| 0:00:19 | The committee explains itself | Sprague: "This is a Claremont budget, our finance committee. We've changed our name. As, we, we see our, our role being a year long role, not just during the budget process, but anything in all things finance with the district. And, this is the process through which we go to, the mayor is the voters with what's being proposed." The clause after "we go to" is garbled and is left as the recognizer produced it. He then names the tension the committee works inside: "as board members walking that very fine line between supporting our programs and presenting a, a palatable tax rate to our voters." | POSITIVE |
| 0:01:34 | Tech centre: six programmes, supply increases only | Herzog: "I'm Alex Herzog. I'm the director of the River tech here in Claremont, in which we currently have six programs. And really, the only, we did small increases in supplies is what we've requested only for this year to start with, because of the increase in inflation and costs overall." He describes copper for plumbing projects that "really can't be reused" once assembled, and a tabletop audit done with the Southern Regional Education Board — the recognizer renders it sRGB — alongside "Andy LaFrance," the first-name-only chair of the tech centre's visioning committee whose surname this corpus renders three different ways and does not resolve. | |
| 0:05:39 | Three new positions — or not | Whitney: "So are you. So we have three new positions that are built into this budget, or you're looking to add." Herzog: "I'm not sure if they're built in. I know we requested that when we talked. Mary." Henry: "Yeah, I built in the health teacher part of the budget, but I didn't build in the other ones." Within four minutes of the first presentation the committee has established that neither the presenter nor the committee knew what was in the document in front of them. This pattern recurs all morning. | HIGH |
| 0:08:13 | A $51,801 guidance salary for a post that does not exist | Crawford: "Mary, just for clarification, at the bottom of page three. Yeah. There's a guidance salary number of 51,801, and it shows zero for this year. What would that have been for and why is it zeroed out for this year?" Herzog: "There was not one hired." Crawford: "Well, then why is 51,000 there?" Herzog: "I think they just left it in the budget." Henry: "It was left in the budget the previous year… but not filled." Whitney then supplies the answer nobody in the room had: "So, Mary, I think that that that position was moved to the middle school." Resolution took eight exchanges. | HIGH |
| 0:10:03 | Career counselor in, teacher-preparation programme out | Crawford: "I'm curious why. Health specialist is in when the teacher training is not, because that was proposed last year and there is a tremendous need for parents [paras] and substitutes in the district." Herzog: "I find them both equally necessary." Sprague adds the Running Start angle — that dual-credit health-science courses could be reached through River Valley "even if we did not have the person with the master's degree here to teach them, they could access them" The career counselor is put back into the budget by the end of the meeting; the teacher-preparation programme is not. | |
| 0:13:57 | Substitute line at zero | Crawford: "Just the obvious question. There's the very first line is celery [salary,] substitutes and it's 0000." Herzog: "We struggle with substitutes… A lot of times when a staff member calls in sick and we. And it doesn't happen very often, but they do call in sick and we cover our classes ourselves here." The two named substitutes — "Mr. Lambert" and "Mr. Gallagher" — share surnames with a former board member and a sitting one; nothing in this record connects them and this page does not. | |
| 0:14:43 | Whitney on buying education more cheaply through River Valley | Whitney: "Just so I can get a sense of how programs are built so that we can maximize the amount of educational opportunity and advancement with the least amount of dollars and being able to partner with River Valley and get those dual credit." She puts Running Start at "between 3 and $600 per student"; Sprague and she settle on "150 A credit." Her conclusion: "So the more that we optimize our opportunities at River Valley, the less we have to actually build into our legacy budget," and it frees classroom space. Herzog explains the two-way accreditation constraint that limits it: college faculty cannot be left alone with K–12 students, and district teachers must meet the college's standards to teach for credit. | POSITIVE |
| 0:22:43 | Two staff on one culinary line | Crawford: "On page two. Alex. The culinary salary goes from 97 to 82. Why is there a decrease there?" Henry: "it's just it's the way it was budgeted last year was budgeted higher than what we're actually spending." Herzog: "We had two. We have two staff in there and they put both staff in the line." Henry: "Right. But I haven't moved it out of there yet." A chef and an assistant chef, one of them "on a letter of agreement," sit in a single salary line. | HIGH |
| 0:24:12 | Maintenance salaries down $9,000, health insurance up $16,000 | Crawford: "On page five, the, maintenance salaries go down 9000, but the health insurance goes up 16." Henry's answer is that she budgeted a two-person insurance plan where a single had been assumed, and set the custodian line "at a lower rate because more than likely, whoever we're" hiring starts lower. Herzog supplies the human fact underneath it at 0:24:31: "Our beloved custodian. I knew that having passed. Right, we have not replaced him… they've had interviews and just nobody taken the job. So we do have a paying somebody overtime." | |
