Participants
Everyone who appears in the record of this meeting. There is no agenda, no attendance sheet and no minutes, so names and roles come from the recording — direct address between the speakers, each voice’s own account of itself, and the superintendent’s introduction of the two middle-school staff — cross-checked against the district’s approved board minutes of 6 and 20 December 2023, which print the board and central-office rosters, and against the project’s roster for 2023–24. This was a working session of a subcommittee: no member of the public spoke and no public-comment period was offered. Segment and word counts are from the dialogue file (1,466 rows, 21,902 words) — the longest record of any session in this budget season.
| Name | Role | Participation |
|---|
| Candace Crawford | Claremont School Board member; Finance Committee member | The heaviest speaker — 374 segments, 4,751 words, 21.7 per cent of everything said, and the first substantive voice of the afternoon. She opens by refusing the schedule at 0:01:08 (“there’s no way I can present this to the board on Wednesday night”), then reads a nine-item list of what the committee still does not know (0:04:13 to 0:08:12). She drove the middle-school staffing count, the guidance-counsellor arithmetic, the field-trip question, the para counts, the pre-K discrepancy and the $688,426.17 line. She is addressed as “Candace” by Mary Henry at 1:21:47 and as “Candy” by Sprague at 2:03:33, and she addresses Sprague as “Frank” at 0:28:02. Three weeks later she was still reverse-engineering the change between the budget handed out at this meeting and the one the board voted on (flag 3). |
| Frank Sprague | Chair, Finance Committee; Vice Chair, Claremont School Board | Presided. 293 segments, 3,800 words. Opened the session and closed it; set the agenda by announcement, not by document. He read the 13 December ESSER “sunset” sheet into the record at 0:08:42 and 0:18:45 — the only place either document survives (flag 1) — pressed the $688,426.17 line to the answer that it is a reconciling plug (flag 4), and gave the afternoon its most quotable description of the district’s books at 2:10:18: “it’s like mining Bitcoin. There’s these little pieces of things that don’t that that don’t match.” He is named by Henry at 1:40:51 (“you know, Frank, I’m going to give you the actual amount”) and by Romeo in the third person at 0:57:16. He gives yet another version of his own career here — the discipline-monitor model he says he “brought … to Stevens” as a principal at 0:55:19, and his special-education background at 1:52:09; this page quotes his words for this meeting and does not reconcile them with the five other accounts he gives elsewhere in this corpus. His is the last substantive sentence on the tape, at 2:24:03. |
| Heather Whitney | Chair, Claremont School Board; Finance Committee member | 277 segments, 4,333 words. Speaks first on the tape, before the meeting starts. She took the strategic frame throughout: the default budget as a fallback at 0:01:37, the priorities-first method she proposed at 1:43:25 (“I think we should do is we should have what our priorities are”), which Sprague restated at 1:47:21 as “the must haves and the nice to haves”, zero-based budgeting at 1:53:04, and the state minimum counsellor ratio read accurately into the record at 1:53:35 (flag 11). She raised the forensic audit at 2:11:35 and was refused. She identifies her own profession obliquely at 1:48:39 (“in my world, if you’re a staff nurse and you work on the floor…”) and names another district she has served at 0:31:57. She is addressed as “Heather” by Sprague at 0:11:51. Her last words on the tape are the ones that matter most, at 2:23:36 and 2:23:51: “I already found a quarter of a million” … “I can find 1.4 right now.” |
| Mary Henry | Business Administrator, Claremont School District / SAU 6 | 251 segments, 3,820 words — a far larger share than at any earlier session in this season. She arrives about sixteen minutes late and with the paperwork unfinished, still distributing sheets at 0:16:25 and telling Crawford at 0:18:06 that the district-wide page is missing “because I’m not done with it, so I’m going to finish it” — the one section where the chair says “half my questions are” (0:18:14) and later “probably 70% of my questions” (1:32:38). It never arrived on paper (flag 8). She supplied every number the committee used: the assessment base, the $0.81-per-million tax factor, the $1.19 rate increase, the “1.4 million or 9.15%” local raise, and the explanation of the $688,426.17 line. She also corrected herself on the record against her own interest at 0:59:03 (“I need to correct myself. Yes. It is still in there. Thank you.”) and declined the forensic audit at 2:11:39. |
| Michael Tempesta | Superintendent of Schools, SAU 6 | 119 segments, 1,947 words. Arrives about fourteen minutes late — his first words, at 0:14:14, are “We have a new schedule and that’s why we’re a little late”, and at 0:18:11 “Thank you. We knew we were a 15 minutes but.” He presented the revised middle-school staffing model, introduced the two CMS staff at 0:27:43, reported his meeting with the teachers’ association at 0:33:35, and had to account for his own $100,000 estimate at 1:30:14 (flag 6). Asked at 1:58:27 where he would put money, he answered “I would invest in the elementaries.” He is addressed as “Mr. Tempesta” by Crawford at 1:29:13. He was dismissed by the SAU 6 board twenty-four days later, on 11–12 January 2024. Nothing in this record anticipates that. |
| Frank Romeo | Principal, Claremont Middle School | 81 segments, 2,350 words — 10.7 per cent of the meeting in thirty-three minutes, from 0:34:22 to 1:07:17. Absent from the 13 December session that was largely about his school, he is present here and answers for it. He explains the seven-period model, the academic centres and the four-position reduction, and concedes the limits of his own proposal twice without being cornered: “They’re not in this budget currently. I would like them to be” (0:57:35) and, on the data the committee wanted, “I do not have that information” (1:04:03). Named by the superintendent at 0:14:27 (“Romeo right off the printer”) and by Whitney at 0:21:46. Two days later six of his teachers addressed the full board against this schedule change — recorded in the district’s approved minutes of 20 December 2023, not on this recording. |
| “Miss Foster” | Claremont Middle School staff — author of the proposed master schedule surname only; no first name is ever spoken | 36 segments, 827 words. Introduced by the superintendent at 0:27:43: “We have Miss Steel and Miss Foster from the middle school here, a counselor and a schedule extraordinaire who put this together.” She is the schedule’s author — “based on the proposal that I’ve put together, every teacher has two student center blocks per week” (0:44:24) — and defines its scope at 0:58:43: “that’s all I was tasked with doing and that’s why that’s all that addresses.” She dates her own service at 0:54:44: “I’ve been here for. I think this is my 13th year in the district.” She is a different person from Courtney Steele, the CMS administrator who told the board on 16 August 2023 that she was entering her fourteenth year; the district record does not supply this speaker’s first name and this page does not guess one. |
| “Miss Steel” | Claremont Middle School counsellor — present, not heard | Named by the superintendent as in the room at 0:27:43 and never named again. No cluster in the dialogue file is attributable to her and no voice on the recording identifies itself as hers, so this page places her in the room on the superintendent’s word and attributes nothing to her. The project’s roster carries Courtney Steele as a Claremont Middle School administrator from at least August 2023, which is the likely referent, but the recording gives only a surname the recognizer renders Steel. |
| Unattributed fragments | — | 35 rows (2.4 per cent of the file, 74 words — an average of two words each) carry no named speaker: bare acknowledgements (“Okay.”, “Right.”, “Yeah.”, “Bowling?”) with nothing to anchor them. No claim, quotation or figure on this page rests on any of them. |
| Ben Nester | Director of Special Education, SAU 6 — not present | Absent, and repeatedly the answer to a question. Four times the committee is told a figure can only be explained by him: on Bluff’s para count, “we need to talk to Ben because there may be a reason why Ben feels 11 was what they needed” (1:21:01); on preschool teachers, “I would have to ask Ben what the rationale behind it was” (1:39:53); on behaviour interventionists at Bluff, “Those were the ones that Ben had talked about keeping. I don’t remember his rationale” (2:14:27); and on a social-worker line, “The follow up with Ben” (2:16:13). His preschool estimate of $60,000 is also one half of the discrepancy at flag 6. He had announced his resignation four days earlier, on 14 December 2023, effective July 2024 — a fact from elsewhere in this corpus, not from this recording. |
| Chris Pratt | Principal, Stevens High School — not present | The source of the block-to-traditional estimate the committee tests at 1:29:13, and not in the room to defend it. The superintendent’s account at 1:30:14: “the only reason I put that in, Mr. Pratt thought that he could do it neutral with the with them teaching six at a small period of time.” In December 2023 Pratt was the high-school principal; he became interim superintendent on 11 January 2024 and permanent in May 2024. Nothing here anticipates that. |
| Noelle Kronberg | Clerk, Claremont School Board — not present | Appointed 15 November 2023 and the producer of the board’s minutes from that date. She is neither present nor mentioned. No one took a record of this meeting. See flag 1. |
| Mike Koski | Assistant Superintendent, SAU 6 — presence not established | Not named anywhere on this recording and not heard in any identified cluster. He is on the district’s central-office roster in the approved board minutes for 6 and 20 December 2023. The board chair refers to “Mike and I have a meeting tonight” at 1:34:26, but in a room containing Michael Tempesta that reference cannot be assigned. This page does not place him in the room. |
Agenda
No agenda was posted for this meeting, none has since appeared in any district share, and the Cablecast record’s own Agenda field is empty. The item list below is reconstructed from the chair’s transitions and from members announcing a change of subject, and it is not an official document. There were no motions, no seconds, no votes, no roll call and no adjournment, so the third column records what the committee did with each item, not what it decided. Hover over (or Tab to) a clipped cell to read the full text.
