.
- CSB Agenda 6.7.23.docx (1).pdf — the posted agenda: the central-office roster, the core value and mission statement, timed items from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., and the CCTV Channel 8 and Channel 10 watch links. It is the source for the location, for the "(vote required)" label on the consent agenda, and for the full description of the donation hearing. It titles the presenter "Assistant Athletic Director" where the minutes and his own documents say Athletic Director.
- draft CSB Meeting Minutes 6.7.23.docx.pdf — the draft filed in this meeting's own packet folder, identical in substance to the final version in the Minutes share
- Dicks Sporting Goods $5,500 — remittance advice and cheque image. Cheque #000017458, dated 04/28/2023, $5,500.00, drawn by The Dick's Sporting Goods Foundation of Coraopolis, PA on Wells Fargo Bank, N.A., against invoice #119353 dated 02/09/2023, payable to "CLAREMONT MIDDLE SCHOOL ATTN: SHAUN LAPLANTE", marked "VOID AFTER 180 DAYS". The single most citable document in this packet — see flag 3 and flag 4
- Sports Matter Grant Proposal — the ask the donation answers, signed by Shaun Laplante with his district e-mail address. Requests "$10,000", not $5,500; itemises a used utility vehicle at $4,000–$5,000, a Daktronics MS-918 scoreboard at $8,805 plus $2,300 installation and about $2,500 of rewiring, and a TUFFframe modular outdoor batting cage at $6,799. Records that about $10,000 had already been raised locally and would cover the scoreboard, rewiring and installation. The document behind Bonnie Miles's "I was looking at I reading $10,000 here"
- CMS Athletics Improvement Plans (2).pdf — the companion presentation, nine sections. Sets the ask at "Support: $10,000" and prices the three items differently from the proposal: utility vehicle $4,000, batting cage $4,629, futsal goals $700. Documents a futsal league of "10 teams… Over 70+ players" playing Saturdays 4–8 p.m., a two-day CVL soccer tournament that raised over $3,000, and a baseball-field rebuild itemised to $12,305 including an $11,105 scoreboard. The $5,500 donation covers the batting cage and futsal goals almost exactly ($5,329) and not the utility vehicle.
- 23-24 School Year Calendar — the document referred to on the agenda as "Exhibit A". Ends "177 Student Days/185 Teacher Days". Marks August 30 as the first day for grades 1–12 with early release, August 31 as kindergarten's first day, and June 13 as the "Tentative Last Day of School… Early Release". See flag 7
- Claremont School Board Retreat Minutes May 16, 2020 4_00-1900 @ Teal Lantern (1).pdf — the date in this title is wrong by three years; the retreat was May 16, 2023. Records six of seven board members and the assistant superintendent meeting 16:00–19:00 at a Claremont restaurant, a strategic-plan and assessment presentation, seven progress items, the administration's top three priorities, a shared-vocabulary discussion, and the creation of three SMART goals "recorded by Whitney Skillen". See flag 10 and flag 15
- CSB May2023 Goals — headed "Claremont School Board Goals 2023". Five student-achievement goals (including math +3–5%, ELA +5–10%, an alternative programme pilot for at-risk high schoolers, and a published statement of support for the technical centre), two budget goals (evaluation metrics for every programme; reduce eligible out-of-district placements by 50%), and four climate-and-culture goals (a 20% reduction in discipline referrals; a policy audit on family accountability; an affirmative belief statement to open each meeting; quarterly school awards). The document behind every "at the retreat" reference in this meeting
- DRAFT English Language Arts and Literacy Framework — 64 pages, "SAU 6 Claremont Curriculum Framework 2023". Cover letter reads "adopted by the Claremont School Board ENTER DATE HERE" (see flag 17). Names the ELA and Literacy Advisory Board 2021–2023 and the Curriculum Subcommittee 2022–2023, including Josh Lambert and Heather Whitney as board members, David Irwin as Academic Dean of Claremont Middle School, and Stephanie Hurst as "Literacy Specialist, SAU 6". Eleven guiding principles, K–5 and 6–12 anchor standards, curriculum maps, and a reference list running to CommonLit, Wit & Wisdom, Geodes, Heggerty, Fundations, The Writing Revolution, Scarborough, Sedita, Shanahan and Wexler. The advisory-board list spells her forename "Stephane" once and "Stephanie" once.