| 0:25:26 | Front doors described as not ADA compliant | Crawford asks about "2005 thousand for water, 12,500 for building" on the maintenance page. Herzog: "when I met Mr. Holt, I didn't ask for this, but two years ago. Our front doors are not Ada [ADA] compliant… I believe some of that is budgeted because it could be up to $10,000 to replace those doors." The claim is the director's characterisation, made in passing; no one at the table asked what standard the doors fail, and no document in any share addresses it. Henry then explains the water line: "the water and sewer is what that is… That's the cost of our part of" it, and the prior year "was only 6000" — "it was too low." | OBSERVATION |
| 0:26:09 | "I think we owe that to him" — the maintenance director should present his own budget | Crawford: "So so just as a point for administration, I would really love to have Steve Holt come in and explain the maintenance budgets. I think we owe that to him to hear what he has to say, and it helps us have a better understanding of what those items are." Henry: "Totally agree with you." Whitney raises the Capital Improvement Committee as the natural home for several of these items and notes "we have capital reserve funds that may cover these dollars and some of the Esser [ESSER] money"; Crawford answers that the committee "had one meeting" — "there was one meeting." Holt is put on the December 6 agenda. | POSITIVE |
| 0:27:45 | What a career counselor is, and why the tech centre wants one | Whitney: "The career counselor, can you explain to the public and the group the difference between a career counselor and a guidance counselor?" Herzog: same certification, different focus — work-based learning, employer relationships, "resume interviewing connections," a job board. He describes the age barrier — "You can't go out to even intern until you're 18" — and Sprague describes the information gap he used to hear about from students: "my guidance counselor told me I couldn't take the second I couldn't complete because I've got to have algebra two." Crawford states that a career counselor is a tech-centre requirement; Herzog corrects her: "It's recommended." | |
| 0:35:38 | CMS opens: a $97,000 grant and its long tail | Romeo: "we don't have too many new proposals. The same thing as Doctor Herzog said, we have some supply lines that we've increased. We were awarded a grant, $97,000 for music instruments. And so with that comes sort of the maintenance and upkeep of that. So I asked for a little bit of an increase in repairs." A second grant brought mountain bikes and snowshoes, and with them stipends for the clubs that use them — a worked example of grant income creating recurring local cost. | |
| 0:36:25 | A third counselor for 367 students | Romeo: "Technically, we have two. I'm asking that we have three. And the reason behind that simply is with 367 kiddos and at times we've reached 400. There's always one in crisis. And that would leave one counselor for the rest of our kids." He adds that counselors are being asked to teach as well, following a social-emotional-learning model in sixth grade, career readiness in eighth. | |
| 0:37:24 | Student centres, deans, and what the words mean | Romeo: "I know there's a big question about the student centers. Right. And the dean positions… I would like to retain at least one of those rooms, sort of as an academic slash behavioral room." Asked whether the deans stay, he answers "if I had the the magic wand. Yes." Crawford spends several minutes establishing that dean, academic center, campus monitor and campus aide are four labels for overlapping things; Romeo concedes it: "We're kind of using two different languages for the same thing. I'm more using internal language." Sprague, from experience: "I've worked in schools that had deans of students. And these people have master's degrees." | |
| 0:39:49 | Teaching load: three classes of five, and the case for four | Whitney: "using your current model with grade based teachers right now, how many classes and how many students does do those teachers cover versus going to a" different model. Romeo: teachers "teach are three out of the five classes." The other two periods carry IEP and 504 work, lunch duty, the student centres, team meetings and in-house substituting — for which, Crawford establishes, "They get a small stipend for that." Romeo's defence of lunch duty is that "kids like seeing teachers in there and teachers like seeing kids in there." Whitney's point, made plainly: "there's a different value attached to their time." | |
| 0:45:23 | Seven paraprofessionals against ten budgeted | Romeo: "we're fortunate enough to have one pro grade level… We have seven Paris [paras] right now." Crawford: "Why don't you have ten?" Romeo: "It's tough to find qualified people." The behavioural programme "definitely needs two powers [paras] in there"; the life-skills programme "really should have three. They operate with two right now." The middle school is also moving to Title I status — "It was just proposed to us to move into that" — which changes the qualification requirement for its paraprofessionals, and Romeo says the district is "looking for tr[aining]" so as not to lose anyone. | |
| 0:47:05 | Instructional salaries down $333,000 — and the answer is not in the transcript | Crawford: "So now looking at this budget, instructional salaries go down 333,000. And is that a loss of position." Romeo: "That is not a question for me to answer." Henry: "All right. Mike, do you want to answer it or do you want me to?" Tempesta, by telephone: "I can answer it." His next segment runs 28 seconds and transcribes as seven words. Crawford's own words at 0:48:09 — "Six fewer staff." — are the only surviving trace of the superintendent's answer. She then draws the inference herself: the schedule change is not optional. Romeo: "It does seem that way doesn't it?" | OBSERVATION |
| 0:49:20 | The payroll-tax match, and the first "over budgeted" | Crawford: "regular instruction TSA [FICA] match. Less 20,000. 19,900." Henry: "That is the additional match for, Those six teachers for. Well, not just them. It's actually was over. Budgeted. Okay. Yeah. So that's an actual number." The reduction is therefore partly a staffing change and partly a correction of a prior-year over-budget — a compound the committee will meet repeatedly and which makes the comparative columns hard to read. | HIGH |