| Taken up | Item (reconstructed) | What was said, and the disposition |
|---|
| 0:00:13 | 1. Opening | Twenty-six seconds, with no call to order, no roll and no statement of the meeting’s authority. Sprague names the body, the date, the purpose and the word that gives this page its central question in one breath: “we’re here to look at the the budget and have a caucus with our with the three of us who are the budget finance committee.” He then reports that no other board member sent in questions. Disposition: none; the meeting simply begins. |
| 0:01:08 | 2. Whether the committee can report to the board on Wednesday — and what happens to the 3 January hearing if it cannot | Opened by Crawford before the administration arrives: “there’s no way I can present this to the board on Wednesday night. There are too many questions.” Whitney’s fallback: “For me, I would go to the default budget would be my recommendation if we don’t have clarity.” Crawford refuses that too and proposes moving the hearing to 17 January, noting the 3 January date was chosen as a snow buffer. Whitney: “I think we have some legal constraints on when we have to be.” Crawford: “No, that’s not our problem. It’s their problem to get us the answers.” Disposition: unresolved here; revisited at 1:32:58 and left unresolved again. The hearing went ahead on 3 January 2024 and the budget was adopted on 17 January. See flag 3. |
| 0:04:13 | 3. Crawford’s catalogue of unanswered questions | Read into the record over four minutes: middle-school staffing; whether elementary paras are special-education or regular; elementary social workers; field trips budgeted at one school and not the others; the preschool’s structure, framework, oversight, goals and expectations and its “two conflicting reports” of a $60,000 and a $100,000 increase; the ESSER phase-out; the $688,426.17 expense-reduction line; the overall increase; and assurance that the teachers’ association had signed off on the high-school schedule change. Disposition: put to the administration when it arrived; most were answered in part, several not at all. |
| 0:08:35 | 4. The 13 December ESSER “sunset” handout, read aloud | Sprague: “one of the things we received from the administration on December 13th is this this handout” — then its title and its numbers. This is the only place in the public record where the document appears. Disposition: used as the basis for questioning; the document itself was never posted. See flag 1. |
| 0:14:14 | 5. The administration arrives; the revised middle-school model | The superintendent enters about fourteen minutes late with a new schedule off the printer; the business administrator about sixteen, distributing a fresh budget version and apologising for the missing district-wide page. The superintendent walks the committee through the revised CMS structure — one principal, one assistant principal, no academic deans, five core teachers per subject instead of six — and the guidance-counsellor count, which takes twenty minutes and four participants to settle. Disposition: the arithmetic was eventually agreed; the underlying question of what ESSER had paid for was not. |
| 0:34:22 | 6. Claremont Middle School — Principal Romeo and the schedule’s author | Thirty-three minutes, the longest single item. The seven-period day, the 45-minute blocks, the five teaching teams, the academic centres, the four-position reduction, the behaviour-monitor role and the class sizes. Whitney asks three times for the budget impact and gets a decrease of about $638,000 that turns out to be mostly special-education tuition moving to the high school. Crawford establishes that the academic centres in the proposal are unstaffed and that the deans are gone. Disposition: the schedule was explained and broadly accepted; its budget effect was not isolated. Romeo: “They’re not in this budget currently. I would like them to be.” |
| 1:07:22 | 7. Elementary staffing, unfilled positions and an $85,000 overspend | Opened by the business administrator, unprompted: “in this year’s budget so far we’re $85,000 over budget and teacher salaries based on this year’s budget in the middle school” — while positions stand unfilled. The explanation offered is hiring at higher steps. The committee then works through Bluff (three unfilled classroom posts, no rooms for them), Title I grant-funded lines, longevity, field trips, paras by school and the certified-occupational-therapy line. Disposition: several answers deferred — field trips (“I’m not sure I’m going to have to find out for you”), para counts (“we need to talk to Ben”). |
| 1:23:33 | 8. Tax impact — the assessment base, the per-million factor and the rate | The item that turns the budget into a number a resident can feel. The assessment base is given as $1,228,844,331 against $747,000,280 two years earlier; the factor as “$0.81” per million of budget; the first estimate as “$1.38” on the rate, later revised to “$1.19” once revenues were counted — a rate moving “from 14, 14, to $15.33”, or $119 a year on a $100,000 home. Disposition: accepted as the working figure; no total budget number was ever attached to it. See flag 3. |
| 1:29:13 | 9. The 13 December handout tested: the $100,000 block-to-traditional cost, and the preschool’s $60,000 or $100,000 | Crawford reads the second of the two 13 December figures to its author and gets it back as an estimate he cannot stand behind. The preschool discrepancy is put the same way and answered the same way. Disposition: the $100,000 is confirmed not to be in the budget; the preschool figure is left at Nester’s $60,000 by inference, with its author absent. See flag 6. |
| 1:32:58 | 10. Scheduling, again — and a bargaining meeting the committee is not sure it should attend | Crawford: “I don’t think we are ready to present to the school board on Wednesday night.” Sprague: “we’d have to have. We have to develop a a recommendation for a target number for the rest of the board.” Whitney: “The hearings been warned.” An extra session this week is floated and abandoned. The superintendent mentions a paraprofessional meeting on Wednesday, then stops himself — “we shouldn’t talk about this right now” — and Crawford asks “should Frank and I be there?” Disposition: no further meeting was set; the recommendation was left to the caucus. See flag 10. |
| 1:40:24 | 11. The target number | The committee tries to fix a figure it can recommend. Crawford proposes working backwards from a tax impact — “If I look at a target, tax impact of, let’s say $0.75” — which Sprague converts to “slightly under $1 million” of cuts. Whitney rejects the method: “I just think we’re looking at it the wrong way… we should have what our priorities are.” The business administrator supplies “$1.19”, then the increase “1.783” and the local raise of “1.4 million or 9.15%”. Disposition: no target was agreed on camera. See flag 3. |
| 2:06:20 | 12. The $688,426.17 Board Voted Expense Reduct line — and a forensic audit, raised and declined | The chair’s “burning question”. The business administrator explains the line as a figure inherited from her predecessor that she cannot allocate and that reconciles two columns which otherwise do not match. Sprague: “it’s like mining Bitcoin.” Whitney: “So at what point is a forensic audit?” The answer is no. Disposition: the line stays in the budget, unallocated, and the audit is not pursued. See flag 4. |
| 2:13:38 | 13. The district-wide sheet, worked through without the document | The chair finally gets to the section carrying most of his questions, from a single sheet rather than the promised report. ESSER positions moved into the general budget: an arts coordinator, behaviour interventionists at Bluff, a board-certified behaviour analyst, an occupational therapist, an ESL teacher, a district-wide instructional coach. Whitney draws the conclusion at 2:18:59: “so that’s important to know is that we actually have added positions.” Disposition: several lines flagged for follow-up with the special-education director, who is absent. See flag 7. |
| 2:21:21 | 14. Collective bargaining, correctly kept out of open session | Sprague: “So is it appropriate to talk about what the impact of any of the negotiated agreements are?” The business administrator: “Not yet.” Sprague: “That’s why I didn’t just learn it out. My inner voice is saying, don’t talk about that.” Disposition: not discussed. Two days later the board ratified three contracts in open session. See flag 10. |
| 2:23:36 | 15. Close — and the caucus | Whitney: “I mean, I’m oh, I already found a quarter of a million” … “Discretionary” … “And I, I mean, I can find 1.4 right now.” Sprague then closes the public part of the afternoon at 2:24:03: “Well I think we need to we need to caucus, I guess,” followed by “I think. Are we done with the admin? I think we may be. I don’t mean that like… that, but… We’re done,” the business administrator’s “We’re done. I’m sorry. You guys want,” and his thanks. Disposition: the administration leaves; the recording stops about half a minute later; nothing further is on any public record. See flag 2. |
Discussion timeline
Chronological, from the dialogue file. Times are the transcript’s own start seconds, rendered from the same number that the link seeks to, so text and link cannot disagree. Timestamps link to the same moment in the Cablecast recording. Quotations are reproduced exactly as the speech recognizer rendered them: square brackets mark an insertion or correction and the garbled wording is kept visible wherever the correction changes the sense; repeated stutters are sometimes condensed; nothing else has been smoothed and no missing word is supplied. Hover over (or Tab to) a clipped cell to read the full text.
| Time | Topic | What was said | Flags |
|---|
| 0:00:13 | The chair calls it a caucus, in the first sentence | Sprague: “Well, good afternoon everyone. It’s 1:00 on, What is today? Monday the 18th. Monday the 18th. And we’re here to look at the the budget and have a caucus with our with the three of us who are the budget finance committee. And so I spent a little bit of time on actually a lot of time on Saturday going through additional clarifications that I need.” Then, at 0:00:39: “Most of it is around, specificity around staffing. And so I think all of us have some questions. I didn’t I did not hear, from any of the other board members. So as far as questions about the budget.” No call to order, no roll call, no statement of authority. | HIGH HIGH |
| 0:01:08 | “There’s no way I can present this to the board on Wednesday night” | Crawford, before any administrator is in the room: “I would just like to say at this point, there’s no way I can present this to the board on Wednesday night. There are too many questions. There’s too many unanswered. There’s too much information that we don’t have to make a sensible, summary of of what this budget budget includes and what the reasons are for the others being included.” And at 0:01:30: “There are too many questions, and I do not feel comfortable explaining that to the rest of the board as yet.” Two days later she voted to send the budget to hearing. | MEDIUM |
| 0:01:37 | The default budget is put on the table, and taken off | Whitney: “For me, I would go to the default budget would be my recommendation if we don’t have clarity.” Sprague, at 0:02:33: “No. Nullifies all the negotiations.” Crawford at 0:02:35: “I’m not ready to say a default budget exists regardless of what we do. However, I think that there’s still work to be done on this budget before it goes to the full board.” The default budget was in fact on the March 2024 ballot, at $35,906,774 against a proposal of $36,117,407 — a difference of $210,633. | |
| 0:03:06 | Whose problem the unanswered questions are | Whitney: “I think we have some legal constraints on when we have to be.” Crawford, at 0:02:56: “No, that’s not our problem. It’s their problem to get us the answers.” Whitney: “No, I recognize that. But in in the event that we do not get the answers, we still have to make a decision.” Crawford at 0:03:30 lays out an alternative calendar — “The 10th or 11th in January and it gives us the 16th or 17th in January. To act on this, it gives the administration a chance to answer these questions” — noting that 3 January had been chosen only as a snow buffer. | MEDIUM |
| 0:04:13 | What a budget is for, and what this one does not say | Crawford: “a budget represents what you expect to do in the coming year. And I think that there, the big the big problems for me is, I think the middle school has a lot of issues around staffing, and none of those answers have been achieved yet. I think, the elementary school, I have questions on the Paris [paras], the Paris [paras] in there.” At 0:04:45 she adds elementary social workers and field trips: “They weren’t in. They weren’t. They were requested at Dessner [Disnard] and we asked where they were.” | |
