Participants
Everyone in the record. Name spellings follow the agenda and minutes rosters; where the automatic transcript renders a name differently the row says so. Because no roll was called, "present" here means the person is heard or is named by someone in the room, not that any official record places them there. Rows marked named, not heard are spoken about but never speak.
| Name | Role | Participation |
|---|
| Heather Whitney | Chair, Claremont School Board | Presided throughout; 121 rows, the largest share of the meeting. Opened without a roll call — "Looks like we're fortunate enough to have a quorum this evening" — and immediately flagged the missing retreat minutes: "there were minutes in the packet are supposed to be in the packet for our retreat. I don't see them, so we'll revisit them at a different time" (0:00:41). Ran the consent agenda, the citizens' comment period, the public hearing and the donation vote by absence of objection (flag 5). Asked the meeting's sharpest question of the middle-school team — whether anything tracks students through the student support centres to academic outcomes, "because to me, to me the end game is academic growth" (0:55:20). Reported the board's self-evaluation retreat at 1:19:14, tried to hurry the tech-centre statement forward and was stopped by her own vice chair. Tempesta thanks "Chair Whitney" at 0:02:44. Not to be confused with board member Whitney Skillen — the highest-risk name collision in this corpus. |
| Frank Sprague | Vice Chair, Claremont School Board; Budget subcommittee chair; NHSBA delegate | Moved acceptance of the Schwab donation at 0:02:14 and seconded the fund-balance motion at 1:12:31. Pressed the business administrator on how he would answer a city councillor who asked why $200,000 more was being held back — "if someone comes up to me, one of the city councilors, and says, why didn't you send 200,000 back? What do I tell that? What do I tell that person" (1:10:11) — then asked the question that mattered: "What are the chances that that's not enough?" (1:12:41). Insisted a "fields" budget line existed against the superintendent's and the administrator's recollection, and was substantially right (flag 3). Read the board's tech-centre statement of support into the record (1:30:41) — the assignment the October 11 retreat minutes record him taking. Reported on the NHSBA Delegate Assembly. The transcript renders his surname correctly here, unusually for this corpus. |
| Arlene Hawkins | Board member (elected March 14, 2023); chair of the SAU 6 joint board since July 13, 2023; Policy subcommittee | The most persistent questioner of the night. Twice asked the superintendent to write measurement into his own goals rather than leave it to a benchmark grid: "Measuring growth in student achievement and professional instructional practices in all the schools" (0:11:41) and "I keep I'm referring back to the wording within the goal to include measurable growth in student achievement in instructional practices" (0:13:10); then asked that the goal also commit the superintendent to helping the board improve its own budget process (0:19:52). Asked whether spending retained fund balance on an audit finding would need a public hearing and a board vote (1:11:24). Seconded the tech-centre letter. Raised the vacant clerk's seat in the closing minutes. The chair recognises her as Arlene at 0:53:16 and as Miss Hocking — a known transcription of Hawkins — at 1:04:09, each immediately before she speaks. |
| Candace Crawford | Board member (appointed July 19, 2023); Capital Improvement and SRVRTC Visioning subcommittees | Made three of the meeting's four motions: the fund-balance retention ("I so move", 1:12:29), the athletic-fields licence (1:26:38) and the tech-centre support letter (1:31:59), and the minutes record her seconding the donation. Pushed the middle-school principal hardest on equity: "My concern is that oftentimes the kids who aren't achieving and don't get those tokens are the ones that really need extra help reading" (0:49:51), and established that the school has no functioning parent-teacher organisation (0:46:18). Was the member who caught that the licence in the packet might still be the six-year version — "I'm a little confused. The proposal. It's isn't it for is this for six years or" (1:25:11). The chair addresses her as "Crawford." at 0:49:51; the transcript garbles the chair's queue as "No candy, Miss Gillen" — Now, Candace, Miss Skillen. |
| Whitney Skillen | Board member; Policy subcommittee chair — omitted from the minutes' attendance list | She is not named present or absent in the minutes, and she is unmistakably in the room. She speaks in eight separate places, is queued and recognised by the chair twice by name, and delivers the Policy subcommittee report that the minutes themselves attribute to her. Substantively: asked the superintendent what his budgeting goal would actually deliver — "what outcomes or things do you hope to deliver out of improving the budgeting process?" and "maybe a, a timeline for how you, how and when you want to improve your process" (0:16:07) — and pressed for a written procedure: "I would be interested to see the any kind of like procedural plan or SOP that is written for the budgeting process so that it's so that we year after year follow like a systematic process" (0:19:17). Asked what the barriers to a late bus were (0:52:15); reminded the board it had come close to consensus against housing the alternative programme inside the high school (1:03:41); and was the only person to read the licence's escalator clause correctly (flag 3). Her policy report is at 1:28:02. The transcript renders her "Miss Gillen" and "Miss Gilman"; this ASR never gets her surname right. See flag 1. |
| Jennifer Gallagher | Board member (elected March 14, 2023, one-year seat); Curriculum and Ad Hoc Disruptive Behaviors subcommittee chair — Absent | The one member the minutes record as absent, and the recording agrees. The chair passes over her curriculum report — "Curriculum committee. No, we don't have any updates from Jen" (1:29:39) — and states the absence outright at her ad hoc committee: "Unfortunately, Jennifer Gallagher is unable to attend this evening. So unless there's any updates from Mr. Nestor" (1:33:49). Both of her subcommittees therefore went unreported, though Sprague reports at 1:35:56 that he had contacted her from the NHSBA Delegate Assembly about a resolution on disruptive students and had discussed a CHINS petition resolution for next year. She does not speak on this recording. |
| Bonnie Miles | Board member; Capital Improvement subcommittee chair — attendance not established by any record | The agenda assigns her the Capital Improvement Committee report. The minutes name her neither present nor absent, and the words Bonnie and Miles and the transcript's usual garbles for her surname appear nowhere in the 647 rows of the dialogue file — she is not addressed, not thanked, and not heard. When the chair reaches her subcommittee at 1:27:34 she asks the room generally — "Does anybody from the Capital Improvement committee have any updates?" — and Candace Crawford, who also sits on that subcommittee, answers No. No. This page does not assert that Bonnie Miles was present, and does not assert that she was absent. With no roll call and an incomplete minute, the record does not settle it. See flag 1. |
| Michael C. Tempesta | Superintendent of Schools, SAU 6 | Gave the superintendent's report and district-wide goals (0:02:44) and presented the athletic-fields licence (1:22:18). Accepted both of Hawkins's proposed goal amendments on the spot — "Have done goals my whole career. I can definitely amend the goal" (0:14:13). Explained the licence's term reduction: "the only the only thing that we agreed to move this along was to stay away from a six year term. So we went with a two year term" (1:22:23). Referred without prompting to a personal absence earlier in the autumn — "I wasn't here for a first part of September with with my mother passing away" (0:12:19) — which is the reason he attended the September 6 meeting by telephone. He was fired by the SAU 6 board on January 11–12, 2024, eighty-five days after this meeting. The transcript renders him "Mr. Dempster" in the chair's introduction of the licence item and "Mr. Thompson" at 1:37:38; both are known renderings of Tempesta and neither is a real person. |
| Mary Henry | Business Administrator, Claremont School District (started July 2023) | Presented the fund-balance retention recommendation and, in answering the chair's follow-up, gave the meeting's most consequential disclosure — the state of the audits (flag 2). Recommended retaining up to $424,000 and explained why the wording mattered: "You have to use the word up to so that that we can do that" (1:08:20). Her stated reason was defensive: "I'm very worried about those audits and what they may reveal. And if you don't have the funds, you will run into a deficit" (1:10:46), citing a $750,000 deficit she had inherited in a previous town. Supplied the field-maintenance history that neither the superintendent nor the board had: a budget line carrying $5,000 against actual payments of $30,000 and $14,275 in the two preceding years (1:24:35). The transcript garbles "audits" as "adits", "warrant article" as "Warren article" and "DOE-25" as "dough 25". |
| Ben Nester | Director of Special Education, SAU 6; the board's de facto secretary in this era | Gave the alternative-programme location update (1:00:08) — six candidate sites with costs: River Valley Community College (rates quoted for non-profits, nothing in writing), the Claremont Savings Bank ("annual cost of about $25,000 to rent that space"), the new charter school's building ("a hard know" — a hard no), two Pleasant Street storefronts at "13 to $1400" a month, and space at Stevens High School. Was not asked to call a roll at this meeting because none was taken. Answered "Not at this time" when the chair sought an update on Gallagher's ad hoc committee (1:33:49). The transcript renders him "Mr. Nestor". |
| Frank Romeo | Principal, Claremont Middle School | Presented the Claremont Middle School update — 104 rows, the second-largest share of the meeting. Reported the school short a seventh-grade maths teacher and a seventh-grade science teacher and described the workaround: half the affected students take the course through VLACS while the other half take it in person, switching at the mid-year. His reason for not doing what other schools did is quotable: "we just felt our students deserve more than to be put into a cafeteria, into a large room in front of a computer. Like most schools are doing" (0:23:03). Walked the board through the written answers his team had prepared in advance (flag 14), argued against a phone ban imposed without teaching — "if it's not cell phones, then it's Pokemon cards" (0:36:19) — and campaigned again for a late bus. The chair thanks "Principal Romeo for coming out and the team coming out" at 0:20:35, immediately before he begins. |
| Courtney Steele | Claremont Middle School administrator handling VLACS registrations | Introduced by Romeo as someone he had promised would not have to speak, and then carried the technical detail of the whole VLACS workaround. Reported that Claremont was "one of 18 schools in this same boat" (0:24:51), that at that point "I have registered all but one student, and that one is in the process with V lax" — the one outstanding case being a family without an e-mail address at home, for whom the school was arranging a proxy through the student's guidance counsellor (0:25:09). Described pulling seventh graders into her office a few at a time because the registration form froze accounts when answered incompletely, the enrichment block staffed by the content-area teacher, the DBA live assessments, and the decision not to import per-assignment grades because "our algorithm is different" from the vendor's (0:30:55). The transcript renders VLACS as "blacks", "V lax" and "Vlachs". |
| Michael "Mike" Koski | Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum, Instruction, Innovation and Assessment, SAU 6 — named, not separately identified | On the agenda's central-office roster and referred to four times in the room — "Mr. Kosky can tell you as well" (0:05:14), "I've talked about with Mr. Tempesta and Mr. Kosky" (0:36:19), "Mr. Kosky did some research and found two storefronts on Pleasant Street" (1:00:55), and as a presenter for the following meeting (1:40:18). Romeo also says "We've talked again with Mike and Mike about it" — Tempesta and Koski. He is plainly in the building; no cluster in the dialogue file is attributed to him, and this page does not assign him any words. The minutes record "Assistant Superintendent Koski speaks about a 3 year plan that they are working on" under the curriculum subcommittee — a report the recording carries in an unidentified voice (1:29:44). See the method footer. |
| Unidentified second voice at the staff table | Not attributable — sixteen short contributions between 1:28:27 and the adjournment | A voice silent for the first eighty-eight minutes and then repeatedly audible to the end. It supplies the policy code when Skillen loses it — A b g. for policy BG (1:28:33) — gives the curriculum update immediately after the chair says there is nothing from Gallagher: "We have that, though. May I say yes, please? We're working on a three year plan, which hasn't been done in the long, long time and looking forward to presenting something soon" and "Yeah, the adoption cycles and renewal cycles of different curriculum" (1:29:44), and corrects the chair on which meeting she means at 1:40:17. The minutes attribute the three-year curriculum plan to Assistant Superintendent Koski. Nobody in the room names this speaker and there is no roll call, so this page does not name it either; the dialogue file lists Koski, curriculum director Kat McLaughlin and Candace Crawford as live candidates and notes the cluster may be more than one voice. See the method footer. |
| Lydia (Stanaway) | Claremont Middle School dean — named, not heard | Named twice by Romeo as present and as an author of the packet material: "Which I have Lydia, here we talk about progressive discipline" (0:32:27) and "what Miss Lydia had put together for you, along with Andrew, is just taking a look at our cell phones sort of violations" (0:34:18). Only her first name is ever spoken; the surname is supplied from this project's roster notes for the 2023–24 middle-school deans and is not confirmed by any document in this packet. She does not speak on the recording. |
| Andrew | Claremont Middle School staff — named, not heard | Credited by Romeo, with Lydia, for compiling the cell-phone violation data in the packet's board-questions document (0:34:18). First name only; no surname is spoken anywhere on the recording and none appears in the packet. Does not speak. |
| Chelsea Weatherford | Recording secretary; produced these minutes — named, not heard | Signs the minutes ("Submitted by Chelsea Weatherford") and is twice named on the recording as the clearing house for board business: Tempesta will "get it on the Chelsea" — get an item onto the agenda (1:39:45) — and the chair asks members to send advance questions "to Chelsea with a CC to Mike" (1:39:48). She holds no elected office; the district clerk's seat was vacant throughout 2023. |
| Angela Vivian | Human Resource Director, SAU 6 — named, not heard | On the agenda roster. Named by Tempesta for making herself available in the buildings (0:12:19) and by the chair as the model for the board's own website plan: "we loved what, Miss Vivian had put forth as far as a profile of all of the admin team on the website" (1:20:39). |
| Jeff Small | Director of Technology, SAU 6 — named, not heard | Credited by Courtney Steele for resolving the VLACS technical problems — "Jeff has been phenomenal in helping me work out any of those hiccups" (0:25:09) — and for giving classroom staff visibility of student screens (0:30:34). The chair names "Jeff Small group" as the team that would host board-member profiles on the district website by January 2024 (1:20:39). |
| Kat McLaughlin | Curriculum Director, SAU 6 (started August 1, 2023) — named, not heard | Named once, by Tempesta, among the administrators already out in the buildings supporting professional development (0:12:47). She has no attributed cluster in this dialogue file, as in the August 17 and September 20 recordings. Spoken and transcribed here as Kat McLaughlin; contemporaneous district documents elsewhere in this corpus give the name as Catlin "Cat" McLaughlin, and her full first name is not settled by anything in this packet. She is one of the live candidates for the unidentified voice that gives the curriculum update, and this page does not resolve it. |
| Chris Pratt | Principal, Stevens High School — named, not present | Named four times and scheduled to present at the following meeting. Tempesta: "I already met with Principal Pratt. It fits well into what he's doing. He's been working hard with his team to expand the running start opportunities" (0:09:02). The chair reports speaking to him about the vacant student board seat (1:40:54). In October 2023 Chris Pratt is the high-school principal, not the superintendent; he became interim superintendent on the night Tempesta was removed in January 2024. |
| Citizens' comment speakers | None | The chair opened citizens' comments at 0:01:06 and closed them at 0:01:33 — twenty-seven seconds — with "Seeing none". The separately noticed public hearing on the Schwab donation, opened and closed in the following thirty-one seconds, also drew nobody. The minutes record "Citizens Comments- None". No member of the public speaks anywhere on this recording. See flag 6. |
Agenda
The official agenda is the packet's CSB Agenda 10.18.23. Every item on it was reached; the meeting ran an hour and forty-three minutes against a two-hour schedule. The "Taken up" column links to the moment the board turns to the item. Scheduled clock times are the agenda's own and are left as plain text.