| 0:52:07 | "A budgeting error" | On the CMS special-education salary line, down $132,000, Henry: "it's actually it was a budgeting situation and" — Whitney finishes it: "A budgeting error." Henry: "Yeah. Budgeting error. And the number of kids right now it's a combination of the two." The board chair supplies the word; the business administrator adopts it. It is the first of at least four occasions in this meeting on which a variance is explained as an error in the document rather than as a change in the district's operations. | HIGH |
| 0:53:40 | $50,000 for family and consumer science that is not family and consumer science | Crawford: "it's family and consumer science increase of 50,000." Romeo: the post could not be filled, so "we went towards is intro to design, like a digital literacy teacher." Crawford works it through: "it seems like this budget proposes continuing with digital instruction rather than an actual per[son]" — and Romeo confirms the substitution happened "two years ago because we cannot find anyone to hire." Sprague: "but is showing his new money in our budget line that it didn't exist last year." Romeo: "It should not because… It wasn't a new position I put in." | HIGH |
| 0:56:13 | Lines that look like new positions, at nil impact | Sprague: "FY2324 was zero and now proposed 2425 it's 50,000. And when I look over at the percentage increase," the column does not show it. Henry: "It's the way the system does it." Sprague: "Does that affect. Well the overall percent at the end of the" — Henry: "It should not." Sprague: "And that's not the only one that's like that," naming the social-work salary line at the bottom of page six as the same pattern: "Because they look like they're brand new positions." | HIGH |
| 1:02:19 | Campus monitors: ESSER positions arriving in the operating budget | Sprague: "Campus monitor on page nine. 2410 1165. Again, brand new position, 0% impact." Henry: "Yep. They were in Esser [ESSER] and we put those into the budget." Two positions, about $60,000 of salary. Sprague notes that with benefits "it goes up to north of 100 grand" — Henry checks and corrects him, because the benefit line below also carries secretaries. The same movement is happening across the district: behaviour interventionists, instructional coaches and campus monitors all coming off expiring federal relief money and into local appropriation, presented as lines with no percentage change. | MEDIUM |
| 1:04:04 | "The lack of detail in what we're being presented here" | Sprague, after the benefits line turns out to contain several unrelated groups of staff: "That's where the the lack of detail in what we're being presented here makes it" — Henry, immediately: "And maybe I should put it into an Excel sheet for you so you can see the full description of the line." That offer becomes one of the meeting's two concrete deliverables, and Sprague returns to it at 2:39:31: "the vast majority of our questions have been who? Who is under that line?" | HIGH |
| 1:07:17 | A $90,000 administrator who is a teacher on a stipend | Sprague finds a school-administration line of about $90,000 that Romeo identifies as something else entirely: "That's a sped position. So the school Lee A [LEA] the one of our Sped teachers receives a stipend to be the lee a for those meetings." Sprague: "It's a $68,000 position." Henry: "It was 98000." Sprague: "It doesn't show it that way… And this person does not have any, does not have an administrator certification either… Listed as an administrator." Henry: "So it could be it's in the wrong line. I'm not sure," and then the explanation that recurs: "this is how the budget was entered into the system when I came here. It was uploaded before my time." | HIGH |
| 1:12:11 | Stevens opens: pottery, printmaking, and lines that vanished after submission | Pratt: "the largest edition [addition] I put in there was about $10,000 to the finance department, and that is where building two new courses and programs try to build the visual arts department. And that is a pottery class and a printmaking class." The kiln already exists and is in use. Then, at 1:13:18, a different kind of item: "If you look at that item there, it didn't show up in the budget last year. But to be honest, it was taken out after I submitted the budget. And I think it's one of the things that the former business minister [administrator], there was a few things taken out." | HIGH |
| 1:14:01 | $40,000 for city fields, and assistant coaches for liability | Pratt: "the $40,000 that we used for all the town fields… the city fields that we use. So that's the other big increase you see there in the Athletics." He says it too "was put in the budget last year, but it was taken out after the fact." On coaching: "a lot of the larger teams only have one coach… we looked at is looking at hiring some assistant coaches strictly for liability reasons. Because if we have it's an away game and a student gets hurt. Right now we have the coach going to the hospital. No one's going back on the bus with the kids." | |
| 1:14:38 | Budgeting ahead of the federal cliff, on purpose | Pratt: "you'll see little increments, to some of the different departments. And that's because I want to stop budgeting now for when the Esser [ESSER] grants run out to cover the cost of like the, the Excel [IXL]. And we've, we got the grant for the yonder [Yondr]. So we don't have to worry about that. But down the road we will. So I'm trying to add the money in incrementally to the budget. So it's not one big increase at at 1.1 or 2 years down the road." A deliberate, disclosed glide path off expiring federal money — the opposite approach to the same problem the campus-monitor line represents. | MEDIUMPOSITIVE |