| 0:05:31 | The preschool: two district reports, two different numbers | Crawford: “What is the structure? What is the framework? What’s the oversight? What are the goals? What are the expectations? And we have two conflicting reports. We have one said that it’s going to be a $60,000 increase. The other says $100,000 increase. Clearly there’s no definitive plan regarding that issue.” The same discrepancy had gone unresolved at the 13 December meeting, where its author said on camera that it did not make sense to him either. | MEDIUM |
| 0:06:52 | ESSER has ended, and the $688,426.17 line still cannot be read | Crawford: “this Esser [ESSER] has ended and how the Esser positions either are phased out or incorporated into this budget is not clear at all. And I want to know where you know what’s happening with those. And the bottom line for me is district wide, the there’s an expense reduction line of 688,000 that I cannot make sense of.” | MEDIUM MEDIUM |
| 0:07:22 | The only overall figure spoken in the first hour — and it does not reconcile | Crawford: “And I’ve asked a number of times and I haven’t gotten the answer. The grand total right now is a million for over last year’s budget, and that’s a 16% increase. I don’t think that’s tenable. And I’m trying I’ve been trying hard to figure out where the increases are. And, I have not gotten any clarity on that.” quoted as the recognizer rendered it. “a million for” is the transcript’s text; no correction is supplied here. The stated percentage does not fit: an increase of roughly $1.4 million on the FY2024 appropriation of $34,880,312 is about 4 per cent, not 16. The district’s own document of 20 December puts the increase at 4.11 per cent. At 0:16:13 she reads a second pair of figures off the new sheet: “Goes up a million for this is the overall million seven.” | MEDIUM |
| 0:07:45 | The high-school schedule: union sign-off, and a $100,000 nobody can place | Crawford: “I fully support Stevens High School. Going to the more traditional schedule. I want assurance that SRA [SREA] has signed off on this, and I want to know where the $100,000 cost is, because in Mr. Tempesta document, he said that they’re going to that and it would be $100,000 cost.” And at 0:08:12: “I want to know how that, traditional schedule is integrated with the tech center schedule. And, I’d like to and the statement is that will reduce dropout rates. Tell me how.” | MEDIUM |
| 0:08:35 | The 13 December “sunset” handout, read into the record — the only copy the public has | Sprague: “So my one of the things we received from the administration on December 13th is this this handout.” Then, at 0:08:42: “the title of this page is sunset. Additional staff funded by federal Esser [ESSER] positions intended to mitigate student learning loss due to impact the impact of Covid. And then it is a number of things. And for example, if I look at the middle school, there are academic deans and CMS academic center structure remaining at CMS.” This document exists nowhere else in the public record. | HIGH |
| 0:09:13 | The sunset sheet’s numbers: $333,000 out, $133,000 out, $300,000 back in | Sprague: “When I look at CMS, I’m looking at a reduction in regular instruction of 333,000. I’m looking at a reduction of 133,000 in special ed. And then at the bottom, it says these programs have been added to individual school budgets in the fiscal year 25 budget. Estimated additional impact 300,000.” He restates it at 0:18:45: “it’s on the sunset. Additional staff funded by Esser [ESSER]… it talks about elementary and middle and below. It talks about middle and high school and estimated impact to the budget of 300,000.” The $333,000-against-$300,000 problem is the same one the committee failed to resolve five days earlier. | HIGH MEDIUM |
| 0:10:10 | “688 K is probably a dollar on the tax rate” | Sprague: “the real question I have is under district wide in its on page one of the, of the book and it’s the 688 K. Right. And I think we asked what is that. And I think we were told, they weren’t sure that’s what I heard. And so 688 K is probably a dollar on the tax rate.” Whitney, at 0:10:39: “that dollar amount is consistent with the amount of money that was put back into the budget last budget cycle. And Miss Henry said she could not. She knew that the bottom line was correct insofar as expenditures… But there was no documentation of how that money was allocated. So I don’t know if that from the previous business administrator.” | MEDIUM |
| 0:11:51 | The chair’s standing condition, restated for the fifth session running | Sprague: “So again I’m going to say the same thing I’ve been saying. I think every meeting I can’t. And you you said it, Heather, that we need to know if if the administration’s goals are as our goals, the same. Right. And I can’t make that determination unless I know what is this staffing. I have no idea when I when I look at special ed salaries, going up, or going down, say a district wide, what does that mean?” And at 0:12:28: “Where’s the money going? And so I, I don’t know where, where it is. And so how do I know?” | MEDIUM |
| 0:14:14 | The administration arrives — late, and still printing | Tempesta: “We have a new schedule and that’s why we’re a little late.” At 0:14:45: “Mary’s on her way. She had the summary that Frank wanted. She was just printing that. We got caught up printing.” And at 0:18:11: “Thank you. We knew we were a 15 minutes but.” The business administrator arrives at 0:16:25 distributing sheets, and at 0:18:06 tells Crawford the district-wide page is not in the set “because I’m not done with it, so I’m going to finish it.” Sprague, immediately: “So that’s where half my questions are is in district wide.” | OBSERVATION |
| 0:20:02 | The revised middle-school structure: no academic deans | Tempesta: “I’m looking at that slide right now, the 300,000 in specifically the academic I can we just finish some of the cleanup with the deans. And from the last meeting that’s what you’re looking at now.” At 0:20:32: “So we we have one assistant principal. Okay. One principal, no academic deans.” And at 0:22:22, the staffing rationale: “they could get by with a class size of about 16 if they had, five teachers, okay, per subject area. So that’s kind of the summary instead of the six that they have five for three grades.” | |
| 0:24:35 | The guidance-counsellor count — twenty minutes to establish three, going to two | Crawford: “this model, how does it the staffing at the middle school, one one full time social worker…” Whitney at 0:24:52: “they currently have three. Guidance come on top plus.” Tempesta at 0:25:26: “As her [ESSER] paid for the third guidance counselor. Yes, it was in the budget though.” It takes a further fifteen exchanges, and a correction from the business administrator at 0:29:00 (“I was I assume no because we had three in the budget”), to establish that the third post was budgeted rather than ESSER-funded. That an elected member, the superintendent and the business administrator needed twenty minutes to count the counsellors at one school is itself the measure of the missing packet. | MEDIUM |
| 0:27:43 | Two middle-school staff are introduced | Tempesta: “We have Miss Steel and Miss Foster from the middle school here, a counselor and a schedule extraordinaire who put this together.” Followed at 0:27:53 by “Very helpful.” Only one of the two is ever heard. Neither is given a first name at any point in the recording, and no minutes exist to supply one. | HIGH |
| 0:30:27 | What a career counsellor is, and whether a tech centre must have one | Opened by Whitney: “Let me ask a question. Why do we have a career counselor at the tech, when normally that sits within the guidance department at the high school?” Crawford answers from the visioning committee, at 0:30:58: “the career counselor work at the tech center is one who works out in the community with employers much more than the guidance person… It’s very different.” And at 0:31:57: “it does say that the tech centers will have a career counselor.” Whitney disagrees from her own experience elsewhere: “Then I don’t know what to tell you because we do not at Fall Mountain and we have we are we got our tech center under qualified and we do not have to.” Crawford closes it: “That’s not really material for us.” No document is produced on either side and the point is dropped. | |
| 0:33:23 | The teachers’ association: met, but not answered | Crawford: “You said you were going to meet with Syria [SREA] last week. Regarding the tech center, I mean, regarding the middle school changes.” Tempesta at 0:33:35: “I met with the SRE [SREA] about the high school schedule in the middle school schedule, and then they we gave them the documents and then we said, we know that there are some things in there that we may have to impact carbon. We have regular meetings with them.” Crawford: “It’s what was their response?” Tempesta at 0:33:51: “They said, yeah, we know. So when we when we see it, give us a breakdown and we will.” On 13 December he had told the same committee the meeting had not yet happened. | POSITIVE |
| 0:34:22 | The middle-school principal arrives, having covered a class | Romeo: “About four teachers and administrators. So I sub today, so I apologize. Just getting over here.” Whitney: “You don’t have to go to the gym now. You ran.” The staffing shortage the committee is budgeting for is the reason its principal is late to the meeting about it. | |
| 0:35:50 | The case for the seven-period day: more instructional time, fewer teachers | Romeo: “looking at positions that we have not been able to fill and understanding a teacher shortage…” At 0:36:20: “right now our teachers teach three out of the five blocks that we have.” And at 0:37:07: “We’re able to extend our schedule out another block, which takes us from 56 minutes to 42 minutes, roughly of instructional time. Right? 45.” Then at 0:37:34: “we are giving our teachers more time with our students by extending out the blocks that we have.” | |
| 0:38:52 | The schedule, from its author | Foster: “So we have five teams in essence working within the building for each grade. So there’s two in sixth grade. There’s a one group that is two thirds of the seventh grade. That’s a team. You have a two thirds eighth grade team. And then you have a one third, seventh, one third, eighth. So each of those has a set of four teachers to it right for the content areas.” Romeo at 0:40:45: “We have seven a seven period day the one period is lunch which is 90 minutes. It’s broken up into three. And that’s our enrichment.” | |
| 0:44:24 | The academic centres will be staffed by the teachers themselves | Foster: “based on the proposal that I’ve put together, every teacher has two student center blocks per week, where they’re pushing into those student centers. And I will say, like the behavioral and academic does go hand in hand because a lot of those behavior, if they’re in their behaviorally, a lot of times it’s because they are they have lagging skills in their content area.” Crawford, at 0:45:32: “there’s no staff for these learning centers other than the teachers on a rotation basis.” Foster at 0:46:28: “There’s no regularity… for that.” | |
| 0:55:19 | “don’t call it a behavioral specialist” — a budget line renamed on the record | Sprague: “So my suggestion is don’t call it a behavioral specialist. Call it call. Call it what it is. I brought the model to Stevens with the discipline monitor. And this was a person who handles low end things. Tier one. And so I don’t have to chase down Tardis [tardies] as the principal.” At 0:55:48: “this is the person that bird dogs minor infractions. Is that what you’re describing?” Romeo: “That is what I’m describing.” A budget line was renamed on the record to match what it actually buys. | POSITIVE |
| 0:56:31 | The centres in the proposal are unstaffed, and their author says so | Crawford: “There’s a principal, an assistant principal, a full time social worker at the middle school, two guidance counselors, and the, academic centers would be unstaffed. Would there be a campus monitor?” Romeo at 0:57:35: “They’re not in this budget currently. I would like them to be.” And at 0:58:31: “in the model that we have that we gave you as a schedule, I have not put them in the budget.” Foster at 0:58:43: “that’s all I was tasked with doing and that’s why that’s all that addresses.” | POSITIVE |
| 0:59:03 | The business administrator corrects herself, unprompted | Having told the committee a campus-monitor post had been taken out, Henry goes back to it: “I need to correct myself. Yes. It is still in there. Thank you.” And at 0:59:09: “2 to 2 campus monitors. One is listed and I need to it’s assistant athletics, but it needs to be slash campus monitor. That’s my bad for not putting that.” Nobody had caught the error. | POSITIVE |