Official agenda items and their disposition. Motions, movers and seconders are given as the approved minutes record them, with the recording noted where it differs or adds detail.
| Taken up | Item | Agenda text / disposition |
|---|
| 0:00:11 | I. Call to Order and Pledge of Allegiance (6:30 p.m.) | Agenda: "I. 6:30 PM Call to Order and Pledge of Allegiance." The chair calls the meeting to order, names it "Claremont school board meeting. One. Two. Three. Four for October 18th, 2023" — the transcript's rendering of the date announcement — and leads the Pledge. Minutes: "Meeting called to order by chair Heather Whitney." Neither record gives a clock time for the call to order. |
| 0:00:41 | II. General Business — Secretary Roll Call of Attendance (6:35 p.m.) | 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)." No roll call was taken. The chair says only "Looks like we're fortunate enough to have a quorum this evening. So we're going to move forward with our consent agenda." The minutes nonetheless print a "Present:" and "Absent:" list, naming five of the seven members. See flag 1. |
| 0:01:06 | II. Consent Agenda agenda marks this "(vote required)" | Agenda: "Consent Agenda (vote required) 1. Amendments and Final Approval of board agenda 2. Minutes Approval-10.4.23 (Should be available Monday prior to the meeting.)" Disposed of without a vote: "Is there any objections to having all of our items, on the agenda as written? If no objections, we'll consider that consent. And if there's no objections to the minutes as written, we'll consider that consent. Seeing no objections, we'll move forward to citizens comments." Minutes: "No objections from any present school board members. All consent agenda items pass." The 10.4.23 draft minutes approved here record a nonpublic session sealed for twenty years (flag 11). The retreat minutes the chair expected were not in the packet (flag 4). See also flag 5. |
| 0:01:06 | II. Citizens Comments | "Is there anyone in the audience that would like to speak to the board in this session?" — closed twenty-seven seconds later at 0:01:33: "Seeing none, we're going to close citizens comments." Minutes: "Citizens Comments- None." See flag 6. |
| 0:01:33 | III. Public Hearing — Schwab Charitable Fund donation (6:40 p.m.) | Agenda: "III. 6:40 PM PUBLIC HEARING Donation in the amount of $6000.00 to the Claremont School District from Schwab Charitable Fund." Opened and closed with no speakers: "we're opening the public hearing for to speak on the donation from to the Claremont School District from the Swab Charitable fund, total of amounting $6,000. Is there anyone in the audience that would like to speak to this? No. Okay. Moving forward, we are going to now close the public hearing." Swab is the transcript's rendering of Schwab. The packet's Exhibit A is the grant letter and the cheque itself, drawn 09/19/2023 and marked "Present for Payment Within 180 Days". See flag 12. |
| 0:02:04 | IV. Closing of Public Hearing; acceptance of the donation (6:50 p.m.) | Frank Sprague moves at 0:02:14: "To make a motion to accept the Schwab Charitable Trust donation of $6,000. With thanks." A second is audible but the speaker is not identified on the recording; the minutes name Candace Crawford. No vote was taken. The chair asked instead: "Is there anyone that would like to oppose accepting this donation? Seeing no opposition. The board accepts the donation of $6,000 from the Schwab Charitable Fund." Minutes: "Frank Sprague makes a motion to accept the Schwab Charitable Fund donation in the amount of $6000.00; seconded by Candace Crawford; no further discussion; Motion passes." See flag 5 and flag 12. |
| 0:02:44 | V. Superintendent Report — District Wide Goals 2023-2024 (6:55 p.m.) | Agenda: "V. 6:55PM Superintendent Report ● District Wide Goals 2023-2024." Presented from the packet's CSB Supt Report 10.18.23 GOALS, which sets out three goals; the recording numbers only the first two aloud and then spends most of the report on the third. Arlene Hawkins asked twice that measurement be written into Goal 1 and that Goal 2 commit the superintendent to helping the board improve its own budget process; Whitney Skillen asked what Goal 2 would actually deliver and on what timeline. Tempesta agreed to both amendments. No vote was taken and the minutes record no adoption of the goals. See flag 7. |
| 0:20:35 | VI.1 Claremont Middle School Update (7:00 p.m.) | Agenda: "1. Claremont Middle School Update Presentation from Principal Frank Romeo." The longest item of the night — forty minutes. Staffing shortages and the VLACS half-year workaround; the written answers to four board questions published in the packet as CMS Board Questions; cell-phone violation counts; the deans and student support centres; barriers to academic outcomes; and the book vending machine. No motion, no vote — a report item. Minutes: "The school board has the opportunity to ask questions regarding the presentation." |
| 1:00:08 | VI.2 Alternative Program Update — search for a new location | Agenda: "2. Alternative Program Update Update from Ben Nester, Director of Special Education on search for new location." Taken out of order and then restored: the chair called item three at 0:59:27, the business administrator had begun, and Nester interrupted — "One second. Then I can I can come." — after which the chair apologised and gave him the floor. Six candidate sites with costs, then a board discussion in which Skillen, Hawkins and the chair all pushed back on housing the programme inside Stevens High School. No motion; the minutes record only discussion. |
| 1:07:05 | VI.3 Claremont District Budget Update/Surplus (Discussion/Vote) | Agenda: "3. Claremont District Budget Update/Surplus (Discussion/Vote) Update from Business Administrator, Mary Henry." Motion carried. Candace Crawford moved at 1:12:29 ("I so move"), Frank Sprague seconded ("I'll second. But I like to ask one more question"), discussion followed, and the chair put the question at 1:17:38: "The motion before us is to retain up to 424,000, in our fund balance for fund balance retention. Everybody okay with that? All in favor, say aye." A voice vote follows with no opposition. Minutes: "Candace Crawford makes a motion to retain up to $424,000 for fund balance retention; seconded by Frank Sprague; all in favor via voice vote. Motion passes." No tally is recorded in either source. See flags 2 and 8. |
| 1:19:14 | VI.4 Claremont School Board Self-Evaluation Retreat (Discussion) | Agenda: "4. Claremont School Board Self-Evaluation Retreat (Discussion) Led by Heather Whitney, Chair What was accomplished, what is next." The chair's report on the October 11 retreat: two evaluation instruments, a statement of support for the technical centre assigned to Sprague, board-member profiles on the district website targeted for January 2024, agenda items to be marked where they align with district goals, and the board's goals to be printed on the back of the agenda. The retreat's own minutes were not in this packet; they appear in the following meeting's. See flag 4. |
| 1:21:55 | VI.5 Non-Exclusive MOU with City of Claremont for Maintenance of Athletic Fields and Facilities (Discussion/Vote) | Agenda: "5. Presentation of Non-Exclusive MOU with City of Claremont for Maintenance of Athletic Fields and Facilities (Discussion/Vote) Presentation by Mike Tempesta, Superintendent." The document in the packet is not a memorandum of understanding but a licence agreement, and the motion adopted calls it one. Tempesta presents from 1:22:18. Motion carried unanimously. Crawford moved, Sprague seconded (Second. at 1:27:21, confirmed by the chair as Seconded by Frank), and at 1:27:34: "I none opposed. Motion passes unanimously." Minutes: "Candace Crawford makes a motion to approve the license agreement between the City of Claremont and the Claremont School District for maintenance of athletic fields and facilities per the contact that was provided to the school board; seconded by Frank Sprague; no further discussion; all in favor via voice vote; motion passes unanimously." "contact" for "contract" is the district's typo. See flag 3 and flag 13. |
| 1:27:34 | VI.6(a) Capital Improvement Committee — Subcommittee Chair Bonnie Miles | Agenda: "a) Capital Improvement Committee SubCommittee Chair Bonnie Miles." No report. The chair asks the room; Candace Crawford, also a member, answers in the negative. The minutes print the heading with nothing under it. This subcommittee had reported substantively two weeks earlier, on October 4, through Whitney Skillen — a building tour with Steven Holt, the district's maintenance director, named in those minutes as "Steven Holt". |
| 1:27:52 | VI.6(b) Budget Sub-Committee — Subcommittee Chair Frank Sprague | Agenda: "b) Budget Sub-Committee Subcommittee Chair Frank Sprague." No separate report: "Budget subcommittee. We're going to be hearing from Miss Henry shortly about the, timeline." In fact the timeline had already been discussed at 1:18:01 and was deferred to the November 1 agenda. The minutes print the heading with nothing under it. The agenda names Sprague as chair of this subcommittee; the October 4 minutes name its members as Whitney, Sprague and Crawford. |
| 1:28:02 | VI.6(c) Policy Sub-Committee — Subcommittee Chair Whitney Skillen | Agenda: "c) Policy Sub-Committee Subcommittee Chair Whitney Skillen." Skillen reports an operational plan being built out of a single sentence in policy BG, which allows the policy committee to delegate policy revision to other board members: "we are developing an operation plan that operationalize that sentence that will instruct board members, step by step how to revise policies, including how to locate our existing policy, how to locate the sample policy on the New Hampshire School Board website, how to use the Google folder system that we're setting up." Minutes: "Policy subcommittee is still putting together the operational plan per policy BG. They are working on a step by step plan on submitting policies." The minutes record this report from a member their own attendance list omits (flag 1). |
| 1:29:39 | VI.6(d) Curriculum Committee — Subcommittee Chair Jennifer Gallagher | Agenda: "d) Curriculum Committee Subcommittee Chair Jennifer Gallagher." The chair passes over it — the subcommittee chair is absent — and an unidentified voice at the staff table volunteers a three-year curriculum plan and the "adoption cycles and renewal cycles of different curriculum". The minutes attribute this to Assistant Superintendent Koski. This subcommittee does not appear in the October 4 reading of the board's subcommittee roster; the agenda for this meeting is where it surfaces. |
| 1:30:09 | VI.6(e) SRVRTC Visioning Committee — Board Representatives F. Sprague, B. Miles, C. Crawford | Agenda: "e) SRVRTC Visioning Committee Board Representatives F. Sprague, B. Miles, & C. Crawford." Motion carried. Sprague reads the board's statement of support for career and technical education into the record from 1:30:41 — the task the October 11 retreat minutes record him taking on. The chair first said no vote was needed ("I think we have we have consensus. We have consensus. We don't need a vote if everybody is okay") and then took one anyway. Crawford moved at 1:31:59; both Hawkins and Sprague offered a second; the minutes record Hawkins. Voice vote, no opposition. Sprague adds: "And I've given a copy to the press." |
| 1:33:39 | VI.6(f) Ad Hoc Disruptive Behaviors Committee — Subcommittee Chair Jennifer Gallagher | Agenda: "f) Ad Hoc Disruptive Behaviors Committee Subcommittee Chair Jennifer Gallagher." No report; the chair states Gallagher's absence and asks Ben Nester, the committee's staff member, who answers "Not at this time." The minutes print the heading with nothing under it. Sprague later reports having contacted Gallagher from the NHSBA Delegate Assembly about a resolution on unruly students and parents. |
| 1:34:04 | VII. Other Business (8:20 p.m.) | Three items. Sprague's report on the NHSBA Delegate Assembly in Concord — Oyster River named school board of the year, a close vote on a sustainability resolution, and a possible CHINS-petition resolution for the following year. The Goshen School District meeting of December 18, 2023 on the tuition agreement, for which the chair sought a volunteer and Tempesta warned a quorum might be required (flag 4). And the vacant student board seat. Minutes record all three. |
| 1:39:48 | VIII. Future Dates / Future Agenda Items (8:25 p.m.) | Agenda: the November 1 meeting; Program of Studies 2024 on 11.15.23; Budget Public Hearing 1/3/24; Budget Ratification 1/17/24; Deliberative Session 2/7/24; a January 2024 alternative-programme update; and "July 2024 Impact of New Cell Phone Policy on Academic Performance". Future agenda items for 11.1.23: academic achievement indicators and summer programme evaluation (Koski), preschool programme and SEL goals (Nester), paraprofessional contract, annual meetings with City Council. The chair calls it "a very dense meeting" and asks members to send advance questions to the recording secretary. See flag 14. |
| 1:42:45 | IX. Adjournment (8:30 p.m.) | "If if there's no objections to adjourn being done, we're adjourned." Minutes: "No objections from any present school board members to adjourn the meeting. Meeting adjourned." No time of adjournment is recorded in either source; the recording's last row ends at 1:42:53. See flag 5. |
Discussion timeline
Chronological, from the dialogue transcript. Timestamps link to the same moment in the Cablecast recording. Quotations reproduce the automatic transcript as recorded; square brackets mark this page's correction of a transcription garble, and quotations taken from the agenda, the minutes or a packet document are attributed to that document in the surrounding text.