| 1:19:09 | Two guidance counselors where three are budgeted | Crawford: "the salary line, only increases $20,000, which is minuscule based on the size of the budget… It's 1,000,006 category." She then maps the structure: a principal, two assistant principals — "we cut the alphabet in half" — and "two guidance people." Crawford: "You should have three." Pratt: "Should have three. That's another area where I budgeted for three last year. And in the fall when I showed up, it wasn't budgeted. But I didn't budget it. This year we still have two." The third is being traded, in effect, for the tech centre's career counselor: "That was the swap." | HIGH |
| 1:24:02 | Whitney lines the two schools up side by side | Whitney: "this is what I have. Let's make sure we have it lined up. So I've got a mess [CMS] 367 students. We have a principal. An assistant principal recommended two academic center deans with two behavioral specialists in those centers a social worker, a sped teacher. This is what the request is for." Against that: "three guidance counselors at Stevens High School with 500 students who have a principal, two assistant principals, two guidance counselors budgeted for, three, our restorative practices." Henry then corrects her own earlier answer: CMS has three special-education teachers, "One is 50% in a grant." | |
| 1:25:17 | A $663,000 increase, and where it comes from | Sprague: "I'm looking at your bottom line. Yep. And you've got a $663,000 increase. And I'm not blaming that on you because I'm looking at the sped out of district, which is 800 and something." Henry interjects to prevent the wrong inference: "remember, there was $400,000. That is less in the middle that went up to the high." Sprague's concern is the taxpayer's: "we've got almost $1 million worth of what I'm presuming to be ninth graders. Right, that are out of district." | MEDIUM |
| 1:27:18 | "About 10% of the class is out of district" | Sprague: "I'm an English major and I'm not that great at math, but even I can figure out that that's about 10% of the class is out of district." Pratt explains why the in-house alternative programme cannot absorb them: "we have the academy now upstairs, and we have about 14 students in that. But right now, none of them are. None of them are special ed kids… we cannot find special educators to take on that role of level of need… the kids who are out of placement right now, we don't have the the bodies to get them into the program." The staffing shortage, not the placement policy, is what holds the cost in place. | MEDIUM |
| 1:30:44 | The chair questions whether the placement matches the need | Sprague, disclosing his own connection first: "I hate to say this because I've benefited greatly from from the Orion group, but I worry about the what the kids are actually getting in a place like Granite Hill. And really what they're being exposed to is Granite Hills, an offshoot of Orion House, which, deals with a lot of kids that are involved in the court system." He describes the placement as it should work — "a temporary kind of waypoint along the way… and then you go back to your… home school" — against what he says happens: "have kids there for a year after year." His conclusion at 1:32:23: "from what you identified as the need, I don't know if the need matches the program." He then routes it away: "That's a Ben question or Brianna Connell question." Tuition at Granite Hill is put at "about 6060 1000" — Sprague reads it back as "61,000. So 60 800,000." | MEDIUM |
| 1:32:48 | What returning a student would actually save | Whitney: "Mr. Tempesta, what is your ballpark back of the napkin estimate of savings per student that we could bring back into an in district program, but are we looking at like 50% savings?" She presses through several inaudible answers to a usable number: "a worst case scenario. We're saving 50% per student if we can bring them back to district I guess that's what I'm looking at, right? Am I accurate in that assessment?" Tempesta: "Yes. That's conservative okay." Her reason for wanting a defensible figure is explicit: "if we're going to sell this to the public." | MEDIUMOBSERVATION |
| 1:35:10 | Stevens special-education salaries up $105,000 — 60 per cent | Crawford: "Sped salaries go up 105,000. That looks like at least one position… Percentage wise, it's a 60% jump, which is a lot meaningful." Henry reads five special-education teachers into the line; Pratt says "We have right now. We have three special ed teachers. I think we're budgeted for five." Crawford does the arithmetic aloud: "if you were budgeted for five. Yeah, that would have been 175,000. That was in the budget. And now it jumps to 281,000… if you look at the history, it goes from 227 to 1 74175. So those two years are similar. Why the jump from last year to this year?" No answer is reached; Pratt offers the Academy's staffing as a guess and adds "That's my best guess. That's the only thing I can think of." | HIGH |
| 1:42:01 | One social worker, nine minutes, and a plain question | Crawford: "I'm trying to understand this. So there is so there was a social worker. There has been a social worker full time at the high school last year. It was funded under a title program. But this year it's going back into our budget. Just yes or no." What emerges instead: Courtney Porter is the district-wide social worker, housed at Stevens, spending — Pratt estimates — "more like 35, 40% this year" of her time there; she is 90 per cent in the district-wide budget and about 10 per cent in the McKinney-Vento grant ("McKinney Bento" in the transcript). Henry on the separate $67,000 Stevens line: "There was an additional low social worker that was here, but it didn't transfer into the budget in the system. I don't I don't know why." | MEDIUM |
| 1:50:28 | The same employee found in two budgets at once | Sprague, who has gone back to the prior-year book while the others talk: "So I found Courtney Porter for last year in district wide… Now with a salary of 52,000 and that wide." He had already read her out of the Stevens book at 1:47:34: "We said 16 salary of 69. 956." Then the question that names it: "Is she make 120,000 a year." Henry: "I can pull her out. She is not pulled out a district wide currently." Whitney: "Not pulled out of Stevens High School." Henry: "Pull that out of Stevens High School." Whitney: "Awesome." The correction is agreed on camera and confirmed again at 2:55:46: "Courtney. Out of there. Got it." | MEDIUM |