| 0:59:25 | The budget impact of the middle-school redesign, asked four times | Sprague: “According to the sheet. We were given its about 40… 30 36,000.” Whitney at 1:00:03: “A decrease of 600,000.” Crawford: “638,000. But that’s assuming that the figures for budget were right… It’s assuming that last year’s budget numbers are accurate and we’ve discovered them on.” Henry at 1:00:55 supplies the real driver: “the biggest reason why or one of the reasons why you’re dropping there is because of the special ed added district placements.” Crawford at 1:01:48: “on page 18 a Sped tuition is down 425,000.” The isolated cost of the redesign is never produced — Romeo at 1:04:03: “Do not have that information.” | MEDIUM |
| 1:07:22 | $85,000 over on teacher salaries — with posts unfilled | Henry, volunteering it after the principal leaves: “Just so everybody knows to in this year’s budget so far we’re $85,000 over budget and teacher salaries based on this year’s budget in the middle school.” Crawford: “you’ve spent more than 80/85,000 over your current budget? Correct. Even though you haven’t been able to staff some of the positions.” Henry at 1:07:44: “We’ve staffed some. But we’ve stopped them late. So actually we would have been over budget by more than that if we had staffed them at the beginning.” The explanation offered at 1:08:26 is hiring at higher steps: “It depends if we hired in people at higher wages.” It is offered as a hypothesis, not a reconciliation — at 1:09:25: “I would have to go back to confirm that, double check it.” | MEDIUM |
| 1:14:14 | Three empty classrooms at Bluff, and no rooms for the teachers anyway | Henry: “I’ve got two open positions or three open positions that I didn’t put a dollar value on. In fiscal year 24… Grade three and grade four. Correct. We don’t have filled.” Sprague at 1:14:39: “Do we have three empty rooms at bluff down?” Crawford: “What’s happening to those kids.” Whitney: “they’ve combined.” Henry: “And we’re splitting them back out again.” The point returns at 2:03:11, Sprague: “That’s why I ask the question about bluff putting the teachers. And there’s not even rooms for those teachers to be in.” | |
| 1:18:16 | Field trips: budgeted at one elementary school, not the other two | Crawford: “in this new budget that we, that you just gave us, where are the field trips listed?” Henry: “That is a good question. That probably is. I’m not sure I’m going to have to find out for you. I apologize, I don’t know.” At 1:18:41: “bluff did not include any because they said that the PTO pays for it. So they didn’t add it.” Crawford: “I asked specifically to see if it’s part of curriculum. Why isn’t it included in the other two schools?” Henry: “I will have to ask Christine why she’s not.” A question first asked on 13 December, still unanswered five days later. | OBSERVATION |
| 1:20:43 | Paraprofessionals, counted school by school — and 116 down to under 70 | Crawford works through the counts the principals had given: “Maple said there were 22… and bluff said there were 18 pairs [paras].” Henry at 1:21:01: “Maple has 22 pairs [paras] according to this budget… I’m going to go back to that. We need to talk to Ben because there may be a reason why Ben feels 11 was what they needed.” Tempesta at 1:22:43: “When Ben started, I think he had 116 powers [paras] in these cuts to under 70.” And at 1:22:31, on the constraint: “They have to follow IEPs as the big, you know, we would never deny it if it’s needed. But it used to be just a practice that each grade got so many.” | |
| 1:23:33 | “The bigger elephant in the room” — the tax rate | Sprague: “I want to circle back to, the bigger the bigger elephant in the room, which you brought up a little bit earlier. And that’s the impact on on taxes.” Henry at 1:24:00: “Plus I just got you a new tax rate. Your tax rate dropped.” And at 1:24:24, on why: “you guys gave back over one point, what, $6 million the previous year or two. So when you did that, you didn’t have it in the new year.” “over one point, what, $6 million” is the transcript’s text; at 1:50:18 she puts the same figure at “1.2 million in the last fiscal year”. No correction is supplied here. | |
| 1:25:32 | The assessment base: $747 million to $1.228 billion | Henry: “It’s one 1,228,844,331.” Sprague: “So roughly 1.2 billion.” Henry at 1:25:55: “And then 22, your amount was 747,000. No, 747,000. Yep. $280. So you guys almost doubled year.” Sprague at 1:27:29: “everybody’s assessment, just for perspective, went up a minimum of 56% or something like that. Yeah, I think the minimum was 50 for residents. It was at average 56% or something like that for residential.” His conclusion at 1:27:56: “if we were looking in real numbers, apples to apples, it’s like $1.60.” $747,000,280 to $1,228,844,331 is an increase of about 64 per cent, not a doubling. | |
| 1:27:03 | The conversion factor: $0.81 on the rate for every million of budget | Henry: “So for every million on the tax rate, you’re looking at $0.81, roughly for every 100,000. Every $300,000 of.” Restated at 1:28:07: “so every for every million. Million goes up $0.81.” Her first estimate, at 1:28:24: “In 38 is what I have at $1.7 million 38” — which Sprague reads back at 1:28:31 as “What is that. $1.38 is the real cost”, and repeats at 1:40:24: “the real increase, besides the tax rate, but also the impact of higher assessments is roughly, whoops, $1.38 on the million.” | MEDIUM |
| 1:29:13 | The $100,000 in the superintendent’s own handout, tested to destruction | Crawford: “Mr. Tempesta in, in your hand out of the 13th. It says that the, changing from the high school from the block to traditional would be a cost of $100,000.” Tempesta, at 1:29:36: “Yes.” Then at 1:30:14: “the only reason I put that in, Mr. Pratt thought that he could do it neutral with the with them teaching six at a small period of time.” Crawford: “Then why did you put 100,000?” Tempesta: “Because he wasn’t quite sure. I thought it might have been one academic…” Whitney completes it and closes it: “Teacher, but currently this 100,000 is not in the budget.” Sprague: “Not in the budget.” Tempesta at 1:30:33: “No. All these were estimates.” | MEDIUM HIGH |
| 1:30:44 | A cost nobody had priced: moving the alternative programme off campus | Sprague: “He did. He did. He factor in textbooks?” Crawford at 1:31:16 turns to the alternative programme: “The special ed for the all Ted [alt ed] apparently there’s. Is there any added cost.” Whitney at 1:31:37: “We don’t have an estimate on what it’s going to cost to move them off campus.” Crawford at 1:31:53: “there was no cost built in for that. No.” Three weeks later Crawford found this programme zeroed out of the budget entirely, at about $240,000, and said the committee had not been told — a fact from the 5 January 2024 recording, not this one. See flag 3. | MEDIUM |
| 1:32:01 | The preschool: $60,000 or $100,000, and 35 children | Crawford: “for the preschool, there was a difference. Ben had 60,000. You had 100,000. So I guess the 60,000 is more the figure.” Tempesta: “Yeah. His. If he’s revised. Yes.” She restates it at 1:36:55: “in Ben’s budget there was 60,000. In Mr. Tempesta it was estimated at $100,000 increase. And and that was for approximately 35 students.” Tempesta at 1:37:13: “Oh, no. I think 85 over the course of the year.” And at 1:37:23, on why typically developing children are needed: “you have to have the program for special ed students, but they have to have typical peers.” The discrepancy is resolved by inference, with its author absent. | MEDIUM |
| 1:32:46 | The document carrying 70 per cent of the chair’s questions never arrives | Sprague at 1:32:38: “my alternate probably 70% of my questions have to do with district wide.” Whitney: “So do we want to touch on district wide?” Sprague: “Right now we don’t have.” Henry: “The I actually got it done. I just haven’t sent it to you. But you guys don’t have it in front of you, so.” And at 1:32:52: “I don’t know who I can get to print it.” The section was eventually worked through forty minutes later off a single sheet, at 2:13:38. | OBSERVATION |
| 1:32:58 | “I don’t think we are ready to present to the school board on Wednesday night” | Crawford, for the second time. Sprague at 1:33:10: “we would have to tell them this is this is your target. We would have to tell them that today.” And at 1:33:23: “We have to develop a a recommendation for a target number for the rest of the board.” Crawford at 1:33:35: “if we can’t give this to the board Wednesday night, I don’t know how we can have a hearing on January 3rd.” Whitney: “The hearings been warned.” The hearing went ahead on 3 January. | MEDIUM |
| 1:34:45 | The plan: go away, read it alone, come back | Sprague: “Well, let’s, Let’s do this. Let’s get the district wide, look at it on our own, and then, we are what our concerns are. But I think, I think I really think that, one thing we can do today is sort of come up with a, with a target number of what we think is palatable for, for passing.” He adds a request in the same breath: “can you calculate what the impact of the Secretary’s and the camp see [CAMCE] is also.” An extra session that week was floated at 1:34:23 and abandoned over diary conflicts, one of them the chair’s bowling night. | HIGH |
| 1:35:42 | A paraprofessional negotiation, and two of three members asking to attend | Tempesta: “We’re going to talk after we talked to Matt today” — then, at 1:35:52: “So, yeah, we shouldn’t talk about this right now.” Crawford at 1:35:56: “So should Frank and I be there? Should we plan to be there? That’s the only reason I’d like to talk about it.” Tempesta at 1:36:02: “No, no, I get it. We can. We can talk after… We have a couple things modeled, and we want to just check in so we shouldn’t talk.” Two of three members is a quorum of this committee; collective-bargaining strategy is expressly outside the definition of a “meeting”, so the exchange is lawful on its face. See flag 10. | POSITIVE |
| 1:41:39 | “This group, the three of us need at least one more meeting” | Crawford: “I think this group, the three of us need at least one more meeting. I would like to look through this budget. I’ve got a lot more.” She then sets out the method she would use, at 1:42:11: “If I look at a target, tax impact of, let’s say $0.75. Okay. And which would be cutting. Now I know how much that, how much that means.” Sprague converts it at 1:42:39: “slightly under $1 million, then.” Crawford at 1:42:41: “now that I understand the budget, I can see where I would have to cut to get that reduction in the tax rate.” | HIGH MEDIUM |
| 1:43:25 | The board chair rejects the target-first method | Whitney: “I just think we’re looking at it the wrong way. Okay. I think we should do is we should have what our priorities are.” And at 1:43:33: “What our academic priorities are. Agree. But and then we just before so what minimum what can we do at a bare minimum and work from there.” At 1:44:21: “I need to know what what is discretionary. And that’s really all I need to know.” Sprague reduces it at 1:47:21: “I’ll put it in simple terms. So the must haves and the nice to haves true.” | |
| 1:44:59 | What is actually being added | Whitney: “So for instance we have three social workers that we’re adding. Okay. Yeah. We’re also adding a pro…” then “We’re adding a change in the schedule… At the at the Stevens High School.” Crawford at 1:45:21: “Testing a teaching program at the Stevens High School, the art, additional art.” Whitney at 1:45:30: “I don’t think we’re adding an additional teacher. We’re buying supplies, which is like a one. So and I’m really focusing on legacy cost.” Sprague at 1:44:55: “significant amount of it is is out of district placement.” | |
| 1:48:39 | The board chair on pay, and on what the district is asking of its staff | Whitney: “in my world, if you’re a staff nurse and you work on the floor, you get paid less than you do if you work in the intensive care unit.” At 1:49:00: “what we’re asking our teachers to do in this district, given its current environment, is we’re asking a lot more than they’re being.” Tempesta pushes back at 1:48:19: “Teaching staff is competitive. Now. Total compensation for teachers right now is competitive in the region.” Crawford draws the conclusion at 1:48:28: “Then we should be able to… fill all our staff positions.” | |
| 1:50:05 | The number a resident would feel: $14.14 to $15.33 | Henry: “It’s $1.19… Per 100,000. So on $100,000 home, you’re looking at $119.” At 1:50:18: “This current budget that I have in front of me with all the revenues that I have based on what the budget is, again, that could change a little bit. I have 119. If everything holds true based on your values, you’re going from 14, 14, to $15.33. Again, you gave back 1.2 million in the last fiscal year to come off the tax rate for fiscal year 22, fiscal year 23, we gave back 360,000.” And at 1:51:08: “This is with nothing coming off the tax rate.” The three figures cohere: $15.33 less $14.14 is $1.19. | MEDIUM |