What was said, in order. The Flags column links to the review items below.
| Time | Topic | What was said | Flags |
|---|
| 0:00:41 | The meeting opens without a roll call, and the retreat minutes are missing | Two of the night's problems appear in the chair's first substantive sentence. "Looks like we're fortunate enough to have a quorum this evening. So we're going to move forward with our consent agenda. Our consent agenda includes, minutes for approval for four, ten, 23. And also there were minutes in the packet are supposed to be in the packet for our retreat. I don't see them, so we'll revisit them at a different time." No roll call is taken — the agenda's item II calls for one — and the October 11 retreat minutes are not in the packet, seven days after a retreat that a quorum of the board attended. The minutes for approval are the October 4 draft; four, ten, 23 is the transcript's rendering of 10.4.23. | HIGH MEDIUM |
| 0:01:06 | Consent agenda and citizens' comments, both by absence of objection | "Is there any objections to having all of our items, on the agenda as written? If no objections, we'll consider that consent. And if there's no objections to the minutes as written, we'll consider that consent. Seeing no objections, we'll move forward to citizens comments. Is there anyone in the audience that would like to speak to the board in this session?" Twenty-seven seconds later: "Seeing none, we're going to close citizens comments." The board's own agenda marks the consent agenda "(vote required)". | MEDIUM OBSERVATION |
| 0:01:33 | A public hearing on a $6,000 donation, and its acceptance | The hearing runs thirty-one seconds and draws no one. Sprague then moves: "To make a motion to accept the Schwab Charitable Trust donation of $6,000. With thanks." The document in the packet calls the donor the Schwab Charitable Fund; the cheque is dated 09/19/2023 and made payable to the Claremont School District. Under the version of RSA 198:20-b in force since July 18, 2023 no public hearing was required at this amount — the threshold is $20,000 — which makes this a hearing the board held because it always had. | POSITIVE |
| 0:04:21 | Superintendent's Goal 1: be in every school every week | "So the first goal we have, and for myself in for members of our administrative team and is to visit all schools, administrators and teachers weekly to be in every school and try to exceed that, if we can, to support the instructional goals and in student achievement." The packet's goals sheet states it in the same words. The board's response was that "support" is not a measure — see the exchange at 0:11:11. | |
| 0:05:14 | Goal 2: the budgeting process, and the tuition agreements behind it | "So the next is to, work with our administrative team. We have some new people in the business office and improve the budgeting process, focusing resources again that directly support instructional goals and student achievement." Then the reason it is urgent: "So the tuition agreements that we have, we get kids, as we had for a long time from Goshen and also from, Cornish." The packet's goals sheet lists the pending tuition agreements as "Claremont, Unity, Goshen!" and does not mention Cornish; the recording and the document disagree and this page does not reconcile them. | |
| 0:06:41 | Goal 3: an accelerated nursing pathway at River Valley Community College | The longest part of the report, and the only one the superintendent calls exciting. "The number of nursing job postings right now, 292 that you see between Alice Peck Valley and it's just in Chester Medical" — the packet slide breaks the 292 down as DHMC 162, Alice Peck Day 31, Valley Regional 22, New London Hospital 15, Springfield Hospital 2, Cheshire Medical Center 60. Then: "if you go back to 2019 with a number of job post postings comparing it to now said there were 600 then 1400 now" — the slide itself says only that monthly New Hampshire registered-nurse postings doubled between 2019 and 2023. High-school students could enter the pathway "at a wage of, you know, over $20 an hour" while credentialing. "Alice Peck Valley" collapses two hospitals and "Chester Medical" is Cheshire Medical Center. | |
| 0:11:11 | Hawkins asks that measurement be written into the goal, not bolted on | "I have a question about the goals. And I believe that the spirit of the goals is very much aligned with the Claremont School Board, goals that were worked on during the retreat… I'm looking specifically at all one, if it would be, it would have a greater impact if the goal included rather than supporting would say something about because this is part of a Claremont board goal." She supplies the wording: "Measuring growth in student achievement and professional instructional practices in all the schools." Tempesta offers a benchmark grid instead — "these are the broader focus goals. I completely agree. We should have benchmarks market measure it all the way through" — and Hawkins holds her ground at 0:13:10: "So I think by having it actually in the goal itself, it even more closely aligns with the school board goals." | OBSERVATION |
| 0:12:19 | Why the superintendent was absent in September, and who else is in the buildings | "But we also I started our calendar of visitations. And then as I mentioned before, I wasn't here for a first part of September with with my mother passing away. But the, but now we have the visitation schedule out there walking around." He names the administrators already doing it — HR director Angela Vivian, and at 0:12:47 "Kat McLaughlin are already out there supporting the PD" — and says he will walk the buildings "with, with Ben, with Mary", the special-education director and the business administrator. This is the same family circumstance that kept him off the September 6 recording, where he attended by telephone. | |
| 0:14:13 | The goal is amended by agreement, and never voted on | Hawkins presses a third time — "the way the goal is worded is the way that it's going to be presented as your goal. I mean, there's not an opportunity to include the wording of a fostering measurable growth and improvement" — and gets a straight answer: "Yeah, absolutely. Have done goals my whole career. I can definitely amend the goal. Thank you." At 0:19:52 she asks for a second amendment, that the goal commit him to "assisting the school boards because we're I think we equally need to be a part of working to improve the budget process". He agrees again. Nothing is moved, seconded or voted, and the minutes record no adopted text. | OBSERVATION |
| 0:16:07 | Skillen asks what the budgeting goal will actually deliver | "I had a question regarding goal two and I might have missed it… what outcomes or things do you hope to deliver out of improving the budgeting process? Is there I see, like a a it could be like a report or summary of like the problems that you're facing and like the problems that you want to solve regarding the budgeting process and what you hope to achieve by the end of your, improvements." And then the timeline question: "is it over this budgeting season so that we're learning for next season? Are you going to like implement a new procedure? And is that a goal to deliver one of those." At 0:19:17 she narrows it to a document: "I wouldn't be able to judge the content, but just seeing it to know that it exists and that we have a document to guide our team every year that this takes place would be great." | |
| 0:17:09 | $13 million of federal money, and the problem of sunsetting it | Answering Skillen, the superintendent names the single largest budget fact of the year: "The biggest obstacle that I see for this year where we're all going to need guidance and, you know, I don't want to be, you know, get too derailed on this, but we know that we've used some we've had $13 million of extra federal grant money in the budget, and we have to make sure that we are exiting." He continues at 0:17:36: "we were in sunsetting those things… hey, wait, there are some things that we still need," and then the tuition argument — Claremont must stay "the anchor school for Stevens High School, because we know, I mean, there used to be 75 more kids in that building with the same teaching staff. So basically, we know that tuition is coming in at 16, 17,000, really offset the taxpayer base." This is the last budget cycle before the ESSER money ends; the FY25 budget built the following winter is the first without it. | |
| 0:21:55 | Claremont Middle School: two vacancies and a half-year workaround | "we started when we started the year just as school started. We were short a couple of positions, and the main ones that we were was a science and math position both at the seventh and eighth grade level." Late hires filled the eighth-grade posts; "Where we're lacking two key people. Is a seventh grade math and a seventh grade science." The solution: "the way that we're combating the shortage is that we're having our students take half year courses. So half of the the students will take a math class. The other half will have an in person. And then halfway through the year, we will switch so that no one student will have either all online or all in person." His reason for not doing it the usual way: "we just felt our students deserve more than to be put into a cafeteria, into a large room in front of a computer. Like most schools are doing." | |
| 0:24:51 | Courtney Steele on the VLACS registration, one student at a time | "obviously we were still trying to hire all the way up till when school started. We have gotten kids signed up for this term. It has been a little bit of a process… The lady that I work with at black says we are one of 18 schools in this same boat, which makes me feel a little bit better." At 0:25:09: "At this point, I have registered all but one student, and that one is in the process with V lax. Because we've got a a family that doesn't have an email situation at home. And so we're working to get a proxy being that students guidance counselor." Students without a live course were doing Khan Academy work in maths and working from a textbook in science. The registration form kept freezing accounts — "so a lot of them being seventh graders, I mean, normal brain development, would be like, oh, I don't know. This answer is, so they'd put something random or they'd skip it" — so she pulled them into her office a few at a time. VLACS comes through as black, blacks, V lax and Vlachs throughout. | |
| 0:30:55 | Why the online grades will not appear in the school's gradebook | "it's a work at your own pace program. So, the teachers give them a pacing guide… We can't put their grades like their individual assignment grades, into our grading system because our algorithm is different than V is algorithm, and it would cause a lot of confusion and changing in grades." The consequence: "they'll get one final grade for the semester from that course that will come from their final grade from blocks for that." The vendor calls the half-courses segments rather than semesters, so "the students right now are in segment one, and the students in second semester for us would be in segment two so that they can their only being charged with half of that." Attendance is taken by Claremont staff, not the provider (0:30:22). | |
| 0:33:55 | Cell phones: a three-strike ladder, and the numbers behind it | The escalation, in Romeo's words: a first violation is "you've had your cell phone out, we asked you to put it away and you haven't"; a second means "the phone is out again, and this time you've already been warned. It stays in the office… And a parent is going to have to come get the cell phone"; a third means the phone "must stay in the office or with a dean or an administrator" on arrival each day. He reports the daily-surrender counts aloud — "At the eighth grade, it's it looks it's four, and again at the sixth and seventh grade, it's five" — while the packet's written answers give the full series to 10/13/23: eighth grade 25 first violations, 3 second, 3 third; sixth and seventh 21 first, 4 second, 2 third. The written figures are in the packet; the spoken report gives only the two smallest numbers of the six. | |
| 0:36:19 | The principal's argument against a ban without a lesson | "We're not opposed to taking a look at, what the high school is doing. I think for us, the the question is always, we're making sure that we are teaching appropriate behavior when using electronics, and just taking them away and locking up doesn't necessarily provide that lesson" (0:35:37). Then: "it's something that we continuously talk about and I've talked about with Mr. Tempesta and Mr. Kosky, if that's the direction that we need to go, then we're absolutely fine with it again. We just always ask the question, you know, making sure that we are teaching the lessons that we need to for appropriate behavior. And if it's not cell phones, then it's Pokemon cards." Stevens High School had adopted Yondr pouches that autumn; the agenda's future-dates list already carries "July 2024 Impact of New Cell Phone Policy on Academic Performance", and the packet's written answers link to a pros-and-cons article on phones in school emergencies. | |
| 0:37:28 | 549 uses of one student support centre since the start of school | "Showing in eighth grade, there have been 549 uses or referrals. So that means since the start of school, that room has been accessed 549 separate times for a variety of reasons." The packet's written answers add the figure he does not say aloud — 363 uses of the sixth and seventh grade centre, and an average of 16.6 uses a day in eighth grade. Romeo describes a daily administrative meeting that goes "through every single student in the building" and credits the deans with knowing "what is happening in their buildings and in their grades every day." The packet's Appendix B, the CMS Catalog of Restorative Practices 23/24, sets out what the deans assign; it was never discussed at this meeting. | OBSERVATION |
| 0:40:05 | The late bus, raised again | "I'll bring up Late Bus again just because I always do. But I if we don't have a late bus, we don't have kids that are staying after for academics, for sports, for drama, for clubs. Still continuously building those relationships. If we had a late bus, we would have so much more, just participation and activity in our building." And: "I will continue to stand up here and promoting lake bus. Our kids need it." It is one of six barriers his written answers list, alongside mental-health access, parent programmes, teacher recruitment and retention, K–12 curriculum alignment, and a district-wide reading and writing initiative. | |
| 0:42:53 | Sprague: what does "properly staffing" mean? | "So on your the difficulties the last bullet on your what difficulties if any. You use the word properly staffing. What do you mean by properly." The answer: "we are short staffed, right. And we are short staffed in a number of places, including Paris. We are. And I say this so proudly, we are one of the only schools I know that are fully staffed with special educators. Top to bottom all grade levels, and so properly meaning that we are getting the folks that we need to have in our building to continue to support our kiddos." Sprague's follow-up sets the standard: "it isn't a matter of just warm bodies. You got to have people know what they're doing." Paris is this transcript's rendering of paras — paraprofessionals. | |