| 1:51:50 | Four maintenance posts, one person | Crawford: "We survive on one maintenance salary at that one might be at the high school." Pratt: "That's really. We only have one maintenance person at the high school right now." Sprague: "Shouldn't there be three?" Pratt: "We all pitch in." Henry: "we can't hire people. That's the problem. It's not that they're budgeted." Whitney: "Oh, you have four budgeted." The line is budgeted for four full-time people at rates set low because "we've had lost people that were at higher end." Crawford's aside to the business administrator — "Don't jump off the cliff" — comes at the end of the third hour of this. | |
| 1:53:57 | District-wide begins — the item left over from the night before | Crawford: "So now we still have district wide to go over, and we have the maintenance person to come in and talk about the maintenance." The previous evening's session had ended on exactly this gap: "We haven't seen it yet because we haven't seen the district wide portion yet." Henry offers to fetch the maintenance director mid-meeting; Crawford declines — "I hate to ask him to be on the spot." The superintendent, who had been on the line, is reported gone: an unattributed voice at 1:54:46 says he "jumped in his car and just driving." | |
| 1:55:15 | The SAU share: 90 per cent, "still up in the air" | Sprague: "what we're going to find in district wide would be would be say [the SAU], the Claremont share of Siu [SAU] expenses as well." Henry: "Yes. They would be in here." Crawford: "Well it would be 90% of whatever that is. And that's still up in the air." Henry: "I gave an estimate is what I did, I did." Crawford supplies the basis: "Those these numbers in here on the proposed that you send out for the city." Henry: "So yes, exactly. Yep. So that could change." The SAU 6 budget itself would not go to its own public hearing until December 14, thirteen days later — so the district's largest single administrative cost sits in this document as an estimate of a number not yet adopted. | OBSERVATION |
| 1:56:02 | District-wide special-education salaries up 133 per cent | Sprague: "District wide special ed salaries. Oh it's up on it's up 133%. So I'm curious what's in that line." Henry: speech and language staff, and a behaviour specialist. Whitney reads the history back — "in 2122 we're at 400,000. Right. Then at 2223 it's more reflective of what" it should be — and asks the question directly: "are you suggesting there may have been an accounting error?" Henry: "Yeah… I have not had the opportunity to go back and look I just know in 2324 that this is who we have." Sprague ends it as he ends several others: "leave it as a question for him," meaning the absent special-education director. | HIGH |
| 1:59:50 | A negative line of $688,426.17 that nobody can explain | Crawford asks about the second line on page one. Henry: "I don't want to say this when I was I did not upload this budget. I did not put these numbers in. Again, I'm not blaming anybody. I'm just saying that I don't know." Then, at 2:00:19: "there was a, a line item called board voted expense reductions that was a negative number of $688,426.17 loaded into the budget. Now, again, I cannot tell you what that number was because I can't find any notes. Dave, Jack and I tried to figure it out and we couldn't." The name is David Jack, the interim business administrator who covered the vacancy between April and July 2023; the recogniser's comma is spurious. | HIGH |
| 2:01:12 | Spent, deducted, or put back — the room cannot tell | Whitney: "So am I right in assuming that that money was spent? We're just not sure where." Henry: "That money wasn't spent. That money was deducted." Whitney: "But it was put back in." Henry: "The I'm sure it was put back in because your bottom line number is right." Crawford: "So that 668,000 was divvied up among God knows where." Henry: "Like yes, I have no idea." The two figures spoken for the same item — $688,426.17 by the business administrator, and Crawford's "So that 668,000 was divvied up among God knows where" — are both left as spoken. Henry's decision: "I just felt at this point I'm going to leave it… It's going to be one of those anomalies is just going to sit there." | HIGH |
| 2:01:55 | "Call it the Fudge Factory" | Sprague names it: "Call it the Fudge Factory." Crawford: "Well, I've seen fudge factors." Henry, twice in twenty seconds: "I don't want to I wasn't here, I can't wait" and, earlier, "I don't want anybody to think I'm blaming anybody because that's not what I'm saying." The exchange is the meeting's turning point: from here the committee stops asking about individual lines and starts asking how many of them are wrong. | HIGH |
| 2:02:04 | Substitute pay down $125,000, and what a substitute is worth | Henry: "I'm looking at where we're at currently substitute pay wise. And I was looking at the previous year of 22, 23, which was around 159,000 300,000 is way too much." Crawford turns it into policy: "should we as a board look at increasing that pay to make it more acceptable or more interesting… if we increase the rate of the substitute, might we be more successful in getting subs?" Henry: "A lot of districts have done that right in the area of increased their amount on sub pay." Crawford also asks for a flat daily rate instead of hourly; Henry proposes "a half day amount and a full day amount." Sprague reports a Vermont posting "for a long term sub $260 a day." Crawford asks for the rates at Fall Mountain, Newport and Lebanon for comparison. | POSITIVE |