| 1:51:47 | What the district is legally required to provide, according to the chair | Sprague: “somebody give an example of, of nice to have some must haves. So we, we must have a special ed program for preschool kids.” At 1:52:09: “That depends on your model. You’re only required to provide services to special ed kids. That’s the requirement.” this is a board member’s characterization of the district’s obligation, offered in discussion. It is recorded here as what was said; no view is expressed on whether it states the law correctly. | OBSERVATION |
| 1:53:35 | The state minimum counsellor ratio, read accurately into the record | Sprague at 1:53:16: “Did I read Stephen’s [Stevens] High School right. That you have two guidance counselors there?” Whitney: “No, it’s 300 students per one guidance counselor. And we have under 600 students.” Crawford at 1:53:51: “Keep in mind that the state you’re talking about state minimums.” Whitney at 1:54:01: “when I look at the state minimums and I compare it to our district, we are still doing far, far better.” Crawford: “Well, yeah, because the state minimums are so under.” The figure is right — the rule then in force required one certified school counsellor per 300 students at middle and high school. | POSITIVE |
| 1:54:32 | “That’s where the catastrophe is” — the elementary schools | Whitney: “I am seeing what’s going on in the elementary schools. And that’s where to me, that’s where the flashing light is. That’s where the that’s where the catastrophe is to me is that we are not. We are I think our elementary schools are, are are the place where we could be making all the difference in the world long term, which would be frustrating, because it’s going to take a while to see a return on that investment.” At 1:54:57: “if I’m going to put dollars anywhere, anywhere, it would be early childhood intervention.” The superintendent agrees at 1:58:27: “I would invest in the elementaries.” | |
| 1:56:29 | Three minutes to the scheduled end; the committee sits on | Crawford: “We have two, two, three minutes on the.” Whitney: “I mean, I’m willing to go over if you guys are willing to go over, I’m willing to go over.” Sprague at 1:56:36: “But I don’t I don’t feel I’m closer to any closer to consensus than what we’re trying to do here. Right? So.” The session ran a further twenty-eight minutes. | POSITIVE |
| 1:59:17 | Two years of intervention spending, and no data on what it bought | Sprague: “what concerns me about the middle school proposal is that, what we got here talks about academics, learning loss, student learning loss. And what I’m hearing from Mr. Romeo is, social, emotional. And so, but we don’t we were never I mean, it would be would have been very helpful to have gotten over the last two years of pumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into interventions, again, most most of it being Esser [ESSER] money into deans and social, you know, social workers or whatever all these supports are.” At 2:00:03: “It would have been nice to see how they track their data, if it’s power school or Swiss [SWIS] data or what they have.” Whitney at 2:00:24: “unless it is mirrored or unless you see an increase in academics than to me it’s a meaningless number.” | MEDIUM POSITIVE |
| 2:03:33 | “I agree with Candy that I’d like to have a little more time” | Sprague: “Well, I agree with Candy that I’d like to have a little more time to look at it, but at the same time, I really would like to give administration some…” Whitney: “So what’s our bottom line?” Crawford: “Well, you said we can’t do that.” Tempesta at 2:03:50: “But we can. We can meet again tomorrow or Wednesday.” Whitney at 2:04:03: “I can get my big girl panties on.” And at 2:04:06: “I want to start from the least and go to the most.” No further meeting with the administration was held. | HIGH |
| 2:04:16 | “We’re looking at 1.783” — the largest budget figure spoken all afternoon | Sprague: “So, Mrs. Henry, so we’re looking at 1.783. So if that if we went with that budget, that’s going to be a dollar.” Henry at 2:04:26: “Dollar 19 with the, with everything that I, with all the revenues that I’ve estimated in. Yeah. Yes. It would be an increase of $1, dollar 19 or 100 and 1903 per 100,000. If the values remain the same.” And at 2:04:45: “So it’s $0.08 for every 100,000.” This is an increase, not a total. No total is spoken at any point in this meeting. An increase of $1,783,000 on the FY2024 appropriation of $34,880,312 is about $36.66 million — some $350,000 above the $36,313,407.97 the board moved two days later. See flag 3. | MEDIUM |
| 2:05:07 | “1.4 million or 9.15%” to be raised locally — and a third percentage | Henry: “So overall the net change because it’s 1.4 million, the net change of local tax assessment that needs to be raised is 1.4 million or 9.15%. So even though the budgets up 5.7%, the overall increase to the amount we have to raise is nine.” Whitney confirms it at 2:05:41: “we have to raise an additional 1.4 million locally for this budget as written.” Henry: “Locally you have to raise 1.4 million. Yes. Because that’s how much after the revenues that I have calculated.” the three percentages spoken this afternoon do not reconcile to one figure: an increase of “1.783” million on the FY2024 appropriation is 5.1 per cent, the district’s own document of 20 December records 4.11 per cent, and the figure spoken here is 5.7. All three are reproduced; none is corrected. | MEDIUM |
| 2:06:20 | The $688,426.17 line: “What in the world is that?” | Sprague: “Burning question that I have… So page 44 in the document you gave us today, okay, board voting, voted expense reduction.” Then, at 2:06:39: “What in the world is that?” Henry at 2:06:41: “this is a number I told you that a little bit out there that when the budget was uploaded, Dave, Jack [Dave Jack] and I had this number. Dave told me about it, and then we went back and tried to figure out where it belonged. Had something to do with your guys? With the deliberative. I know a million was added back then, but I’m not sure what the 688,000.” “Dave, Jack and I” is the recognizer inserting a comma into the name of one person, David Jack of Municipal Resources Inc., the interim business administrator between April and July 2023 — a documented garble in this corpus that invents a second person. | MEDIUM |
| 2:07:31 | A number that cannot be made to go away | Sprague: “So if we take if we make that go away… I know, that’s why I want to make it go away.” Henry at 2:07:16: “I can’t I can’t make it go away. What it’s doing is it’s increasing our budget. It’s adding back into it.” And at 2:07:31: “I don’t know what it’s allocated to. So I could go back and look at some of the 44 that were overspent on and I could allocate that money around, but it’s still not going to change our bottom line.” Whitney at 2:07:25: “I because we don’t know, but we don’t know where it is allocated.” | MEDIUM |
| 2:08:52 | The prior-year comparatives do not match the prior year’s spreadsheets | Henry: “we’ve gone back and I’ve looked at spreadsheets that had been done by my pre…” and at 2:09:23: “if you add up like one of the numbers and they say 300,000, but it’s really 325,000 on the spreadsheet, that’s where I was.” Sprague’s summary at 2:10:18: “what we’re finding is throughout the, throughout the whole budget, there’s it’s like mining Bitcoin. There’s these little pieces of things that don’t that that don’t match.” Then the crucial concession, at 2:10:32: “so at some point you have to put a number in that reconciles the two columns. Right. And that’s the number.” Henry: “Right. That was the number that reconciled it.” | MEDIUM |
| 2:11:35 | A forensic audit, raised by the board chair and declined | Whitney: “So at what point is a forensic audit?” Henry at 2:11:39: “I had a talk with our audience [auditors] about that. I don’t feel there’s any reason for a forensic audit. I don’t feel there’s anything that has happened that would be considered,” and at 2:11:53: “You’re going to spend a whole lot of money on the friends [forensic].” Whitney’s reason, at 2:11:56: “Got it put to rest where the money went.” Henry at 2:12:02: “a forensic audit is not cheap. Now, could I do that audit and go back and look? Yes. But again, I don’t know if it’s really worth it at this point because the bottom line is the bottom line, regardless, the budget is is what was voted on.” The district commissioned a forensic audit in 2026. | MEDIUM |
| 2:12:37 | Why the comparison to this year cannot be trusted | Crawford: “when we compare our next year’s expect, you know, budget compared to this year’s, this year’s is not as accurate as it could be…” and at 2:13:00: “that’s why the comparison to last year’s or this year’s budget is…” Henry completes it: “A little off.” And at 2:13:12: “we need to get through our budget process. Right. And then I could go back an… But that’s going to take me some time. And right now I just, I, I have so many other things get done before.” The comparative column that the budget statute requires is the one the officer producing it says is unreliable. | MEDIUM |
| 2:13:38 | The district-wide sheet, at last — ESSER posts moving into local taxation | Sprague: “can I talk about district wide for just a minute? Sure. Since I got it here. So I’m looking at it’s a single sheet. So the art coordina…” and at 2:13:57: “First. First cluster. Okay, it’s under behavioral. Esser [ESSER] moved to a general budget.” He then finds behaviour interventionists at Bluff he thought had gone: “I thought we were getting rid of all of those” (2:15:09). Henry at 2:14:27: “Those were the ones that Ben had talked about keeping. I don’t remember his rationale.” | MEDIUM |
| 2:18:59 | “We actually have added positions” | Whitney: “so that’s important to know is that we actually have added positions.” Henry: “We have added in. I could add up maintain.” Whitney completes it at 2:19:10: “A multitude of esser [ESSER] position. Some of them probably had to, you know, make sense.” And her own partial count, at 2:20:40: “because I’m seeing a quarter of a million already in just salaries that were Esser [ESSER] funded last year.” Crawford at 2:20:51: “If you had 25% isn’t an average of benefits.” The salaries are on one page; the benefits on none. Henry at 2:20:36: “Not salaries and benefits. I can get you the total.” | MEDIUM |
| 2:21:21 | Collective bargaining, correctly declined | Sprague: “So is it appropriate to talk about what the impact of any of the negotiated agreements are?” Henry at 2:21:27: “Not yet. Because I haven’t been okay. Yeah.” Sprague at 2:21:29: “That’s why I didn’t just learn it out. My inner voice is saying, don’t talk about that. Okay. All right.” Two days later the board ratified the CAS, CAMCE and paraprofessional agreements in open session, with the tax impact of one of them stated as about 6.5 cents per $100,000 — from the district’s approved minutes of 20 December 2023, not this recording. | POSITIVE |
| 2:23:36 | “I already found a quarter of a million” | Whitney: “I mean, I’m oh, I already found a quarter of a million” … “Discretionary.” And at 2:23:51: “And I, I mean, I can find 1.4 right now.” Crawford, moments earlier at 2:23:27: “I can’t do it just because I don’t have enough information in my brain to figure that out.” Sprague at 2:23:19: “We haven’t talked about anything substantive with them.” These are the last three positions on the record before the doors close. | HIGH MEDIUM |
| 2:24:03 | “Well I think we need to we need to caucus, I guess” | Sprague, verbatim and complete: “Well I think we need to we need to caucus, I guess.” Then, at 2:24:10: “I think. Are we done with the admin? I think we may be. I don’t mean that like” … “that, but” … “We’re done.” Henry at 2:24:16: “We’re done. I’m sorry. You guys want.” Sprague at 2:24:19: “Thank you for doing this. Very helpful.” Henry, the last words on the tape, at 2:24:22: “Like I said, I’ll get you the other one for the, Any other ones?” The recording then runs about half a minute of room noise and stops. Everything the three members said to one another afterwards is outside the public record. See flag 2. | HIGH HIGH |
Items flagged for review
Flags are a reviewer’s aid, produced by reading the recording against the New Hampshire and federal law in force on 18 December 2023. They are not findings of violation and they are not legal advice. Each card names the rule it rests on and, where a provision has been amended since, says which text applied on the day. Where no verified rule supports a concern it is graded OBSERVATION and labelled as such. Severity tracks legal grounding, not importance. Because this meeting produced no agenda, no packet and no minutes, every card rests on the recording, on the recordings of the sessions either side of it, on the district’s approved board minutes of 6 and 20 December 2023, and on the district’s own budget document printed on 20 December 2023.