| 0:44:21 | Crawford establishes that the middle school has no functioning PTO | She asks what parent programmes exist behind the written answer's second barrier, and gets: "currently we do not have any regular programs. We do have and I send out fliers and newsletters. There are some things that are being promoted around the community that I'll send out, that will invite parents to them specifically within our building. We don't we have some meetings for back to school things." Then, at 0:46:18, "Do you have a PTA or PTO, PTO?" — "We have about three members that we talked on on email. We did meet. Definitely pre and post Covid. We had a great eighth grade family and it was about two years ago, and they kind of all moved on. And they kind of left only a couple. So we're in communication, but we don't regularly meet at this time." What he would like to run: monthly parent meetings on what to look for on children's phones and social media. | |
| 0:49:51 | Crawford on the book vending machine: the children who never earn a token | "I think it's great to have the, vending machine and the tokens is is is good. My concern is that oftentimes the kids who aren't achieving and don't get those tokens are the ones that really need extra help reading. Yes. And so what kinds of programs do you have for those kids?" Romeo says the same question had come up in his own leadership meeting the day before, and describes widening the ways a token can be earned — teacher nominations, a "caught you being good" card drawn monthly, and recognition for improvement rather than attainment: "let's make sure we reward those students and those achievements so that we can move towards some sort of understanding of how to get a token. So it's not just student of the month." Courtney Steele adds that the English department chose the stock to cover all reading levels, including "a high interest book that maybe is a lower readability level". Hawkins asks for a number and gets an estimate: 0:53:37, "12 to 15 would be within the first month". | |
| 0:52:15 | Skillen asks what stands between the school and a late bus; the answer is money and drivers | "This might be a question for the administration, but I'm wondering what are the barriers to a late bus?" Two board members answer budget at once. The superintendent then gives the operational position: "we're still waiting for the results of people taking the the different versions and the aptitudes of, of the, of the road, the road test to be certified… but right now we have two additional drivers that when we started and we also used the Esser money to leverage two busses as well. So it's it's trending positively." Asked whether that means a late bus this year, he will not commit: "I don't want to jinx it, but I think I would rather under promise and boom, it's right there. But it's looking looking good for the near future." Two buses bought with federal pandemic money is a recurring theme of the sunsetting problem described at 0:17:09. | |
| 0:54:56 | The chair asks whether anything connects the student centres to academic outcomes | The best-constructed question of the meeting. "the pie chart that you, you provided, which is great, it looks like to me that more than roughly three quarters of the students that access these centers are there for social, emotional or behavior type issues and a limited number for academic support… is there any mechanism in place currently that tracks the students that have access to the system to see if, if they actually are gaining these social emotional benefits that are leading to academic growth? Because to me, to me the end game is academic growth." She also names the ESSER problem in the same breath: "I know this is part of Esser money, so there's probably a phasing out process that's going to happen." | |
| 0:56:57 | Romeo's three data points, and a number that reverses itself | "some of the data points that we look at is an ineligible list compared from one year to the next… I can tell you that I remember pre student centers, we were 15 and 20" and "Post student centers were four and five." He is careful about the inference: "Whether there's a direct correlation or not, but I'd like to think that the work that we're being done has some has an impact on that." Then a sentence that says the opposite of what he means and is left as the transcript has it: "But I love when I see that our attendance is down. Meaning that there are more kids in school and our and our ineligibility lists are down to 1 or 2 students, which is phenomenal for a school of 375 kids." He is describing absences falling, not attendance — the following clause makes that plain, and this page does not silently correct the sentence. His three measures are the ineligibility list, attendance, and referrals for skipping class. | |
| 1:00:08 | Six possible homes for the alternative programme, with prices | Ben Nester runs the list: River Valley Community College, which "certainly rent out classrooms to nonprofits and other organizations and are are interested in some kind of a partnership" but has put nothing in writing; the Claremont Savings Bank, with "annual cost of about $25,000 to rent that space" and an unasked question about students cycling through a bank's front doors; the charter school's building, "maxed out in terms of space… we've got a hard know on that on that location"; two Pleasant Street storefronts of "1000 to 3300ft²" at "a monthly lease of around 13 to $1400", likely already accessible and probably needing a lead-paint inspection; and Stevens High School, where "there is some space available." The programme was then housed at the technical centre; the chair's closing line is that everybody wanted "some hope that we could move forward with the program being out of the technical center." | |
| 1:02:01 | Sprague's history, and Skillen's line in the sand | Sprague: "the original when we started an alternative program, it was we actually, subcontracted it to Ombudsman and it was in the Goddard Block downtown. And it worked out well. It was a space. And the kids, got there on their own. And, I again, all the research I ever did on alternative programs, not in high school. That's a hard note with me if anybody asks me." Skillen at 1:03:41 puts the board's earlier position on the record: "when we first visited this conversation about the location of the alternative program, I think that we, Like, I didn't say rule out, but I think we came to a pretty close consensus on the board that doing it inside a SHS is not preferable because of how the success rate of alternative programs within the same building as the traditional school." Hawkins agrees; Crawford offers the former Granite State College rooms; the chair prefers a storefront "just from a community image perspective" and asks who would pay for the summer months of a twelve-month lease. | |
| 1:07:26 | Fund balance: the number the annual financial report is waiting on | "this is, regarding the fund balance retention. I attached a copy of the RSA that talks a little bit about it, but you guys are already familiar with it. I've had some conversations with our auditors, as well, about this, because in order for me or in order for me to complete the dough 25, I have to know how much you want to retain, if anything, out of the fund balance the max that you can retain this year." The maximum is $424,000. The wording matters: "you can vote to say that you're willing to do up to 424,000. So if it comes in at 200 000, you still can do it. If you just say 400 and you make a motion and you say 424,000. That's it… You have to use the word up to." dough 25 is the DOE-25, the annual financial report a school district must file with the Department of Education by September 1 under RSA 198:4-d. | OBSERVATION |
| 1:08:42 | The reason for retaining it: what the unfinished audits might reveal | "I'm going to recommend that only because of adits and what has been happening with those. They're not complete. I worry about if we've given back too much to the taxpayers on those audits, that if we hold our fund balance, that enables us to offset that. When it comes time for tax rate setting next year. That's that's my biggest concern as to why I would recommend the vote to do up to that amount." She then states the statutory constraints: "it's very specific. You can't touch that money without having a, public hearing and a vote of the board. Yours is only 2.5%, even though the RSA allows up to five. You would have to vote to change your to do that" — and at 1:09:37, "you have to actually put another Warren article on to increase it to the 5%." adits is audits; Warren article is warrant article. | HIGH OBSERVATION |
| 1:10:11 | Sprague asks the political question, and gets a candid answer | "so as you know, we're all elected officials. And typically, if we if we do for 24, that's about 200,000 more than we usually do. So if someone comes up to me, one of the city councilors, and says, why didn't you send 200,000 back? What do I tell that? What do I tell that person." The answer: "For me? Right now it's it's about fiscal responsibility in the sense that you have not have had your audits all done… I'm very worried about those audits and what they may reveal. And if you don't have the funds, you will run into a deficit. Warren article okay. That's my biggest fear is that I don't want to. I've been through that. When I was in a town, we had a $750,000 deficit. I found that we had to put on the warrant." Sprague's reply is the reason the exchange is on the record at all: "I just want people to hear that." | HIGH |
| 1:11:24 | Hawkins tests what it would take to spend the retained money | "the money would be put aside and could only be utilized even for the audits if we're finding that. Oh, we need this. These. Excuse me, these funds to be used because of the the results of an audit. Does that have to go to a, public hearing and then a vote for the board?" — "You you would have to use. That to me would be a reason to be emergency situation where you have a deficit. Yes." That is the right answer under RSA 198:4-b, II, which requires a public hearing with at least seven days' published notice before retained funds are spent. | OBSERVATION |
| 1:12:41 | "What are the chances that that's not enough?" | Sprague seconds the motion and then asks the question anyway. The answer is a straight admission: "I don't know, I honestly, Frank, I can't give you an answer to that." Pressed — "Right? It is a possibility." — she goes further: "It is a possibility, but I don't I honestly don't feel that it's. If it is, it's not going to be a whole lot more just based on what I've seen." She describes what she has been doing to FY23: "I've found some other items that should have been moved into SRS that we have done… that's been the biggest thing for me to try to fix 23 is to make sure that everything's where it should be. We did a major adjustment to it a few weeks ago, where we found some items that should have been in 23 that weren't yet put in there yet." And then: "I honestly, I guess we're going to be close. I feel bad I can't give you a. Better. More definitive answer." | HIGH |
| 1:15:11 | The audit backlog, stated plainly | The chair asks: "Where are we in the in the audit process. How many are outstanding?" — "Right now 21 is done." At 1:15:34: "He's telling me we're going to hit to be in time to have everything filed with our for our audits, with the state in that or the federal clearinghouse. But I, I don't know." At 1:15:47: "I would like to say that I would have 22 done well before that. We're working on that right now. And then hopefully 23 maybe by the end of this, not this year. I met next year." And at 1:16:09, the sentence that dates the backlog: "We're working. We just got started on 22." Fiscal 2022 ended on June 30, 2022, sixteen months earlier. The mitigation is on the record too — weekly Thursday meetings with the auditors, information sent electronically, and audit staff to be sent on site "a couple days a week here and there." | HIGH |
| 1:16:14 | What is actually holding the FY2022 audit up | "We've made some good headway. We've made some decisions about how to approach it and what we're going to do. My biggest thing for that right now is reconciling grants. Because I really that for me has been one of the biggest struggles is reconciling the grants and trying to figure out where we are, what is outstanding and things like that, and what has what we could claim. What we need to put back into the general fund is just there's a lot in those grants right now." Grant reconciliation is precisely the work a federal single audit tests, and the district's grant volume in FY2022 was at its ESSER peak. | HIGH |
| 1:17:38 | The board votes to retain up to $424,000 | "Is there any objection from the board to call the question? No seeing. No objection. The motion before us is to retain up to 424,000, in our fund balance for fund balance retention. Everybody okay with that? All in favor, say aye." The ayes are recorded in the transcript's crosstalk cluster; the chair then says "Thank you. No. No opposition." The minutes record a voice vote, all in favour, no tally. The chair immediately turns to the budget calendar and secures a commitment to bring a timeline to the November 1 agenda — "It's the only meeting of the month" and "brace yourself for November." | |
| 1:19:14 | The chair reports the October 11 self-evaluation retreat | "Item number four is I just want to quickly touch on, our Claremont School Board self-evaluation retreat. It's the first time the board has officially gotten together to have a little self-reflection. We used two different evaluation tools. One was that was provided through the New Hampshire School Board Association. One was an independent evaluation that each board member did individually." The verdict: "we think we're pretty awesome, or we're doing it, we're doing we're doing pretty well. We have some room for improvement." Four follow-ups: a statement of support for the technical centre, assigned to Sprague; board-member profiles on the district website "have that be a goal for January 2024"; agenda items marked where they align with district goals; and the board's goals printed on the back of the agenda "just as a sentient reminder for us to stay on task". Also: "we are going to have another meeting sometime in the future, having to determine when that is going to be." The retreat's own minutes were not in this packet. The retreat minutes themselves refer back to board goals "developed at the . May 16, 2023" retreat the stray full stop is the district's, so this was not the board's first retreat, only its first self-evaluation. | MEDIUM |
| 1:22:23 | The athletic-fields licence: six years becomes two | The chair introduces it as a presentation by "Mr. Dempster" — the transcript's rendering of Tempesta. "In meeting with the city manager, the only the only thing that We. Agreed to move this along was to stay away from a six year term. So we went with a two year term term, and then we can look at that after, there's no doubt. In there's absolutely no doubt that if you look at it, you know, $30,000 for the maintenance of that. It is. It's a good deal." His comparison: "historically, two there Were. Half time and at one time, a full time person assigned to this that, frankly, would have been paid more than 30,000. So it's a no brainer from that regard." And on the escalator: "Even if we go the full 6%, it's 1800 a year additional, which is again still very reasonable." The document in the packet is the two-year version; the version in the September 6 packet ran to August 31, 2029. | MEDIUM POSITIVE |