- 6.7.23 Curriculum Dept. Presentation — the slide deck presented on the night. "MEET THE TEAM" lists both advisory boards; "The PROCESS" gives the five steps Hurst described aloud; professional development named as LETRS, The Writing Revolution and 95 Percent Group; closes on the Louisa Moats quotation Hurst read to the board
- Claremont NH SAS-School Board — "Claremont NH SAS And SAT Results 2022-2023", the deck behind the assistant superintendent's presentation. Carries the SAT figures quoted on this page: "SAT Math and ERW - NH Avg. Math = 492 ERW=511" with plotted values of 464 and 454 for 2022 and 454 and 441 for 2023, and "SHS SAT Mean Score combined / NH = 1050" with 917 for 2022 and 895 for 2023. The remaining slides — science, ELA and math overall, by cohort, elementary and middle school — are charts whose values do not survive text extraction; the percentages on this page are the ones Koski read aloud
Project files (relative links work when this page is opened from Output/HTML/)
Laws and rules cited on this page
- New Hampshire — Right-to-Know. RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d) — public body includes a school district board "or any committee, subcommittee, or subordinate body thereof, or advisory committee thereto"; the trailing clause is what carries flag 1. RSA 91-A:2 — I (definition of meeting: a quorum convened to discuss or act on matters within the body's jurisdiction); II (notice of time and place posted in 2 places or published at least 24 hours ahead, excluding Sundays and legal holidays; minutes to include names of members, persons appearing, subject matter and final decisions; "The names of the members who made or seconded each motion shall be recorded in the minutes", a clause in force from 2018, 244:1, eff. Jan. 1, 2019; minutes open to public inspection not more than 5 business days after the meeting). The start-time, end-time and minutes-producer clauses in the current text were added by 2025, 112:1, eff. Aug. 22, 2025 and are not applied to this meeting. RSA 91-A:2, II contains no posted-agenda requirement — the point behind flag 22.
- New Hampshire — school money and gifts. RSA 198:20-b, III(a) as in force on this date — "For unanticipated funds in the amount of $5,000 or more, the school board shall hold a prior public hearing on the action to be taken. Notice of the time, place, and subject of such hearing shall be published in a newspaper of general circulation in the relevant municipality at least 7 days before the meeting is held." Current text (threshold $20,000), source note "2005, 188:1, eff. Aug. 29, 2005. 2023, 38:1, eff. July 18, 2023" — the amendment post-dates this meeting by six weeks and must not be applied to it. RSA 197:23-a — the treasurer has custody of district money and "shall pay out the same only upon orders of the school board". RSA 198:40-a — differentiated adequacy aid including for pupils eligible for free or reduced-price meals; cited for the category only, because the current per-pupil dollar amounts are post-2023 and are not the amounts that applied here. RSA 21-J:19 — audits by independent public accountants
- New Hampshire — schools and staff. RSA 189:1 — "at least 180 days in each year, or the equivalent number of hours as required in the rules of the department of education"; last amended 2011, 42:1, eff. July 8, 2011, so this text governed on the meeting date. RSA 189:13-a — criminal history records check, mandatory fingerprints, state records and FBI, covering substitutes, designated volunteers and contractors' employees; amended by 2023, 55:1 (eff. July 31, 2023) and 2023, 164:1–2 (eff. Sept. 26, 2023), both after this meeting. RSA 189:29-b — annual narrative report on gifted and talented students; "If no such policies, programs, or procedures exist, the report shall so state"; 2021, 139:1, eff. July 23, 2021. RSA 189:11 — Holocaust and genocide content within required civics and history instruction, added 2020, 29:14, eff. Sept. 21, 2020; three further amendments took effect July 1, 2023, three weeks after this meeting. RSA 189:74 — school board public comment period of no less than 30 minutes; 2022, 333:1, eff. Sept. 6, 2022. RSA ch. 193-F — Pupil Safety and Violence Prevention Act; cited at chapter level because RSA 193-F:4's enumerated policy elements were amended by 2025, 57:1, eff. Aug. 1, 2025
- New Hampshire administrative rules. N.H. Admin. Code Part Ed 306, Minimum Standards for Public School Approval — the hour equivalents RSA 189:1 refers to. The school-year rule was Ed 306.18 (School Year) in June 2023 — at least 945 hours of instructional time in each elementary school, 450 in kindergarten and 990 in each middle and high school — and was renumbered to Ed 306.15 in the revision effective December 13, 2024, by which point Ed 306.18 had been reused for Remote Learning. The 2023 numbering is confirmed by the Department's own March 2023 minimum-standards revision side-by-side and by its guidance on school year, snow days and remote instruction
- Federal — child nutrition. 7 CFR 210.14 — (a) "Revenues received by the nonprofit school food service are to be used only for the operation or improvement of such food service"; (b) net cash resources limited to 3 months' average expenditures unless the State agency approves otherwise
- Federal — grants management. 2 CFR 200.501 — single audit required at $750,000 of federal expenditures; the $1,000,000 threshold applies only to fiscal years beginning on or after October 1, 2024. 2 CFR 200.512(a)(1) — reporting package due the earlier of 30 days after receipt of the auditor's report or nine months after period end. 2 CFR 200.303 — effective internal control over federal awards. 2 CFR 200.426 — bad debts and related collection and legal costs are unallowable. 2 CFR 200.318–.327 — procurement standards; cited conditionally, because this record does not establish the roof's funding source. 20 U.S.C. §1225(b) — GEPA/Tydings: formula funds available for obligation one additional fiscal year, the mechanism behind the ESSER II and III dates. Part 200 was revised effective October 1, 2024; the 2023 annual edition is the vintage that governed here
- Secondary sources (reporting, not law). Valley News, January 2, 2026, "Financial audits reveal Claremont schools' long-term struggles" — vnews.com; the eventual audit findings and the identity of the district's auditors. Cited only where this page says it is relying on reporting rather than on this meeting's record