| 2:04:33 | Teachers doing substitute duty | Crawford: "I keep hearing how staff, how our professional staff has to pick up and do substitute pay substitute services. It seems to me like we could be much more effective using those teachers for instruction, rather than for substituting." Henry: "I don't disagree with you. I know that that's the way it is in a lot of districts right now." The point connects directly to the middle school's proposed schedule change, which the committee endorses forty minutes later. | |
| 2:06:13 | The board chair asks for a public count of the errors | Whitney: "That's bigger than Candy's ask. Okay. I think that the the voters will want to know." She first protects the business administrator on the record — "Miss Henry is new to the administrative team… it's not a reflection on her" — then states the ask: "it is very important that we know the volume or the number of potential errors that impacted our impacting our budget numbers, past and present." And: "I think we owe it to the public, to, to talk about it." At 2:07:27 she puts a shape on it: "We need to know the aggregate potential, you know, errors that were in the budget that impacted the tax rate one way or the other, and how we're going to manage those inconsistencies." | HIGHPOSITIVE |
| 2:08:03 | Why the meeting is on television | Whitney: "I know this is a lot of work and I'm and I'm but I think it's super important because I agree the reason why we're televising this. The reason why we're having this an open session is to be utterly transparent to the community and utterly transparent to other board members and to administrative, personnel." Henry accepts the work but scopes it honestly: "I need to go back to 22, 23 as well… that is a lot of work given the size, but what I can do is pick out some of the really high discrepancy lines and focus in on those to begin with." | HIGHPOSITIVE |
| 2:09:21 | An administrator block removed live, on camera | Sprague: "I'm looking at the bottom of page. Eight okay. And it says district wide special ed admin salary. So I'm assuming that's bad but it's zero. And then" the benefits "are all listed on the next page." Henry: "I apologize Frank that needs to come out. I that needs to come out. That doesn't belong there. I'm taking out right now. I apologize, I took out the admin salary that was supposed to be in there that we have discussed where, the person did not come over and stayed within the saw [SAU], so I just took that out." Crawford reads the associated figures back across two turns — "The 490." … "964 all come out." Henry: "Yes. My air [error]. I will take out the lines that are associated with that." | HIGH |
| 2:12:04 | Why SAU costs cannot be seen in the district budget | Henry: "we would not be able to break them out in here because they're technically not. They're they're administrative fees for Claremont, but they are not actual expenditures within Claremont. So like, I couldn't show how much we pay in New Hampshire retirement because it's not part of the Claremont liability. Only the cost is." Sprague says the district did receive a breakout last year — "I've got it in my book" — and Henry answers that if so it came as "a separate spreadsheet," not out of the budget system. The SAU's own budget is a separate document adopted by a separate board. | OBSERVATION |
| 2:13:59 | Board secretarial and clerk lines — and a new clerk | Crawford works the school-board object codes. Henry: "I did increase your secretarial line or district clerk line. Excuse me. Your secretarial line. Substantially because of the amount of money you're paying" — the line moves to about $9,000 because "your new clerk with the number of meetings you have" costs more than the previous arrangement. The board had appointed Noelle Kronberg its clerk on 15 November 2023, sixteen days before this meeting. Crawford adds, unprompted: "I just want it known that we do not have any compensation for being on the school board. So these aren't fees that we would" receive. The "school board fees" line turns out to be staff background checks. | POSITIVE |
| 2:17:14 | Psychological services up $92,000; therapy assistants up 160 per cent | Whitney: "Just stick [district] wide. Psych services increased by 92,000… And then the code [COTA] of salaries were up 160% ready." Henry explains the psychologist as a substitution, not an addition: "the cost of hiring a psych through, like, a a contracted service is very expensive… contracted services are up about $200 an hour." She points to the offset at 2:20:26: "There's $198,000 reduction and contacted [contracted] services under Sped." Whitney tests the logic and accepts it: "the purpose of that is to offset a higher rate contracted services." | POSITIVE |
| 2:20:50 | A grieved position, and two accounts of where it landed | Sprague: "there was a position that was put into the saw [SAU] budget was grieved. Right. The position came back into the Claremont budget. The salary was supposed to be paid out of the saw budget." Henry: "It isn't in this budget. That person is an saw employee." Sprague: "No they're not. It was it was grieved and it was retained in Claremont." Henry: "I thought that it was grieved that the person wanted to stay in the Saw budget." Sprague: "The other way around." Henry accepts the correction and books the change: "So then I will move that person into the Claremont budget." The committee and the business administrator held opposite understandings of the outcome of a grievance affecting a salary in the document. | HIGH |
| 2:22:48 | An ESL post moved to the code it belongs in | Crawford: "There's an s l [ESL] salary. It looks like adding a position." Henry: "That position actually is currently was here but has been moved to it belongs in ESL. We I believe had it in c regular district wide salaries and it didn't belong there. You'll see a decrease in district wide by about 36,000… because I moved the ESL person to where that is should be coded to." The new line is about $54,000 against a $36,000 reduction elsewhere, and Henry warns the difference is not clean: "There's some changes within that as well. So it's not just a simple wash." | POSITIVE |