| 1:23:36 | Sprague insists there is a fields line, and the business administrator finds it | Sprague: "I think that this is actually less than what has been budgeted in years past in the budget. I maybe I'm wrong, but I think it was 30s." Tempesta: "Since I've been here and we looked in that and Mary can talk about that. We didn't see it going back 6 or 7 years. I heard historically that it might have been in there. We found one person by name that we remembered, and we also were chasing down another name. But either way, it's like we need to have something." Sprague will not let it go — "there's a budget line that says fields. Yeah. In the budget" — and Crawford says "Never seen that." Mary Henry then supplies it: "There's there's a line, but there's only 5000 in it… That line for the past, since 2019," and the actuals at 1:24:35: "The actual for last year was 30,000 we spent to the city, and the prior year was 14,275." Her conclusion: "We spent more than what we've budgeted… But we never paid a, a field fee. From what I could see." Her recitation of the budgeted amounts by year — "I had 4019, 4020 21. Had 9022, had 5023 had five" — runs together year labels and dollar figures and is not recoverable from this transcript; only the $5,000 line and the two actuals are. | MEDIUM |
| 1:25:11 | Two members read the contract at the table | Crawford checks the term: "So I'm a little confused. The proposal. It's isn't it for is this for six years or." — "For two." Then she checks the process: "have you, verified that with the city that the two year is." — "Oh, yeah. He's. It was his idea." Skillen reads the escalator clause and gets a wrong answer: "How do we decide if it's going to be the 2% or the 6% or." — "They're they don't really. So I just assumed it would be the six." She works it out herself: "Would be an annual adjustment of a minimum of 2%… Maximum. Of. 6%. Right. But how do you decide like," and Crawford supplies it — "based on the cost of living" — leaving Skillen at "we assume based on this current CPI, that's going to always be 6%." The contract does not leave it to assumption: the annual fee is multiplied by the ratio of the Northeast CPI-U for April to the previous April, with a 2% floor and 6% ceiling. Tempesta adds "Matt thought it was good to do that as well" — apparently the board's attorney, whose surname is not spoken. | MEDIUM |
| 1:26:49 | The motion is assembled aloud, and passes unanimously | Three people build the motion between them. Chair: "So we'll say we we make a motion to approve, the." Sprague: "Licensing." Chair: "License agreement made between the city of Claremont, New Hampshire, and," Sprague: "Claremont School District." Chair: "Claremont School District." Sprague: "For use of athletic." Chair: "Fields for the use and for the maintenance of athletic fields. Facilities and facilities. Per the licensed agreement that is provided. In our packet." Crawford: "That sounds very good." Sprague: "Second." Then: "Seconded by Frank. Is there any further discussion? Seeing none. Any discussion? We'll call the question. All in favor?" and "I none opposed. Motion passes unanimously." The party the board named in its motion — the Claremont School District — is not the party named in the document, which is New Hampshire School Administrative Unit #6. | MEDIUM |
| 1:28:02 | Skillen's policy operational plan | "the policy subcommittee is still putting together a operational plan for the delegation of for the for the policy subcommittee to delegate to other members of the school board the revision of our policies and our policy manual." The source is one sentence of an existing policy: "there's a line in policy BG that is the policy adoption policy that says the policies of committee may delegate to other members of the board the revision of policies. And that's all it says. So this we are developing an operation plan that operationalize that sentence that will instruct board members, step by step how to revise policies, including how to locate our existing policy, how to locate the sample policy on the New Hampshire School Board website, how to use the Google folder system that we're setting up." The chair's response: "this is another reason why we're an awesome school board." The policy code is supplied from the floor by the unidentified voice at the staff table. | |
| 1:29:44 | A curriculum update from a voice nobody names | The chair, passing over the absent subcommittee chair — "Curriculum committee. No, we don't have any updates from Jen. Anything." — is answered from the staff table: "We have that, though. May I say yes, please? We're working on a three year plan, which hasn't been done in the long, long time and looking forward to presenting something soon," and then "Yeah, the adoption cycles and renewal cycles of different curriculum." The minutes attribute this to Assistant Superintendent Koski. Nobody in the room says his name, and with no roll call there is no independent check. This page reports the minutes' attribution and does not adopt it. | HIGH |
| 1:30:41 | The board's statement of support for career and technical education, read into the record | Sprague: "I was tasked that the retreat to come up with a letter of support for our CTE programing, and, we can deny collaborated on this. And just to show you how awesome we are. It's already done." He then reads it in full. The whereas clauses: "the Claremont School Board believes that career and technical education is an essential component of its Stevens High School education. Whereas CTE students learn skills that are essential to the Claremont workforce, whereas CTE students acquire industry credential credentials and certification certifications that make graduates more employable. Whereas CTE students earn college credits through dual enrollment and articulation agreements." Then: "Whereas CTE students graduated a higher rate than their peers not enrolled in the CTE programs. CTE students see the relevance of their learning experience and therefore are more engaged in their learning. Whereas the Claremont business community fully supports a robust CTE program at Stevens High School, and indeed depends on a skilled workforce for continued business growth." And the operative clause: "Therefore, the Claremont School Board gives its full support to the continued growth of the River Valley Technical Center and wholeheartedly endorses the formal data driven process to evaluate existing offerings and to add new programs as recommended, that fit the needs of Claremont students in the community." The chair worries it commits the board financially — "if the report comes out that they recommend we put in six new programs saying that we are saying right here that we are going to support whatever the recommendations are. If our budget doesn't support" — and Sprague answers with the text: "as new programs as recommended that fit the needs of Claremont students in the community." Hawkins adds that support "can be incremental." we can deny collaborated is the transcript; Sprague thanks "Candy, for your help on that one" a minute later, and the retreat minutes name only him as author. | |
| 1:33:49 | Both of the absent member's subcommittees go unreported | "Unfortunately, Jennifer Gallagher is unable to attend this evening. So unless there's any updates from Mr. Nestor." — "Not at this time." Gallagher chaired both the Curriculum Committee and the Ad Hoc Disruptive Behaviors Committee; neither reported. The ad hoc committee had met the day of the October 4 meeting and, per those minutes, had asked the board what it wanted the committee to accomplish — a question that went unanswered for another cycle. | HIGH |
| 1:34:13 | The NHSBA Delegate Assembly, reported back | "I went down to Concord Saturday to the school board Association delegate meeting… the river was the school board of the year" — Oyster River — "they had some great ideas on goal goal setting and how that works with with moving the district forward." On the resolutions: "All of the articles that we the, the, the, the body went the same way as we did on all but one. And that was the sustainability resolution from Manchester. Very close vote. However, it was it was 20, I believe it was 22 for four abstentions and 25 against." He also reports contacting Gallagher mid-session about a resolution on unruly students and parents, and a possible joint resolution for the following year on reinstating CHINS petitions, which the association had not supported "because of it just wasn't very specific." The October 4 minutes record the board's positions on twelve of those resolutions, with the chair the lone dissenter on two. | |
| 1:37:38 | Goshen, December 18, and a warning that a quorum might be needed | The chair seeks a volunteer to attend the Goshen School District meeting on December 18 about the tuition agreement. The superintendent then adds something that matters under the Right-to-Know Law: "I just heard back from doctor actually during this meeting and I want to follow up because, she intimated that it might we might need a quorum of, of the, which I didn't think was the case. I'll follow up." Context: "in our tuition agreement with Goshen, we agreed that are both are both districts. Both Claremont and Unity. Are involved in that agreement." On the substance: "Their agreement is up soon. So it was a three year agreement… I recommend strongly to do we have 3 or 4 kids. Doesn't break the bank. We can't turn any tuition away. Goshen only they have 85 kids in the town and they don't have any schools." The item was carried to the November 1 agenda. | MEDIUM |
| 1:39:48 | Advance questions for a "very dense meeting" | "I just want to send a reminder out to the board that we do have a very dense meeting next week. And so if folks could compile your questions and have as many robust questions that you can submitted to Chelsea with a CC to Mike. So it gets forwarded to the presenters so they can hopefully answer the questions that we have in their presentation so we can move through the agenda." Corrected from the floor — the next meeting is a fortnight off, not a week — she adds at 1:40:30: "We received a lot of information in our emails that is pretty robust and well ahead of schedule, so you can review them and actually ask questions related to their presentations. So if there's things that you feel that you would like clarified in their presentations, this will give them time to make those adjustments." This is the practice that produced the packet's own CMS Board Questions document. | POSITIVE |
| 1:40:54 | Two empty seats: the student representative and the district clerk | "I'm also spoke to Chris Pratt about the student representative. He is still searching for a volunteer. It's not a highly desirable position. And so I just kind of threw out to him that perhaps, a whoever facilitates the student government may reach out to the board or, or may like to reach out to us and come up with a more compelling role for that individual… maybe we can expand it a little bit instead of them just being somebody who kind of rattles off what's going off in school." Then Hawkins raises the other vacancy at 1:41:43: "the question about the, the clerk position for." It is deferred to the next agenda. The district clerk's seat had been vacant all year — no candidate filed in March 2023 — which is why an administrator, not an elected clerk, calls the roll at Claremont board meetings in this era, and why no roll call happened when none was called for. | HIGH |
| 1:42:31 | Adjournment, by absence of objection | "To paraphrase of this, what do we need to do to get out of this meeting?" — then, at 1:42:45, "If if there's no objections to adjourn being done, we're adjourned." Neither the recording nor the minutes gives a clock time for adjournment. The transcript's last row ends at 1:42:53. | MEDIUM |
Items flagged for review
These are a reviewer's aid, not findings of law and not legal advice. Each card names the rule it rests on and links to the primary source, and each provision is stated as it stood on October 18, 2023 — see the vintage note in the method footer. Where the record contains an explanation or a mitigation, the card says so. A page with no HIGH item is a normal outcome; this meeting has two.
HIGH The approved minutes account for only five of the board's seven members, and one of the two they omit spoke eight times and gave a subcommittee report the same minutes record
The agenda's item II provides for a "Secretary Roll Call of Attendance of Board Members". No roll call was taken. The chair opened with "Looks like we're fortunate enough to have a quorum this evening" (0:00:41) and moved straight to the consent agenda. The approved minutes nevertheless print an attendance list: "Present: Heather Whitney, Frank Sprague, Candace Crawford, Arlene Hawkins Absent: Jennifer Gallagher." That is four present and one absent out of a seven-member board. Whitney Skillen and Bonnie Miles appear in neither column.
For Skillen the omission is demonstrably wrong. She speaks at 0:16:07, 0:19:17, 0:52:15, 1:03:41, 1:09:47, 1:25:52, 1:28:02 and 1:42:14; the chair queues and recognises her by name twice; and the minutes themselves, four pages after omitting her, record her Policy subcommittee report under the heading "c) Policy Sub-Committee Subcommittee Chair Whitney Skillen." A document cannot both leave a member off the attendance roll and minute her report. For Bonnie Miles the record is simply blank — she is not listed either way, and the words Bonnie and Miles occur nowhere in the 647 rows of the dialogue file. This page therefore takes no position on whether she attended, and neither should a reader.
RSA 91-A:2, II requires that minutes "include the names of members, persons appearing before the public bodies, a brief description of the subject matter discussed and final decisions" — the names of members is the first thing on the list, and it is the item a citizen most often needs, because it determines who was in the room for a vote. The consequence here is not academic: the board took three recorded votes, and the public record does not establish how many members were present for any of them. The same board's minutes two weeks earlier, on October 4, name six members present and one absent — all seven accounted for — which shows both that the district knows how to do this and that the omission was particular to this night.
A second consequence follows. Because there was no roll and no complete attendance list, the minutes' attribution of the curriculum report at 1:29:44 to "Assistant Superintendent Koski speaks about a 3 year plan that they are working on" cannot be checked against anything. Nobody in the room says his name at that point. The minutes may well be right; this page reports the attribution and does not adopt it.
Why HIGH, and what mitigates. This is the unmitigated limb: a binding statutory requirement, a document that exists and is wrong on its face, and no explanation anywhere on the record. What tells the other way is that the minutes are otherwise unusually careful — every motion carries its mover and its seconder, which RSA 91-A:2, II has required since January 1, 2019, and they name the person who produced them, which the law did not require until August 22, 2025.