HIGH A full quorum of a public body sat for two and a half hours on the district’s budget with no notice, no agenda, no packet and no minutes — and two days later the district told the public in approved minutes that the minutes were online
Which limb this rests on. This project grades a missing record HIGH where the absence is unmitigated — a public body met, no minutes exist in any district share, and nothing on the record explains it — and MEDIUM where the record mitigates: someone on tape says minutes exist elsewhere or are coming, or the body lacked a quorum and transacted nothing, or the meeting was noticed and packeted and only the minutes are missing. This is the unmitigated limb. Every mitigating condition fails. All three members of a three-member committee were present for the whole session, so the committee sat with a full quorum for two hours and twenty-four minutes. It transacted a great deal short of a vote: it took the revised middle-school staffing model and the schedule that produced it; it established that the academic centres in that model are unstaffed and that the academic deans are gone; it extracted the superintendent’s account of his own $100,000 estimate; it received the tax-rate calculation that would carry the budget to the voters; it pressed the $688,426.17 expense-reduction line to the admission that it is a reconciling plug; it raised and lost a forensic audit; and it settled that it would not report to the board on Wednesday, before doing exactly that. No agenda and no packet exist either, so this is not a case of minutes alone going missing. And nobody on this recording says minutes exist, are being kept, or are coming. No one is present to keep them: the board’s clerk, appointed five weeks earlier, is neither there nor mentioned.
The legal frame, in the text in force on the day. The Right-to-Know Law’s definition of “public body” reaches “[a]ny legislative body, governing body, board, commission, committee, agency, or authority of any county, town, municipal corporation, school district, school administrative unit, chartered public school, or other political subdivision, or any committee, subcommittee, or subordinate body thereof, or advisory committee thereto.” That trailing clause is what carries this flag; it has stood unamended since 2008, 354:1. A finance subcommittee of a school board is therefore a public body in its own right, with the full notice and minutes duties. The governing version of RSA 91-A:2 was the one amended by 2023, 188:1, effective 3 October 2023 — eleven weeks before this meeting. It required notice posted at least 24 hours in advance in two appropriate places; minutes including “the names of members, persons appearing before the public bodies, and a brief description of the subject matter discussed and final decisions”; the names of the members who made or seconded each motion; and that “minutes shall be promptly recorded and open to public inspection not more than 5 business days after the meeting.” A draft satisfies the deadline. No notice for this meeting has been located, nothing was posted within five business days, and nothing has been posted in the two years and eight months since.
The district’s own answer, given two days later, and why it does not work. The approved board minutes of 20 December 2023 record, under item 6(b), Finance Subcommittee: “Subcommittee meetings and minutes are available online for people to review.” The first half is true and the second half is not. The meetings are online — that is why this page can exist. The minutes are not, because there are none: no minutes of any 2023 Finance Committee session exist in any district share, and none has since appeared. The sentence was written two days after this meeting, about this meeting among others, and a citizen who read the board’s approved minutes and went looking would have found only video. That is a distinct problem from the missing minutes themselves, and it is worth its own line: an approved public record tells the public that a record exists which does not exist. A week earlier the same item in the minutes of 6 December had put it accurately — “Sessions have been recorded on CCTV” — which is a claim about video and nothing more. Between 6 and 20 December the statement grew a second half it could not support.
Video is not minutes, and the gap is not academic here. A recording carries no list of members present, no list of persons appearing, no description of subject matter and no record of final decisions; RSA 91-A:2, II requires all four. The cost of relying on the tape instead is visible in this very meeting. Two middle-school staff are introduced at 0:27:43 as “Miss Steel and Miss Foster”; neither is ever given a first name, one of them never speaks, and with no attendance record this page cannot state with certainty who was in the room. The Cablecast entry for the show carries a custom field named Agenda whose value is null — the broadcast system has a slot for the document and the district left it empty.
Three documents survive only as speech. Two were handed out at the 13 December session and are read aloud here for the first and only time. The chair at 0:08:35: “one of the things we received from the administration on December 13th is this this handout”, and at 0:08:42 its title and content — “the title of this page is sunset. Additional staff funded by federal Esser [ESSER] positions intended to mitigate student learning loss due to impact the impact of Covid”, from which he reads “a reduction in regular instruction of 333,000… a reduction of 133,000 in special ed… Estimated additional impact 300,000” (0:09:13), and later “it talks about middle and high school and estimated impact to the budget of 300,000” (0:18:45). Crawford reads the second at 1:29:13: “Mr. Tempesta in, in your hand out of the 13th. It says that the, changing from the high school from the block to traditional would be a cost of $100,000” — answered “Yes.” Neither sheet has ever been posted, and neither is mentioned anywhere on the 13 December recording that produced them. The third is the budget version distributed at this meeting, which Crawford refers to three weeks later as “the 1218 budget” and which is likewise in no share (flag 5).
The district built the shelf and never used it. A Drive folder titled Claremont Finance Sub Committee, owned by sau6webmaster@sau6.org, was created on 27 October 2022 — fourteen months before this meeting — and contains no files. The district’s other subcommittee folders created the same day are likewise all empty. The first subcommittee material of any kind ever filed into the district’s main packets share is a folder created 18 August 2026, two years and eight months after this meeting.
In fairness. The committee did the opposite of meeting in private for the part of the afternoon it controlled: it broadcast the session live, as it had every session of the season, and it did so because the board chair had asked for exactly that on 1 December (flag 12). The statute requires availability for inspection, and nothing in this record shows anyone asking for these minutes and being refused; absence from Drive is not proof that no minutes were written. The committee took no vote, so no formal decision went unrecorded. Those facts reduce the harm. They do not discharge a minutes duty that attached to this body for this meeting, and they do not make the 20 December sentence accurate.
What would resolve this: dated minutes for 18 December 2023, or a working public link to wherever this committee’s minutes are in fact kept. What would sharpen it: a documented request to inspect them that went unanswered.
Sources: RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d) — “public body” includes “any committee, subcommittee, or subordinate body thereof, or advisory committee thereto” unamended since 2008, 354:1; the section runs I–VI only; RSA 91-A:2 as codified in 2023 (2023, 188:1, eff. Oct. 3, 2023) — 24-hour notice; minutes naming members, persons appearing, subject matter and final decisions, and the movers and seconders of motions, open to inspection within 5 business days the 2025, 112:1 additions — start time, end time, minutes-producer — take effect 22 Aug. 2025 and do not apply here; the mover/seconder clause is older, 2018, 244:1, eff. Jan. 1, 2019; RSA 91-A:1 — “the greatest possible public access to the actions, discussions and records of all public bodies”; approved Claremont School Board minutes, 20 December 2023; approved Claremont School Board minutes, 6 December 2023; Claremont Finance Sub Committee (Drive folder, created 27 Oct 2022, empty — verified 2026-08-29).
HIGH The public part of the afternoon ends with the administration being cleared from the room for a members-only caucus of a full quorum — and the recording stops. No caucus exemption in the Right-to-Know Law reaches a nonpartisan school board
What the record shows the caucus was. The word is not an afterthought: the chair uses it in his first sentence, at 0:00:13 — “we’re here to look at the the budget and have a caucus with our with the three of us who are the budget finance committee.” It was planned that way. On 1 December the board chair proposed it: “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”, and Crawford fixed the window: “And then the 18th at 1 to 3 p.m.” On 13 December the committee spent ten minutes on what it was: the chair thought it was “to caucus with with the the rest of the board”; the board chair corrected him — “The caucus on the 18th is just us” — and set its terms, “we’ve got three hours, two hours allocated. So admin is welcome but not required”; Crawford stated its purpose, “the caucus is on the 18th where we’re going to try to hash out what our recommendations are to present to the board.” all five quotations are from the 1 and 13 December recordings, not this one
What happens at the end of this recording. At 2:24:03 the chair says, in full: “Well I think we need to we need to caucus, I guess.” Seven seconds later, at 2:24:10: “I think. Are we done with the admin? I think we may be. I don’t mean that like” … “that, but” … “We’re done.” The business administrator answers “We’re done. I’m sorry. You guys want”, the chair thanks her, and her closing offer to send another schedule at 2:24:22 is the last speech on the tape. The Cablecast totalRunTime is 8,692 seconds — 2:24:52; the dialogue file’s last row ends at 2:24:25. The recording carries about half a minute of room noise after the administration is dismissed, and then it ends. This corrects a note in this project’s own attribution briefing, which records the closing line as “I think we need to caucus” and says “the tape stops the moment” he says it. The line is “Well I think we need to we need to caucus, I guess”, and the tape runs a further 49 seconds — long enough to carry the dismissal of the administration and the thanks, and not long enough to carry anything else.
What the record does not show, and this matters. There is no evidence on any public record that the caucus convened, how long it lasted, who stayed, what was said, or what was decided. The recording ends; there is no notice, no minutes, no attendance list and no product signed by the committee. What can be established is that the three members intended to caucus, that they cleared the room to do it, that a quorum of the body was present, and that two days later the chair presented “Finance Subcommittee Recommendations” to the full board and moved a budget figure forward. The rest is inference, and this page does not make it. That irrecoverability is not a side-effect of the problem; it is the problem.
Why calling it a caucus does not remove it from the Right-to-Know Law. Three steps, each in the text in force on the day. First, this committee is a public body: RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d) reaches “any committee, subcommittee, or subordinate body thereof” of a school district. Second, a gathering of all three of a three-member body to discuss the budget recommendation it exists to make is a “meeting”: RSA 91-A:2, I defines one as “the convening of a quorum of the membership of a public body, as defined in RSA 91-A:1-a, VI… for the purpose of discussing or acting upon a matter or matters over which the public body has supervision, control, jurisdiction, or advisory power.” Three of three is not a subset of the committee; it is the committee. RSA 91-A:1-a runs paragraphs I–VI only and contains no definition of “meeting”; the definition is at RSA 91-A:2, I. Any citation to a paragraph IX of RSA 91-A:1-a is to a provision that does not exist. Third, the statute’s one caucus exemption does not fit. RSA 91-A:2, I(c) excludes from the definition of a meeting only “A caucus consisting of elected members of a public body of the same political party who were elected on a partisan basis at a state general election or elected on a partisan basis by a town or city which has adopted a partisan ballot system pursuant to RSA 669:12 or RSA 44:2.” Every element fails here. There is no political party: RSA 671:30 provides that “Every school district in the state, except one having a special statute relative to election of its district offices, shall use the non-partisan ballot system for the election of district officers” — a provision in force, unamended, since 1979. Claremont school board members are elected as school district officers on a nonpartisan ballot, so none of them was “elected on a partisan basis”, none belongs to a party as a member of this body, and the two adoption routes the paragraph names are routes for town and city officers, not school district officers. The I(c) exemption is structurally incapable of covering a New Hampshire school board caucus.