| 2:25:46 | Instructional coaches move off federal money | Crawford: "The professional development salary looks like a new line item." Henry: "That are instructional coaches that, I believe has been talked about with the board that we had an and that would be moving those positions to the general budget." Two people, with about $24,000 of associated retirement appearing on the next page. Another ESSER-funded post arriving in local appropriation as a line with no history behind it. | MEDIUM |
| 2:28:50 | A $91,000 occupational therapist inside the assistants' line | Sprague: "Are we bringing in a slew of new people? Is that what's happening?… If we're bringing do we already are they already working for us. Because how do we know if they're projected proposed and they're not in the fiscal 23. How do we know they're going to take benefits or not?" Henry: "I have one that is in here is proposed, and the other four are currently working for us," then finds the cause: "there is an occupational therapist sitting in here that is around 91,000. That's huge." Whitney: "So that's not a a coda [COTA]." Henry: "That's not a coda. It's an OT… I'm going to pull that out." Her own diagnosis: "I would have had an OT line, an occupational therapy line within the budget. So I've got to do some cleanup in the way that things are done." | HIGH |
| 2:29:33 | The state's chart of accounts, named on tape | Henry, explaining why the corrections matter beyond tidiness: "there's things that I felt like, like DSL [ESL] for instance, did not belong in regular Ed. It is supposed to be coded in that line, per the wonderful book that we have from the state of New Hampshire. So, I can move the OT out into the a line where they'll be separate." Then, quietly: "I know there's a lot of work to do." Sprague apologises for the pressure — "I probably always think Q-Tip quit taking it personally" — and Henry answers "It's hard though. You gotta understand. I take pride in my job." | HIGH |
| 2:31:10 | Technology: an integrator, and a job that already existed | Small: "we're really looking to get a technology integrator. That is one of the big pieces. We had two part time ones in the past… They will offer professional development services, they'll offer trainings, they'll do rostering of any of the new programs." Sprague: "I'll call this what it is. It's Tammy Morse's old job basically… one of the justifications for an assistant for the assistant superintendent would be that that person would assume a lot of what Tammy Morse did… it sounds like we were we hired somebody to do something. They're not doing it now. We're going to hire somebody else to do what we thought that they were going to do." He is careful to separate the two questions: "I'm not disagreeing with anything either." | OBSERVATION |
| 2:34:42 | $90,000 of copiers, broken down on request | Crawford: "here's an maybe an offset. So copiers go up $90,000." Small: "we should have probably broken that down a little bit. But part of that is roughly when I wrote that down here, 37,000 of that is a loss [lease]. So it is a lease payment. We replace like 12 copiers in our first brick, and we put them on a four year lease. So of that comes out and then we have 27 standalone printers" at "like $19 a month… includes all of the service and toners." Crawford connects it to the $127,000 reduction in technology equipment; Small confirms the two lines were deliberately separated: "I don't want to just keep them in a 734 line because I want to keep it separate." Henry agrees: "They need to be separated… They don't belong in equipment." | POSITIVE |
| 2:36:29 | Phone and internet reductions, and a competitive E-Rate bid | Small: "there's some pretty big reductions both on the phones and the internet. The phones are that was a project that we did with the new IT phones, which does drastically reduce our price. And the other one was, we did an RFP proposal through E-Rate. And, because our fiber build the last five years, we were paying for the fiber build, plus the internet. And now, it's a new five year, and it's just for the internet." On the federal share: "they do 70%, we pay 30." The E-Rate discount matrix runs from 20 to 90 per cent by poverty and rurality, so a 70 per cent discount is squarely inside it. | POSITIVE |
| 2:37:21 | Consolidating the asks | Whitney: "We've got like seven minutes to go. And what I'm hoping is that if we can kind of, I kind of hijacking… we can kind of group some of our questions to make sure that we know what we want for our next meeting." Crawford returns to the maintenance director at 2:37:38 and to a $25,000 worker's-compensation rise, which Henry attributes to another "budgeting error. Based on what the previous years were. Right. That was way too low." Asked how she builds the numbers, Henry describes her method: employee-related lines "calculated out based on this person's salary… I audit my information that comes through to make sure everything came through. Right. And if there are any variances, I, I look at those." | HIGH |
| 2:39:31 | "Who is under that line?" | Sprague, summing up what three hours of questioning had actually been about: "that would save us, because I would say the vast majority of our questions have been who? Who is under that line?" The request is for a staffing schedule behind the appropriation — the same thing Henry had offered herself ninety minutes earlier. It is the single most repeated ask of the meeting and the one that most plainly describes the defect in the document. | HIGH |
| 2:40:01 | The chair backs the middle school's schedule change | Sprague: "the schedule change or the teaching load change at the middle school, I personally I had no idea what the arrangement was there… after talking with Mr.. Mr. Pratt about what? The, the teacher's teacher to student load is at the high school. It seems very reasonable. What what they're proposing as far as people going to teaching four classes instead of three. Having been an administrator, I want my most qualified people not doing I want them doing what they're good at." And: "I don't want them covering detentions. I don't want them doing bus watch. I want them I want them teaching. And so I support that model." He adds the caveat that the union has not agreed: "I'm interested in teacher reaction to that because that's a substantial change." | |