Sources: RSA 91-A:2, II (minutes to include the names of members; mover-and-seconder clause added 2018, 244:1, eff. January 1, 2019; start-time, end-time and minutes-producer requirements added 2025, 112:1, eff. August 22, 2025 and not applied here); 16. CSB Meeting Minutes 10.18.23; draft CSB Meeting Minutes 10.4.23; CSB Agenda 10.18.23, item II.
HIGH The fiscal 2022 audit had not been started sixteen months after year end, the federal single-audit filing deadline for that year had passed, and the annual financial report due September 1 was still waiting on this night's vote
Asked how many audits were outstanding, the business administrator answered: "Right now 21 is done" (1:15:11). Asked again a minute later she was blunter: "We're working. We just got started on 22" (1:16:09). Fiscal 2022 ended on June 30, 2022. On the federal side she named the filing herself — "He's telling me we're going to hit to be in time to have everything filed with our for our audits, with the state in that or the federal clearinghouse. But I, I don't know" (1:15:34) — and would not predict fiscal 2023 before "not this year. I met next year."
The federal deadline. A non-federal entity that expends $750,000 or more in federal awards in a fiscal year beginning before October 1, 2024 must have a single audit, and must submit the reporting package to the Federal Audit Clearinghouse within the earlier of 30 days after receiving the auditor's report or nine months after the end of the audit period. For a year ended June 30, 2022 that is March 31, 2023 — nearly seven months before this meeting, and before the audit had begun. That the district is over the threshold is not in doubt on this record: the superintendent describes "$13 million of extra federal grant money in the budget" (0:17:09), and the administrator identifies unreconciled grants as the specific obstacle: "My biggest thing for that right now is reconciling grants… there's a lot in those grants right now" (1:16:14).
The state deadline. RSA 198:4-d requires each school district to file its annual financial report with the commissioner of education by September 1 — the 2021 codification, the text in force on this date, reads "This report shall be submitted on or before September 1 of each year" and its source note ends 2021, 44:5, eff. May 17, 2021; the New Hampshire Department of Education names the form — the DOE-25 — and repeats the September 1 date and the citation on its own reporting-requirements page. On October 18 that report was not filed, and the reason given was this meeting: "in order for me to complete the dough 25, I have to know how much you want to retain, if anything, out of the fund balance" (1:07:26). The board's vote at 1:17:38 is what unblocked it, forty-seven days late. dough 25 is the transcript's rendering of DOE-25.
What mitigates. A good deal, and it belongs on the record. The administrator had been in post about fifteen weeks. She reported weekly Thursday meetings with the auditor and his team, information sent electronically, and audit staff to be sent on site "a couple days a week here and there" (1:17:12). She had already found and corrected misposted items in fiscal 2023 (1:12:53). And she volunteered the whole picture in open session rather than waiting to be asked twice — Sprague's "I just want people to hear that" is the point of the exchange. State law is also gentler than the federal rule here: RSA 21-J:19 says a municipal audit may be conducted within one year, so the state limb of this is a control weakness rather than a missed statutory deadline. The federal limb and the September 1 report deadline are not discretionary.
Later reporting, not applied to this meeting. The backlog described here did not close quickly: the Valley News reported in January 2026 on the audit findings that eventually emerged, and legislation to withhold state funding from districts that file late was still being pushed in the 2026 session. Neither bears on what the law required in October 2023, and neither is used above.
Sources: 2 CFR 200.501 (single audit required at $750,000 in 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 the end of the audit period — this deadline is unchanged from the version that governed fiscal 2022; the 2024 revisions to the Uniform Guidance raised the audit threshold, not the filing date); 2 CFR 200.303 (effective internal control over federal awards); RSA 198:4-d (annual financial report to the commissioner of education by September 1) — 2021 codification, the text in force on this date (source note ends 2021, 44:5, eff. May 17, 2021; the section was next amended in 2025); NHDOE, Financial Reporting Requirements (DOE-25 due "by September 1 of each year", citing "RSA 198:4-d and RSA 194-B:10"); RSA 21-J:19 (municipal audits — permissive as to timing); Valley News, January 2, 2026, "Financial audits reveal Claremont schools' long-term struggles" (later reporting); New Hampshire Bulletin, April 22, 2026 (2026 legislation on late audits — post-dates this meeting).
MEDIUM A $30,000-a-year municipal licence was approved seven weeks after its term began and after its first annual payment was due, and the entity named in the contract is not the body that voted on it
The packet document is a licence agreement between the City of Claremont and "New Hampshire School Administrative Unit #6, a duly registered non-profit corporation", covering Monadnock, Barnes and Veteran's Parks, the Monadnock and Moody Park tennis courts and the Claremont Savings Bank Community Center pool, for named Stevens High School and Claremont Middle School teams. Its commercial terms are plain: an initial annual fee of $30,000, escalating each October 1 by the Northeast CPI-U with a 2% floor and a 6% ceiling. Three dates matter. Term: "This license shall commence on September 1, 2023 and shall continue until August 31, 2025." Payment: the fee is due "on or by October 1st of every year that this license is in effect". Vote: October 18, 2023. The agreement's own text says the first payment had already gone out, describing the initial annual fee as one "that the School District has already provided to the City". Mary Henry's history is consistent with that: "The actual for last year was 30,000 we spent to the city, and the prior year was 14,275" (1:24:35), against a budget line carrying "only 5000 in it".
This appears to be the first public disposition of this licence. A six-year version of the same document — identical venues, identical fee, identical escalator, term running to August 31, 2029 — was Exhibit H of the September 6, 2023 packet, assigned to the superintendent for "introduction". That meeting's recording is truncated before the item and no minutes of it exist in any district share. The October 4 minutes record only that the superintendent "discusses meeting with the City Manager to discuss the MOU between the Claremont School District and the City of Claremont". So the vote taken here at 1:27:34 is the first board authorisation of this arrangement that appears anywhere in the public record — after the term had run for forty-seven days and the payment date had passed.
The party mismatch. The licensee throughout the document is SAU #6, which the drafting then defines as "School District"; the signature block recites that the superintendent signs "Duly authorized by majority vote of the: N.H. School Administrative Unit #6". But the vote actually taken was the Claremont School Board's, and the motion the chair assembled at 1:26:49 named a different party again: "License agreement made between the city of Claremont, New Hampshire, and" — "Claremont School District." The minutes adopt that reading too. These are not interchangeable. A school administrative unit is a creature of RSA chapter 194-C whose costs are apportioned among its member districts; the municipal budget law names towns, districts, school districts and village districts and does not name school administrative units; and it is the Claremont School District, not SAU 6, that holds an annual meeting, raises money and fields the teams the licence covers. Termination clause (c) makes the mismatch operative — it voids the agreement if "the School District's Annual Meeting refuses to appropriate the necessary funds", and an SAU has no annual meeting.
What mitigates. The board did take a public, recorded, unanimous vote with the document in the posted packet; two members read the contract at the table and questioned it (1:25:11); the superintendent's value argument went unrebutted and is plausible on its face; and, as flag 13 records, the term was cut from six years to two before it reached the board. Nothing on this record suggests the money was improperly spent — only that the authorisation followed the obligation instead of preceding it, and that the paperwork names the wrong body. This page does not assert that no earlier authorising vote exists; the 2023 meetings before September were not searched exhaustively for one, and the September 6 meeting has no minutes at all.
Sources: SAU License for Athletic Fields (SMT Revisions August 22 2023) 2yr.doc.pdf; Exhibit H- SAU License for Athletic Fields .pdf (the six-year version, 9.6.23 packet) the trailing space in that file name is the district's; RSA 197:23-a (the district treasurer has custody of district money and "shall pay out the same only upon orders of the school board"); RSA 32:8 (no school board shall "pay or agree to pay any money, or incur any liability involving the expenditure of any money, for any purpose in excess of the amount appropriated by the legislative body for that purpose, or for any purpose for which no appropriation has been made, except as provided in RSA 32:9-11"); RSA 32:1 (municipal budget law applies to towns, districts, school districts and village districts — school administrative units are not named); RSA 194-C:9 (SAU budget apportioned among member districts; an SAU has no annual meeting of its own).
MEDIUM A quorum of the board met for two and a half hours on October 11 and set board policy direction; no posted notice has been located, and the minutes were not with the packet a week later
The board's self-evaluation retreat was held on Wednesday, October 11, 2023, 5:00 to 7:30 p.m. Its minutes, which surface in the following meeting's packet, record the attendance: NHSBA staff attorney Barrett Christina and five of the seven board members — "H. Whitney, W. Skillen, A. Hawkins, F. Sprague, J. Gallagher (arrived at 5:30pm)". Five of seven is a quorum, and the session was not ceremonial. It reviewed roles and responsibilities, ran two evaluation instruments, identified four "Self-Evaluation Outliers", set deadlines ("Develop process by March 1st 2024"; "Board members bios and photos on website by January 10th 2024"), reviewed progress against the board's goals, and recorded a task assignment — "Draft and publish supporting statement for SRVTC: In progress, authored by F. Sprague". That statement came back to the October 18 public meeting and was adopted by motion at 1:30:41. Sprague says so himself: "I was tasked that the retreat to come up with a letter of support for our CTE programing."
Under RSA 91-A:2, I a "meeting" is the convening of a quorum of a public body to discuss or act upon a matter over which it has supervision, control, jurisdiction or advisory power; a board self-evaluation and a review of board goals is such a matter. RSA 91-A:2, II then requires notice of the time and place, posted in two appropriate public places or published, at least 24 hours in advance excluding Sundays and legal holidays, and requires the minutes to be publicly available within five business days.
What the record shows, in both directions. The retreat was announced on the record at a public meeting a week beforehand: the October 4 minutes list under Future Dates "a) Claremont School Board Retreat- 10.11.23 Teal Lantern @SRVRTC", giving the date and the room. Minutes of the retreat do exist, are signed, and record start and end times — neither of which the law then required. On the other side: no posted or published notice has been located, and on the fifth business day after the retreat the chair told the meeting the minutes were missing from the packet — "there were minutes in the packet are supposed to be in the packet for our retreat. I don't see them, so we'll revisit them at a different time" (0:00:41). The first public copy this project can find is in the November 1 packet, three weeks after the retreat. The search for a notice is not exhaustive — it covered both packet folders and a title search of the district's Drive shares, and that title search did not surface even the retreat minutes themselves, so the absence is reported as not-located rather than as established.
Why MEDIUM. This is the mitigated limb: the meeting was announced at a public meeting and appears in that meeting's approved minutes, and minutes of it were produced and published. What is missing is statutory notice and timely availability, not the record itself. This is not an isolated instance: the board's previous retreat, on May 16, 2023, was attended by six of seven members and no notice for it has been located either. And the same question arose forward at this meeting — Tempesta reported that Goshen "intimated that it might we might need a quorum" of the board at that district's December 18 meeting on the tuition agreement (1:38:04). If a quorum of the Claremont board attends, that gathering is a meeting of the Claremont board and needs its own notice and minutes, wherever it is held. He said he would clarify and report back.
Sources: RSA 91-A:2, I and II (definition of a meeting; 24-hour notice posted in 2 appropriate places; minutes available within 5 business days); RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d) (a school district board, "or any committee, subcommittee, or subordinate body thereof, or advisory committee thereto", is a public body); Claremont School Board Self-Evaluation Retreat Meeting minutes 10.11.23 (in the 11.1.23 packet); draft CSB Meeting Minutes 10.4.23 (Future Dates: the retreat's date and venue).
MEDIUM Three dispositions — including two the board's own agenda marks "(vote required)" — were taken by absence of objection, and the minutes then record one of them as a motion that passed
Unanimous consent is an ordinary parliamentary device and nothing in the Right-to-Know Law forbids it. The difficulty here is the mismatch between what the agenda called for, what happened, and what the minutes say happened.
The consent agenda is headed "Consent Agenda (vote required)" and covers final approval of the agenda and approval of the October 4 minutes. The chair took neither to a vote: "Is there any objections to having all of our items, on the agenda as written? If no objections, we'll consider that consent. And if there's no objections to the minutes as written, we'll consider that consent. Seeing no objections, we'll move forward to citizens comments" (0:01:06). The minutes match the recording — "No objections from any present school board members. All consent agenda items pass" — so the defect is the departure from the agenda, not a misdescription.
The donation is different. Sprague moved it, a second is audible, and then the chair asked only for opposition: "Is there anyone that would like to oppose accepting this donation? Seeing no opposition. The board accepts the donation of $6,000 from the Schwab Charitable Fund" (0:02:24). No affirmative vote was taken. The minutes record it as "Frank Sprague makes a motion to accept the Schwab Charitable Fund donation in the amount of $6000.00; seconded by Candace Crawford; no further discussion; Motion passes." A reader of the minutes alone would understand that a vote was held. The mover and seconder are right — the seconder's voice is not identifiable on the recording, and the minutes supply the name, which is exactly what minutes are for.