Nor was it a nonpublic session. The only lawful way for this body to exclude the public from a discussion within its jurisdiction is RSA 91-A:3, which requires a motion stating the specific RSA 91-A:3, II exemption and a roll-call vote taken in public session, with minutes of the nonpublic session kept and disclosed within 72 hours unless sealed by a recorded two-thirds vote on a statutory finding. None of that happens. The words “nonpublic”, “RSA” and “91-A” appear nowhere in the dialogue file, there is no motion, no second and no roll call anywhere in the recording, and no exemption is named. So the gathering that follows is not a caucus the statute recognises and not a nonpublic session; on the face of the record it is simply an unnoticed, unminuted meeting of a public body — or, read the other way, the unrecorded second half of this one, which is the same defect wearing a different label.
Why HIGH rather than MEDIUM, and what changed. The 13 December page graded the caucus MEDIUM on the strength of three mitigations: the members had asked for it to be recorded, it was recorded, and it turned out not to be members-only. Two of those three hold only for the part of the afternoon the administration attended. The televised session is show 15451 and it is genuinely public. The caucus is what begins where that recording ends, and for the caucus itself the mitigation fails at the point it matters: it was not recorded, the administration was expressly dismissed before it, and nothing about it was minuted. On this project’s severity rule that is the unmitigated limb. It is also the moment the budget process most needed a record: the last thing said before the doors close is the board chair’s “I already found a quarter of a million… Discretionary… And I, I mean, I can find 1.4 right now” (2:23:36–2:23:51), and the first thing the public sees afterwards is a budget total two days later that nobody in this room ever said aloud (flag 3).
In fairness, and it is not nothing. The impulse to close the doors did not come from the administration or from a wish to avoid scrutiny: the board chair had asked on 1 December that the caucus be recorded, before anyone had raised a Right-to-Know question, and two hours and twenty-four minutes of the afternoon were in fact broadcast — more public deliberation on this budget than most districts produce in a season. The committee took no vote at any point, so no formal decision went unrecorded in the narrow sense. And a subcommittee whose members read a budget line by line on live television for five sessions is not a body hiding from the public. What it did not do was extend that practice by twenty more minutes, or write down what happened in them.
Sources: RSA 91-A:2, I — definition of “meeting”, and I(c), the party-caucus exclusion, quoted in full above the governing text was the one amended by 2023, 188:1, eff. Oct. 3, 2023. The 2023 codification carries subparagraph I(c) in word-for-word the same terms as the text served today — checked against both for this page on 2026-08-29 — so nothing in this analysis turns on which vintage is read; RSA 671:30 — “Every school district in the state… shall use the non-partisan ballot system for the election of district officers” 1979, 321:1, eff. Aug. 21, 1979 — unamended, so it governed on the day. Verified for this page 2026-08-29; RSA 669:12 — partisan official ballot system, available to towns for the election of town officers; RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d) — subcommittees are public bodies; RSA 91-A:3 as codified in 2023 — nonpublic sessions require a motion stating the exemption and a roll-call vote in public session amended by 2023, 189:1, eff. Oct. 3, 2023, which added paragraph IV; the I(b) motion-and-roll-call requirement is older and unchanged; Cablecast show 15451 — totalRunTime 8,692 seconds; Finance Committee dialogue, 1 December 2023 source of the board chair’s request that the caucus be recorded and of the 1–3 p.m. window; Finance Committee dialogue, 13 December 2023 source of “The caucus on the 18th is just us”; approved Claremont School Board minutes, 20 December 2023.
MEDIUM No budget total is spoken in two and a half hours; the increase on the table is about $350,000 more than the figure the board moved two days later, and no public record accounts for the difference
What is actually said about the size of the budget. Three numbers, and not one of them is a total. At 0:07:22, before the administration arrives, Crawford reads from the book she has: “The grand total right now is a million for over last year’s budget, and that’s a 16% increase.” quoted exactly as the recognizer rendered it. The stated percentage does not fit any reading: an increase of roughly $1.4 million on the FY2024 appropriation of $34,880,312 is about 4 per cent. No correction is supplied. At 2:04:16, near the end, the chair puts the current figure to the business administrator: “So, Mrs. Henry, so we’re looking at 1.783. So if that if we went with that budget, that’s going to be a dollar.” She confirms the consequence rather than the figure: “Dollar 19 with the, with everything that I, with all the revenues that I’ve estimated in… It would be an increase of $1, dollar 19 or 100 and 1903 per 100,000.” And at 2:05:07: “overall the net change because it’s 1.4 million, the net change of local tax assessment that needs to be raised is 1.4 million or 9.15%. So even though the budgets up 5.7%, the overall increase to the amount we have to raise is nine.” An increase, a tax rate and a local raise. The budget’s own bottom line is never stated.
What the board moved. On 20 December the chair of this committee moved “the budget in the amount of $36,313,407.97 to the budget hearing scheduled for January 3rd to 2024”, and it passed unanimously. that quotation is from the 20 December recording, not this one The district’s own Updated Claremont School District Budget 12.20.23 carries “Grand Total: 36,313,407.97” against an increase of $1,433,096.06, or 4.11 per cent, and is stamped Printed: 12/20/2023 2:06:15 PM — about four hours before the board met. That increase reconciles to an FY2024 appropriation of $34,880,311.91, which is the figure this corpus records for FY2024 to within nine cents.
The arithmetic, and what it makes of this meeting. An increase of $1,783,000 on that same base is $36,663,312. That is roughly $350,000 above the $36,313,407.97 the board moved forty-eight hours later. Read against the percentages the difference is the same: 4.11 per cent in the district’s document, against “5.7%” spoken in this room. So the answer to the question this page exists to settle — is this the meeting at which the $36,313,407.97 was assembled? — is: not on camera. The number in front of this committee while the recording was running was materially larger, and the reduction that produced the board’s figure happened somewhere between the tape stopping at 2:24:52 on Monday afternoon and 2:06 p.m. on Wednesday. this is arithmetic on figures drawn from two different records — a spoken increase here, a printed total in the district’s document — and the three percentages spoken in this room do not reconcile to a single total. It is presented as what the available figures imply, not as a number anyone stated.
The record does not leave it there: a member of this committee went looking for the same $350,000 and said so on tape. At the finance session of 5 January 2024, Crawford described her method — “every time we get a new copy, a new budget, I reference from the very last one where the differences are… we had one, two, three, four. So when I got the 212, 20 budget, I compared it because that was the one that was down 300 and something thousand, not the 688” — and then her question: “And so I was trying to determine where the 350,000. These are all big round numbers. Where it came from. And what I concluded is, on district wide special ed, it looks like, the alt ed was zeroed out.” She put the size of that single item at about $240,000, “comparing the 1218 budget to the 1220 budget to see where the variations were”, and located it: “this is page 42 of the 1220 budget… it’s the alternative support program. It’s all zeros for this next year.” The special-education director offered a partial account — “a teacher teaching position and two behavior specialist positions. I don’t know if that accounts for the full 224” — and Crawford’s objection was not to the saving but to how it arrived: “Why did all of those numbers get deleted? We weren’t informed that some program got cut. So you don’t cut out 240,000 without. I’m wondering where it went or why it went.” every quotation in this paragraph is from the 5 January 2024 recording, not this one The district’s 20 December document bears her out: its Stevens alternative-education lines run to $0.00 for the proposed year, against a (100.00) per cent change.
What that establishes, and what it does not. It establishes that a real, district-produced budget document dated 18 December existed; that it was about $350,000 higher than the one printed on 20 December; and that at least $240,000 of the difference was a programme zeroed out. It does not establish that the caucus decided it. On the contrary, the only committee member to speak to the point said the committee had not been told. So the natural reading — that the three members caucused and cut $350,000 — is not what the record supports. What the record supports is narrower and, for a reader trying to follow public money, worse: the figure moved by about a third of a million dollars in forty-eight hours across a gap in the public record, and three weeks later an elected member was still reverse-engineering it from two documents, one of which the public has never seen.
Where it went next. The hearing went ahead on 3 January 2024. On 17 January the board adopted “a budget for fiscal year 25 of $36,117,406.87” — a further $196,001.10 below the December figure. that quotation is from the 17 January 2024 recording The general operating budget that reached the March ballot was $36,117,407 against a default of $35,906,774.
Why MEDIUM. No provision requires a subcommittee to know a total on any particular date, and none is asserted to have been breached. The grade rests on the process-gap limb and on where the document was going. Under RSA 32:5 the budget must go to a public hearing at which “[a]ll purposes and amounts of appropriations to be included in the budget or special warrant articles shall be disclosed or discussed at the final hearing”, on forms carrying comparative columns of the prior year’s appropriations and actual expenditures. This committee was the board’s only line-by-line reviewer; its report was the board’s basis for sending the budget to that hearing; and at its last session with the administration it had no total, no reconciled prior-year comparatives (flag 4) and no full account of the ESSER positions being absorbed (flag 7). Two of the three members said on camera that they were not ready: Crawford twice, at 0:01:08 and 1:32:58, and the board chair as late as 2:23:51 was still finding $1.4 million she considered discretionary. Two days later all three voted to send the budget to hearing.
A related documentary gap. The approved board minutes of 20 December 2023 record the motion and its mover and seconder — “Frank Sprague made a motion to move the budget forward to the hearing phase, Jennifer Gallagher seconded” — but do not record the amount. The figure $36,313,407.97 exists in the public record only in the recording of that meeting and in the budget file itself. RSA 91-A:2, II requires minutes to carry “a brief description of the subject matter discussed and final decisions”; a final decision to advance a budget of that size, minuted without the size, is a thin description of it.
Sources: RSA 32:5 as codified in 2023 — budget preparation and public hearing; all purposes and amounts disclosed or discussed at the final hearing; comparative columns of prior-year appropriations and actual expenditures source note then ended 2021, 134:3–4; further amended by 2025, 144:1, eff. Aug. 30, 2025, which does not apply here; RSA 91-A:2, II as codified in 2023 — minutes to carry subject matter and final decisions; RSA 40:13 — official ballot (SB 2) procedure, under which the Claremont School District’s annual meeting runs in two sessions unamended since 2019, 192:2; Claremont School District, Updated Claremont School District Budget 12.20.23 — “Grand Total: 36,313,407.97”, increase $1,433,096.06, 4.11 per cent, printed 12/20/2023 2:06:15 PM; approved Claremont School Board minutes, 20 December 2023; School Board dialogue, 20 December 2023; Finance Committee dialogue, 5 January 2024; School Board dialogue, 17 January 2024.