| 2:41:11 | Whitney on getting the public to the deliberative session informed | Whitney: "I think it's important that the community has an opportunity to digest this before we have our deliberative session… because I think there's going to be some some misconceptions about what this means for the education at Claremont, a CMS, and it needs to be parsed out." Her analogy: "I can't imagine having a physician doing something that a nursing assistant would be doing. That would be a gross mismanagement of resources and a disservice to the to patients." And the risk if it is not explained: "we may have a situation where there's going to be a demand or a, a, a disconnect about the validity of this budget change." Crawford: "I do think we need at least another finance committee." Whitney: "this is the beginning of we have multiple meetings that are that document these conversations." | HIGHPOSITIVE |
| 2:43:38 | The calendar, set by consensus | Sprague: "let's look at the timetable because this is scheduled to go I didn't bring my calendar with me when this is supposed to come to the full board." Henry: "I put down the 13th to finalize… that's to me, not really possible… I don't feel comfortable with doing the 13 as your final. So but you've also got your hearing on January 3rd." What the committee settles: December 6 at 1 p.m. — the special-education director and the maintenance director, plus an update on revisions; December 13 from 9 to 12 — a summary of changes, the scheduling presentation, the tax-rate implication and "the compilation of the budget inconsistency"; December 18 from 1 to 3; presentation to the full board December 20. Whitney: "we'll have to have CCTV be available. Contact them." No motion, no vote. | OBSERVATION |
| 2:52:06 | What a penny on the tax rate is now worth | Crawford: "the grand list has changed to like $1 million. So, I mean, I always used a billion. So I was used to use 750 million as a back of the envelope increases the text, an increase of 750 million. Increase the tax rate by $1." Henry offers "250,000 usually depends on your" — the two are describing different units and neither reconciles them on the record. Crawford's source is named: "I just talked to Yuji [Yoshi Manale] the other day and he said that he had gotten that information," the Claremont city manager. Sprague's caution: "keep in mind that people's assessments have gone" up. | OBSERVATION |
| 2:54:52 | "Did you get it all?" | Henry: "And here's what I'm going to ask. Did you write this all down, Heather? And I'm assuming Chelsea, did you get it all?" Whitney: "And we were still on air. Okay. We're still on air." The business administrator is asking whether the meeting's action list has been captured — by the board chair's own notes and by the district's recording secretary. Whatever was captured has not reached any public share. | HIGH |
| 2:55:12 | Off air; the recording keeps running | Josh, the CCTV operator: "Okay off air, but you're still being recorded." Henry immediately reads her list back — "explanation of the school update on revisions. On summary comparisons" — and then remembers the first correction of the day: "I want to go back to the career counselor real quick. Did we talk? We were going to put that back in. Yeah okay. Got it I just I wrote it down." And: "Courtney. Out of there. Got it." Everything after this point is on the recording but was not broadcast live. | OBSERVATION |
| 2:55:50 | Adequacy aid up, statewide property tax up | Henry: "as far as the tax rate goes, I don't think you're going to see that big of an impact because you got more money in adequacy this year. Again, because of the new funding formula that I had, because I've gotten your adequacy at estimates in, although your sweat [SWEPT] tax went up." Then the mechanism, correctly stated: "even though you're your property values are going up, that means you're swept is going to go up, which means you're going to get less adequacy… not not for next year, but the following year, you're going to see a sweat increase that's going to be your part of the statewide education tax." The "new funding formula" is real — the per-pupil adequacy amounts had been raised effective 1 July 2023. | POSITIVE |
| 2:56:37 | A members-only working session — which the chair asks to have recorded | Whitney: "How do you guys feel about just us meeting perhaps on 18th? I could do sometime during the day… For a caucus. I would like it still to be recorded and we can have a discussion." Her purpose: "so we can really hash through it as a budget committee… so that we can then present on the 20th." Crawford: "We need to talk among ourselves to make sure we've got our stories straight for the 20." Whitney: "that we have our rationale of what we are supporting as a subcommittee"… "And what we're not." On administrators attending: "If people if administrative administration wants to be involved in present, that's fine. But we don't want to say we I don't feel it's necessary… It's not to exclude. It's just not to demand." | OBSERVATIONPOSITIVE |
| 2:59:50 | The chair's closing principle | Sprague: "one of my goals is to make sure that the whole board. Knows. Knows what's going on because" — and then: "one of the worst things that can happen is for the subcommittee or a committee to be operating separate from" the board. Crawford completes it: "Right in a vacuum. And the rest of the board not knowing." Whitney: "just by doing it this way. Everybody has an opportunity to" — Crawford: "Log in. That's absolutely right." Whitney: "Either in real time or not. So thank you so much." The recording ends twenty seconds later on Whitney's "It's such a stressful thing. And we know it's really." | HIGHPOSITIVE |