Adjournment went the same way: "If if there's no objections to adjourn being done, we're adjourned" (1:42:45), with no time recorded in either source.
What tells the other way. Every item the agenda marked "(Discussion/Vote)" was voted: the fund-balance retention, the athletic-fields licence and the tech-centre support letter each drew a motion, a named seconder and a voice vote, and the minutes record all three with names. On the letter the chair even proposed to skip the vote — "I think we have we have consensus. We have consensus. We don't need a vote if everybody is okay" — and then took one anyway (1:30:33). RSA 91-A:2, II requires the minutes to record final decisions and the names of movers and seconders; it does not require a tally, and none is recorded for any of the three.
Sources: RSA 91-A:2, II (minutes to record a brief description of the subject matter discussed and final decisions, including the names of the members who made or seconded each motion); CSB Agenda 10.18.23; 16. CSB Meeting Minutes 10.18.23.
OBSERVATION The public comment period was opened and closed in twenty-seven seconds
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." At this meeting the chair opened it at 0:01:06 and closed it at 0:01:33. The separately noticed public hearing on the donation, which immediately followed, drew nobody either.
This is an observation and not a finding, for a reason that matters. The statute's text does not settle whether the 30 minutes is a floor on the opportunity or on elapsed time, and on this recording nobody was in the audience wanting to speak and nobody was turned away. The minutes say "Citizens Comments- None." A reviewer tracking this question across the corpus should note the shape of the practice — invitation, pause, "Seeing none", close — rather than treat any single instance as a violation. Worth noting alongside it: the board's public-comment policy BEDH had its second reading scheduled for the September 6, 2023 meeting, whose recording cuts off before the item and for which no minutes exist, so the policy's adoption date is not established anywhere in the public record.
Sources: RSA 189:74 (school board public comment period, no less than 30 minutes; 2022, 333:1, eff. September 6, 2022); Claremont School Board — September 6, 2023 (policy BEDH second reading; no minutes).
OBSERVATION The superintendent's goals were amended by conversation and never adopted, and the board doing the amending is not the board that evaluates him
The packet's goals document sets out three superintendent goals. Two board members asked for changes and got agreement: Hawkins asked that Goal 1 commit to "Measuring growth in student achievement and professional instructional practices in all the schools" and that Goal 2 add assistance to the board's own budget process; Skillen asked what Goal 2 would deliver and on what timeline. Tempesta accepted — "I can definitely amend the goal" (0:14:13). Nothing was moved, seconded or voted, and no amended text appears in the minutes or anywhere else in the public record. The minutes summarise the item as "Discussion on some of the district wide goals for 2023-2024 school year." A goal amended only in conversation cannot later be measured against.
There is a governance wrinkle worth flagging for a reviewer rather than resolving here. The superintendent of SAU 6 serves the school administrative unit, whose board — a joint body of Claremont and Unity members — organises annually, fixes the salaries of all SAU personnel and apportions the expense among the member districts under RSA 194-C:5, I. That SAU board had, on August 17, 2023, seated a superintendent-evaluation subcommittee and engaged an outside facilitator. Three of the people in this room sit on both bodies: Arlene Hawkins chaired the SAU 6 board from July 13, 2023, and Frank Sprague and Whitney Skillen sat on its evaluation subcommittee. Nothing here is irregular on its face — a member district's board plainly may discuss the superintendent's district-wide goals — but a reader tracking who sets and who judges those goals should know the two bodies are distinct and that this discussion happened in the district's forum, not the SAU's.
Sources: RSA 194-C:5, I (the SAU board meets between April 1 and June 1, organises by choosing a chairperson, secretary and treasurer, fixes the salaries of all school administrative unit personnel and apportions the expense among the districts); CSB Supt Report 10.18.23 GOALS; SAU 6 Board — August 17, 2023 (superintendent-evaluation subcommittee).
OBSERVATION The fund-balance retention was described to the board in terms the statute does not quite use, and the computation is not in the record
The board voted to retain up to $424,000 of year-end unassigned general funds. RSA 198:4-b, II is the authority: a district may vote to retain year-end unassigned general funds in an amount not exceeding, in the aggregate, 5 percent of the current fiscal year's net assessment under RSA 198:5, and before spending any of it the school board must hold a public hearing with at least seven days' notice published in a newspaper of general circulation, with an annual accounting in the district report. That text has stood since 2020, 38:25 (eff. September 27, 2020), so the current statute is the right one for this meeting.
Two things a reviewer should check against the district's own working papers, neither of which is in the packet. First, the base year. The administrator described the 2.5% as "a 2.5% of the amount of money you had to raise in fiscal year 22. So they use the back years number to calculate what that 2.5% would be" (1:09:55). The statute says current fiscal year. Which year's net assessment produced $424,000 is not stated, and no schedule accompanies the memo she describes. Second, the 2.5% figure itself. Her account — "Yours is only 2.5%, even though the RSA allows up to five. You would have to vote to change your to do that" and "you have to actually put another Warren article on to increase it to the 5%" — is consistent with a district authorisation set before the statutory ceiling rose to 5 percent and never revisited. That authorising warrant article is not in this packet either.
Her answer to Hawkins was right on the law: spending the retained money would require a public hearing and a board vote, and she correctly tied it to a deficit situation. And her stated reason for retaining the maximum — that the incomplete audits might reveal a shortfall she would otherwise have to fund by a deficit warrant article — is a coherent one that she gave in open session under direct questioning. It also links this item to flag 2: the board is being asked to hold money back because nobody yet knows what the books say.
Sources: RSA 198:4-b (contingency fund; retention of year-end unassigned general funds up to 5 percent of the current fiscal year's net assessment under RSA 198:5, public hearing with 7 days' published notice before expenditure, annual accounting in the district report; source note ends 2020, 38:25, eff. September 27, 2020); RSA 198:5 (net assessment); RSA 198:4-d (annual financial report by September 1).
OBSERVATION The restorative-practices catalogue in the packet routes middle-school discipline through the school resource officer, including for a category with no statutory reporting trigger — and the board never discussed it
Appendix B of the middle school's written answers is the CMS Catalog of Restorative Practices 23/24, updated August 12, 2023 — a menu of practices "that have been developed and may be assigned to our students by the Dean". Most of it is unremarkable and thoughtfully built: reflective questions, restorative contracts, apologies, parent interviews, restorative circles, and a "From bullying to Upstander" sequence. The document itself says these practices "will be primarily used in relation to minor and major incidents that result in administrative consequences such as detention, ISS, and/or OSS."
What a reviewer should notice is where a police officer appears in that menu. An "SRO Interview" or a "Reflective Conversation With the SRO" is listed as an assignable practice under Assault, Disorderly Conduct to Orderly, Threatening to Reliable, Vandalism/Theft/Destruction of Property to Respectful of Property — and under Unhealthy Choices to Healthy Choices, alongside an "Interview with Healthcare Professional". For the first four, law enforcement involvement is not discretionary in the first place: RSA 193-D:4 requires any school employee who witnesses or learns from the victim of an act of theft, destruction or violence in a safe school zone to report it in writing immediately to a supervisor, who forwards it to the principal, who files it with local law enforcement — telephone notice immediately and written confirmation within 48 hours — and requires a memorandum of understanding with local law enforcement. The categories where the statute does not reach are the ones where an SRO interview functions purely as a school-assigned consequence.
The second observation is procedural: the board never discussed this document. It reached them as an appendix; the middle-school presentation covered the deans, the student support centres, the cell-phone ladder and the barriers list, and the catalogue itself is not mentioned on the recording. The minutes do not list it. No conclusion follows from that on its own — a board cannot debate every appendix — but a district building a formal, written discipline pathway that includes a police interview is making a policy choice, and this is the meeting at which it was placed before the elected body.
Sources: RSA 193-D:4 (reporting of acts of theft, destruction or violence in a safe school zone; immediate written report to a supervisor, filing with local law enforcement, telephone notice with written confirmation within 48 hours, notification of the person responsible for a student victim's welfare, memoranda of understanding with law enforcement); Copy of CMS Catalog of Restorative Practices 23_24 (1).pdf; CMS Board Questions.docx.pdf.
OBSERVATION The packet republishes a seventeen-month-old evaluation reporting that the district's own preschool attenders scored lower than non-attenders — and the item was not on this agenda
The ninth document in this packet is headed "Early Childhood Education Cohort Analysis Claremont School Board Presentation 5.4.22". It is a district-authored cohort study of Spring i-Ready results for four kindergarten cohorts and two longitudinal pre-kindergarten cohorts, and its own summary line is unsparing: "Overall students that attended CSD Early Childhood performed poorer on standardized tests than their non attending counterparts." The document offers its own cautions — a quasi-experimental design; 47.5% of early-childhood pupils qualifying for free or reduced price meals against 34.8% district-wide; COVID and remote learning for three- and four-year-olds; children discharged from Early Supports and Services before entering; and the observation that "the program was in fact conceived to target the population of children that need intervention the most." Its own action list includes an "Independent evaluation of CSD early childhood program by outside agency" and full-day provision for four-year-olds.
Nothing on the October 18 agenda takes it up, and nobody mentions it on the recording. It was queued for the following meeting — the agenda's future items list "Preschool Program/SEL Goals (B. Nester) 11.1.23" — after Frank Sprague raised a model pre-kindergarten programme at the October 4 meeting. Two points for a reviewer. First, a document circulated to a public body becomes part of that body's record whether or not it is discussed, and this one is the district's own negative finding about one of its own programmes. Second, the copy in this packet is the May 2022 presentation, unchanged; whether the pattern held for the 2022-23 and 2023-24 cohorts is not addressed anywhere in this packet.
On student privacy: this document reports aggregate counts and percentages only — 38 special-education children in the early-childhood programme, seven full-time paraprofessionals, four children requiring one-to-one support — and names no child, no grade and no identifying detail. This page reproduces no more than the district's own published aggregates.
Sources: Early Childhood.pdf (24. CSB 10.18.23 packet); draft CSB Meeting Minutes 10.4.23 (pre-kindergarten update requested for the first meeting in November); CSB Agenda 10.18.23 (Future Agenda Items).
OBSERVATION The minutes approved on consent record a set of nonpublic minutes sealed for twenty years, two weeks after the statute governing such seals changed
The consent agenda approved the October 4, 2023 draft minutes without discussion. Those minutes record a nonpublic session entered under RSA 91-A:3, II(k) — the student-or-pupil tuition contract exemption, quoted in full in the minutes themselves — and then: "Jennifer Gallagher makes a motion to seal the meeting minutes for 20 years; seconded by Heather Whitney; roll call vote; All present members voting Yes to seal the meeting minutes." The roll-call votes to enter and leave nonpublic session are properly recorded, and the movers and seconders are named throughout, which is more than many minutes in this corpus manage.
Two things follow, neither of which is a violation and both of which a reviewer should carry forward. First, RSA 91-A:3, IV came into force on October 3, 2023 — the day before that meeting. It requires a public body either to adopt a procedure for reviewing sealed nonpublic minutes or to review them and vote by majority whether the sealing circumstances still apply, and it provides that such a review "shall occur no more than 10 years from the last time the public body voted to prevent the minutes from being subject to public disclosure." A twenty-year seal voted on October 4, 2023 therefore carries a review obligation at ten years regardless of its stated term. Second, RSA 91-A:3, II(k) carries its own publication duty: a contract negotiated by a school board "shall be made public prior to its consideration for approval by a school district, together with minutes of all meetings held in nonpublic session", and approval "shall occur only at a meeting open to the public". The tuition agreements those sessions concern — Goshen, Unity, Cornish — were live business at this meeting and were carried to the November 1 agenda.
Sources: RSA 91-A:3, II(k) (student or pupil tuition contract exemption, with its own publication duty) and RSA 91-A:3, IV (review of sealed nonpublic minutes; added 2023, 189:1, eff. October 3, 2023); draft CSB Meeting Minutes 10.4.23.
POSITIVE The board held a noticed public hearing on a $6,000 donation that the statute, as amended three months earlier, no longer requires one for
RSA 198:20-b governs a school board's acceptance of unanticipated money from a private source under a standing authorisation from the district. Since 2023, 38:1, effective July 18, 2023, the section provides that "For unanticipated funds in the amount of $20,000 or more, the school board shall hold a prior public hearing on the action to be taken," with at least seven days' newspaper notice; for smaller amounts the board need only post the item on the meeting agenda and record it in the minutes. Before that amendment the threshold was $5,000 — so a $6,000 gift would have required a hearing had it arrived four months earlier.
This board did both. The donation appeared on the posted agenda as its own numbered item with a scheduled time, a separate public hearing was opened and closed on the record at 0:01:33, and the acceptance is recorded in the minutes with mover and seconder. Nobody came to speak, and the hearing cost the meeting thirty-one seconds. That is the right way for a practice to survive a statutory change: the board carried on doing what it had always done rather than quietly taking the new latitude.
Two items for completeness. The packet's Exhibit A is the grantor's letter and the cheque itself — $6,000, dated 09/19/2023, payable to the Claremont School District — so the board acted on the gift about four weeks after it arrived and well inside the fiscal year, as RSA 198:20-b requires. And the standing warrant article that RSA 198:20-b, I requires a district to have adopted before its board may use this procedure at all is not in this packet; this page does not assume it exists, only notes that neither the agenda nor the minutes cites it.
Sources: RSA 198:20-b (appropriation for unanticipated funds; prior public hearing required at $20,000 or more with 7 days' published notice, agenda-and-minutes posting below that; source note ends 2023, 38:1, eff. July 18, 2023 — the pre-amendment threshold was $5,000); Exhibit A- Schwab Charitable Donation.pdf; CSB Agenda 10.18.23, items III and IV.
POSITIVE A six-year municipal commitment was renegotiated down to two, and the version the board adopted keeps a non-appropriation escape
The athletic-fields licence that reached the September 6 board ran to August 31, 2029. The one adopted here runs to August 31, 2025. The superintendent describes negotiating the change with the city manager and gives the reason: "We just had a we didn't know where we were going to go in the future" (1:22:47), recommending the board "go with a two year term and not get mired up in the the CPI changes and all the other stuff" and then "look soon to to re-up it if we're comfortable with it." Cutting a forward commitment from six annual appropriations to two, on a contract with a compounding escalator, is a substantive improvement in the district's position and it happened because someone asked for it.
The clause that matters most survived the redraft. Termination provision (c) reads: "In the event that the School District's Annual Meeting refuses to appropriate the necessary funds for the applicable license fee, this Agreement shall be considered null and void." That is the safeguard a multi-year municipal contract needs, because RSA 32:8 forbids a school board to agree to pay money in excess of what the legislative body has appropriated, and only the district meeting can appropriate. The board also got the arithmetic checked in open session: the 6% ceiling is "1800 a year additional" on a $30,000 fee, which is correct.
And the board voted. Whatever the defects catalogued at flag 3, an arrangement that had been running unwritten for years — "we never paid a, a field fee. From what I could see" — is now a signed instrument with a term, a price, an escalator, an insurance clause, an indemnity and a termination provision, adopted by a recorded unanimous vote at a public meeting with the document in the posted packet.
Sources: SAU License for Athletic Fields (SMT Revisions August 22 2023) 2yr.doc.pdf, term and clause 4(c); Exhibit H- SAU License for Athletic Fields .pdf (six-year version); RSA 32:8 (limitation on expenditures).
POSITIVE Board questions were sent in advance, answered in writing, and published in the packet before the meeting
Four questions from board members reached the middle-school principal before this meeting and came back answered in a document published with the packet: "School Board Questions and Responses October 18,2023". The answers are specific in a way the spoken presentation is not — the full series of cell-phone violation counts to October 13, both student support centre usage totals (549 in eighth grade, 363 in sixth and seventh) and the 16.6-a-day average, a sixteen-item description of what a dean actually does, and the six-item barriers list the board then questioned him on. The public gets the underlying figures whether or not the presenter reaches them; the presenter gets to spend the meeting on the parts the board wants to probe.
The practice is deliberate and the chair extended it on the record for the next meeting: "if folks could compile your questions and have as many robust questions that you can submitted to Chelsea with a CC to Mike. So it gets forwarded to the presenters so they can hopefully answer the questions that we have in their presentation so we can move through the agenda" (1:39:48). She also notes the presenters' material had arrived "well ahead of schedule" so members could frame questions from it. Nothing in the Right-to-Know Law requires any of this. It is the same practice that produced the two written question-and-answer documents in the September 6 packet, and it is the single most useful transparency habit visible in this district's 2023 record.
One qualification, so the credit is not overstated: an advance written exchange between individual members and an administrator is not itself a public meeting, and the answers become public only when the district chooses to publish them in the packet. The practice works because the district publishes them. It would stop working the moment it did not.
Sources: CMS Board Questions.docx.pdf; RSA 91-A:2-a (communications outside a meeting, including sequential communications, not to be used to circumvent the chapter); Claremont School Board — September 6, 2023 (the two earlier written question sets).
Appendix — source files
Official and public sources
- Remote video: Claremont School Board 10/18/23 (Cablecast show 15357) — coverage is complete from the call to order to the adjournment; the project's dialogue transcript ends at 1:42:53.
- Packet folder: 24. CSB 10.18.23 — 9 documents, listed below by their exact Drive names.
- Minutes: 16. CSB Meeting Minutes 10.18.23, in the district's 2023 Meeting Minutes folder. Approved minutes exist for this meeting; the defect described at flag 1 is in their content, not their absence.
- Not in this packet: minutes of the October 11, 2023 board self-evaluation retreat, which the chair expected to find here. They are in the following meeting's folder: Claremont School Board Self-Evaluation Retreat Meeting minutes 10.11.23 (1).pdf in 25. CSB 11.1.23. No posted or published notice of that retreat has been located — checked in both packet folders and by a title search of the district's Drive shares on "retreat", "10.11.23" and "Notice" (2026-08-29). That search is not exhaustive and did not itself surface the retreat minutes, so this is reported as not-located, not as established. See flag 4.
- Adjacent meetings on this project: Claremont School Board — September 6, 2023, where the six-year version of the athletic-fields licence was introduced, the recording is truncated and no minutes exist; and SAU 6 Board — August 17, 2023, which seated the superintendent-evaluation subcommittee referred to at flag 7. The meetings on either side of this one — Claremont School Board, October 4, 2023 (Cablecast show 15336) and Claremont School Board, November 1, 2023 (Cablecast show 15385) — now have their own pages on this project; their draft minutes are cited above from the Drive shares.
Packet documents
Names are reproduced exactly as they appear in the district's Drive folder, including the trailing space in "CSB Supt Report 10.18.23 GOALS .pdf", the underscore in 23_24, the doubled extension in "…2yr.doc.pdf" and the duplicate-file parentheticals. The oddities are the district's, not this page's.
- CSB Agenda 10.18.23 — gives the venue (Sugar River Valley Regional Technical Center), the 6:30 p.m. start, the board and central-office rosters, a "Student Board Member" heading with no name, and the item structure used in the agenda table above. It is the source for the subcommittee chairs, and it is the document that calls for a roll call that was not taken.
- CSB Supt Report 10.18.23 GOALS .pdf — three superintendent goals for 2023-2024; the nursing-shortage slides behind the River Valley Community College item, including the 292-posting breakdown across six hospitals, the accelerated-versus-traditional semester grid, a table of where graduates are employed by year, and projected registered-nurse seats rising from 80 in AY2021 to 156 in AY2025. Also the line "Tuition Agreements Pending for budget process: Claremont, Unity, Goshen!". See flag 7.
- CMS Board Questions.docx.pdf — "School Board Questions and Responses October 18,2023". Four questions with written answers: behaviour-support alignment between the middle and high schools; the cell-phone data to 10/13/23; the deans' roles and the student support centre usage figures; and the greatest barrier to improving academic outcomes. Appendix A is the CMS Restorative Practices and Reintegration Program; Appendix B is the catalogue below. See flags 9 and 14.
- Copy of CMS Catalog of Restorative Practices 23_24 (1).pdf — updated 08/12/2023; general and incident-specific restorative practices assignable by the deans, grouped under fourteen incident categories. Never discussed at this meeting. See flag 9.
- SAU License for Athletic Fields (SMT Revisions August 22 2023) 2yr.doc.pdf — the City of Claremont / SAU 6 licence adopted at this meeting: six named venues, a $30,000 initial annual fee due each October 1, a Northeast CPI-U escalator floored at 2% and capped at 6%, term September 1, 2023 to August 31, 2025, insurance and indemnity clauses, and a non-appropriation termination provision. Executed "on this ____day of October, 2023" with the day left blank. See flags 3 and 13.
- Exhibit A- Schwab Charitable Donation.pdf — the grantor's conditions letter (the grant may not satisfy a pre-existing pledge; if the grantee is a government entity the funds may be used solely for public purposes under IRC §170(c)(1); no tax receipt or thank-you note to the donor) and the cheque: $6,000, dated 09/19/2023, drawn on Bank of America for Schwab Charitable and payable to the Claremont School District. See flag 12.
- form.schoolboardselfevaluation (1).pdf — the instrument behind agenda item VI.4: a sixty-item, six-dimension board self-evaluation (Contextual, Educational, Interpersonal, Analytical, Political, Strategic), each item scored 0–10 for a 600-point total with a letter grade per dimension. Four of the retreat's "Self-Evaluation Outliers" map onto specific items in this form — I.3 "Board reviews district's mission statement", II.1 "Board assigns new members a mentor", III.8 "Board has adopted some explicit goals for itself, distinct from district goals" and III.9 "Board provides biographical information that helps members get to know one another better" — which is what turned into the mission-statement, mentoring, goals-clarity and website-biography follow-ups the chair reported at 1:19:14. The form is a generic instrument derived from the Trustee Demonstration Project and is not New Hampshire-specific: item I.7 refers to policies mandated by a "Department of Public Instruction", which is not a New Hampshire agency.
- Early Childhood.pdf — the May 4, 2022 early-childhood cohort analysis, republished here seventeen months later and not on this agenda. See flag 10.
- draft CSB Meeting Minutes 10.4.23.docx (2).pdf — approved on the consent agenda here. Six members present and one absent, all seven accounted for; a nonpublic session under RSA 91-A:3, II(k) with roll-call votes in and out and a twenty-year seal; the board's positions on twelve NHSBA resolutions, each with mover and seconder and two with the chair recorded in opposition; adoption of policy GBE on second read; the Capital Improvement subcommittee's report on the Stevens High School building tour; and, under Future Dates, the October 11 retreat and its venue. See flags 4 and 11.
Project files (relative links work when this page is opened from Output/HTML/)
Laws and rules cited on this page
- Right-to-Know: RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d) (a school district board "or any committee, subcommittee, or subordinate body thereof, or advisory committee thereto" is a public body); RSA 91-A:2 (I, definition of a meeting; II, 24-hour notice posted in two appropriate places, and minutes recording the names of members, persons appearing, subject matter, final decisions and the names of movers and seconders, available within five business days); RSA 91-A:2-a (deliberation only in properly held meetings; sequential communications not to circumvent the chapter); RSA 91-A:3 (II(k), student or pupil tuition contract exemption with its own publication duty; IV, review of sealed nonpublic minutes)
- Public comment: RSA 189:74 (school board public comment period, no less than 30 minutes; 2022, 333:1, eff. September 6, 2022)
- School money and reporting: RSA 198:4-b (retention of year-end unassigned general funds, cap 5 percent of the current fiscal year's net assessment, public hearing with 7 days' published notice before expenditure); RSA 198:5 (net assessment); RSA 198:4-d (annual financial report to the commissioner of education by September 1 — the DOE-25); RSA 198:20-b (unanticipated funds; prior public hearing at $20,000 or more); RSA 197:23-a (treasurer pays out district money only upon orders of the school board); RSA 32:8 (limitation on expenditures); RSA 32:1 (municipal budget law applies to towns, districts, school districts and village districts; school administrative units are not named); RSA 21-J:19 (municipal audits — permissive as to timing)
- School administrative units: RSA 194-C:5, I (SAU board organisation; salaries of SAU personnel; apportionment among districts); RSA 194-C:9 (SAU budget apportioned among member districts)
- School safety: RSA 193-D:4 (reporting acts of theft, destruction or violence in a safe school zone to law enforcement; memoranda of understanding with local law enforcement)
- Federal: 2 CFR 200.501 (single audit at $750,000 in 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 the end of the audit period); 2 CFR 200.303 (internal control over federal awards); 20 U.S.C. §1225(b) (GEPA/Tydings: federal education formula funds available for one additional fiscal year — the mechanism behind the ESSER sunset the superintendent describes)
- Agency guidance: NHDOE, iFinance and Financial Reporting Requirements (DOE-25 due "by September 1 of each year", citing "RSA 198:4-d and RSA 194-B:10")
- Reporting, cited as reporting and not as law: Valley News, January 2, 2026; New Hampshire Bulletin, April 22, 2026. Both post-date this meeting and neither is used to establish what the law required in October 2023.
- Expressly NOT applied, for vintage: the start-time, end-time and minutes-producer requirements added to RSA 91-A:2, II by 2025, 112:1, eff. August 22, 2025; the 80%-of-entitlement floor on catastrophic special-education aid added to RSA 186-C:18, III by 2025 N.H. HB 2 §137; the $1,000,000 single-audit threshold, which reaches only fiscal years beginning on or after October 1, 2024; and the $5,000 unanticipated-funds hearing threshold, which RSA 198:20-b carried only until July 18, 2023 and which is discussed at flag 12 precisely because it had just changed.