MEDIUM A $688,426.17 line in the budget is a plug figure nobody can allocate, the prior-year comparatives are unreliable by the business administrator’s own account, and a forensic audit was raised by the board chair and declined
The line. The chair opens it at 2:06:20 as his “burning question”: “So page 44 in the document you gave us today, okay, board voting, voted expense reduction” — then, at 2:06:39, “What in the world is that?” Crawford had already named it at 0:06:52 as “an expense reduction line of 688,000 that I cannot make sense of”, and the chair had put its scale at 0:10:10: “688 K is probably a dollar on the tax rate.” The district’s own 20 December budget carries the line as Board Voted Expense Reduct at ($688,426.17) for FY2023–24, falling to zero in the proposal — which is why removing it reads as an increase.
The answer, in the officer’s own words. At 2:06:41: “this is a number I told you that a little bit out there that when the budget was uploaded, Dave, Jack [Dave Jack] and I had this number. Dave told me about it, and then we went back and tried to figure out where it belonged. Had something to do with your guys? With the deliberative. I know a million was added back then, but I’m not sure what the 688,000.” At 2:07:31: “I don’t know what it’s allocated to. So I could go back and look at some of the 44 that were overspent on and I could allocate that money around, but it’s still not going to change our bottom line.” And then the sentence that names what the figure is. The chair, at 2:10:32: “so at some point you have to put a number in that reconciles the two columns. Right. And that’s the number.” The business administrator: “Right. That was the number that reconciled it.”
Why that matters for the document the budget statute governs. RSA 32:5 requires the budget to be prepared on forms carrying comparative columns of the prior year’s appropriations and actual expenditures, and requires all purposes and amounts to be disclosed or discussed at the final hearing. On this recording the officer preparing those columns says they cannot be trusted. At 2:09:23: “if you add up like one of the numbers and they say 300,000, but it’s really 325,000 on the spreadsheet, that’s where I was.” Crawford draws the consequence at 2:12:37: “when we compare our next year’s expect, you know, budget compared to this year’s, this year’s is not as accurate as it could be”, and Henry completes the sentence: “A little off.” The chair’s summary at 2:10:18 is the one worth quoting to a taxpayer: “what we’re finding is throughout the, throughout the whole budget, there’s it’s like mining Bitcoin. There’s these little pieces of things that don’t that that don’t match.” An earlier instance is on the same tape: at 1:07:22 the district is $85,000 over on middle-school teacher salaries while posts stand unfilled, and the explanation offered — hiring at higher steps — is expressly a hypothesis: “I would have to go back to confirm that, double check it” (1:09:25).
The forensic audit. The board chair asks the obvious question at 2:11:35: “So at what point is a forensic audit?” The answer, at 2:11:39: “I had a talk with our audience [auditors] about that. I don’t feel there’s any reason for a forensic audit. I don’t feel there’s anything that has happened that would be considered,” and at 2:12:02: “a forensic audit is not cheap. Now, could I do that audit and go back and look? Yes. But again, I don’t know if it’s really worth it at this point because the bottom line is the bottom line, regardless, the budget is is what was voted on.” The chair’s stated purpose was narrower than fraud: “Got it put to rest where the money went” (2:11:56). Nothing was moved and no decision was taken; the exchange simply ends. The district commissioned a forensic audit more than two years later, in 2026.
Why MEDIUM. This is the control-weakness limb. Nothing here is concealed — the officer volunteers the whole account on live television, describes the figure’s origin, and offers to do the work if asked. No verified provision requires a district to eliminate a reconciling entry, and RSA 21-J:19’s audit requirement is permissive as to timing, so a decision not to commission an additional audit is not a missed deadline. What is flagged is the combination: an unallocated six-figure entry inside the comparative column that RSA 32:5 requires, carried forward into a budget going to a statutory public hearing, with the officer responsible saying she cannot say what it is for and has not the time to find out (“that’s going to take me some time. And right now I just, I, I have so many other things get done before”, 2:13:12).
In fairness. The business administrator had been in post about five months when this meeting took place, and the $688,426.17 predates her: she attributes it to the interim administrator who preceded her and to the deliberative session’s $1,000,000 restoration in early 2023. She does not defend the number, minimise it, or claim to understand it. She corrects herself elsewhere in the same session without being caught (flag 12). And her substantive point — that reallocating the figure would not change the bottom line — is arithmetically correct as far as it goes.
Sources: RSA 32:5 as codified in 2023 — budget on forms with comparative columns of prior-year appropriations and actual expenditures; all purposes and amounts disclosed or discussed at the final hearing; RSA 21-J:19 — audits of political subdivisions by independent public accountants cited for the holding only: the section does not impose a deadline of its own, so a late or additional audit is a control question rather than a missed statutory date; RSA 197:23-a — the district treasurer’s custody of district money and independent books of account context for why an unallocated reduction line matters; no treasurer conduct is in question here; 2 CFR 200.303 — non-federal entities must maintain effective internal control over federal awards engaged because ESSER-funded posts are being moved into the same general-fund lines; no federal finding is asserted; Updated Claremont School District Budget 12.20.23 — the Board Voted Expense Reduct line at ($688,426.17).
MEDIUM At least four successive budget documents were put to this committee during the FY2025 season; the district’s public shares hold one of them
The versions are named on the record. A fresh budget is distributed during this meeting — the business administrator at 0:26:03, “it’s in the new one because the one I just gave you”; Crawford at 1:18:16, “in this new budget that we, that you just gave us”; the chair at 2:06:20, “page 44 in the document you gave us today”. It is not the book the committee arrived with: Crawford is still comparing the two at 0:16:13 and 1:14:58. Three weeks later she counted them: “every time we get a new copy, a new budget, I reference from the very last one where the differences are okay. So it kind of builds, you know, we had one, two, three, four”, and she named two of them by date — “comparing the 1218 budget to the 1220 budget.” both quotations are from the 5 January 2024 recording, not this one
What the public has. One: Updated Claremont School District Budget 12.20.23, filed in the 20 December board packet. The 18 December version — the one worked through line by line on this recording, the one carrying the $688,426.17 line at its page 44, and the one whose difference from the 20 December document is the $350,000 of flag 3 — is in no district share. Nor are the two 13 December handouts (flag 1). Nor is the “summary that Frank wanted” that the superintendent says was being printed at 0:14:45, nor the district-wide report that never arrived at all (flag 8).
Why that is more than a filing complaint. A viewer watching this meeting live hears page numbers for two and a half hours — page 18, page 21, page 25, page 41, page 42, page 44, page 55 — against a document nobody outside the room can open. Every figure examined here is therefore unverifiable by a member of the public, in either direction: a citizen can neither check the committee’s arithmetic nor confirm that the administration’s sheets said what the committee understood them to say. The Right-to-Know Law’s stated purpose is “to ensure both the greatest possible public access to the actions, discussions and records of all public bodies, and their accountability to the people”, and RSA 91-A:2, II requires minutes to record “a brief description of the subject matter discussed” — which, for a meeting conducted entirely by page reference, is precisely what is missing. No request for these documents appears in this record, so no refusal is alleged; RSA 91-A:4, I’s inspection right is engaged only when someone asks.
In fairness. Producing a revised budget between working sessions is good practice, not bad: the committee asked for changes and got them, quickly, and the version handed out here incorporates the CMS restructuring discussed five days earlier. The problem is not the iteration; it is that four iterations reached three elected members and one reached the public, and the one that reached the public is the last.
Sources: RSA 91-A:1 — statement of purpose; RSA 91-A:2, II as codified in 2023 — minutes to include a brief description of the subject matter discussed; RSA 91-A:4, I as codified in 2023 — right to inspect governmental records paragraph I’s inspection right long predates the 2024, 49:1–2 amendments, eff. Aug. 13, 2024, which post-date this meeting; cited here only to note that no request was made; RSA 32:5 as codified in 2023; Finance Committee dialogue, 5 January 2024 source of “we had one, two, three, four” and of “the 1218 budget”.
MEDIUM Every cost figure the committee tested turned out to be an estimate its author could not stand behind, including two in a document the administration had issued five days earlier
The $100,000 high-school schedule change. Crawford, at 1:29:13: “Mr. Tempesta in, in your hand out of the 13th. It says that the, changing from the high school from the block to traditional would be a cost of $100,000.” The superintendent confirms it — “Yes” — and then unwinds it, at 1:30:14: “the only reason I put that in, Mr. Pratt thought that he could do it neutral with the with them teaching six at a small period of time.” Crawford: “Then why did you put 100,000?” Superintendent: “Because he wasn’t quite sure. I thought it might have been one academic…” The board chair closes it: “Teacher, but currently this 100,000 is not in the budget.” And at 1:30:33, of the whole sheet: “No. All these were estimates.” The principal whose judgement the figure rests on is not in the room.
The preschool: $60,000 or $100,000. The same discrepancy Crawford had listed at 0:05:31 — “We have one said that it’s going to be a $60,000 increase. The other says $100,000 increase. Clearly there’s no definitive plan regarding that issue” — is put to the superintendent at 1:32:01: “Ben had 60,000. You had 100,000. So I guess the 60,000 is more the figure.” He answers “Yeah. His. If he’s revised. Yes,” then supplies a third number at 1:37:13: “Oh, no. I think 85 over the course of the year.” Three figures, resolved by inference, with the author of the lower one absent — and this had already failed to resolve on 13 December, where the same author told the same committee his own sheet did not make sense to him.
The middle school’s $333,000 against $300,000. The sunset sheet shows a reduction in regular instruction of $333,000 and a note that the programmes have been added back to school budgets at an “Estimated additional impact 300,000” (0:09:13). Whether the $300,000 is on top of the $333,000 or funded by it had gone unanswered on 13 December, and it is not answered here either: the board chair puts the question again at 0:19:26 — “whether that was before or after the reduction of the teaching staff positions” — and the superintendent answers with the slide rather than the arithmetic.
The middle school’s own redesign is never priced. Asked four times what the new schedule costs or saves, the committee gets a school-level movement of about $638,000 (1:00:05) that is then attributed largely to special-education tuition and salaries moving to the high school (1:01:48) — and the isolated figure is never produced. The principal at 1:04:03: “Do not have that information.” Crawford’s conclusion, at 1:03:35: “the schedule is helpful… you folks did a good job explaining to us how you get the reduction of staff. We have a bigger” problem.
And one item with no figure at all. Relocating the alternative programme off the high-school campus. Whitney at 1:31:37: “We don’t have an estimate on what it’s going to cost to move them off campus.” Crawford at 1:31:53: “there was no cost built in for that. No.” Three weeks later the same programme was found zeroed out of the budget entirely (flag 3).
Why MEDIUM. No verified provision requires a working budget draft to be internally consistent, and none is asserted to have been breached. The grade rests on the control-weakness limb and on the destination: RSA 32:5 requires that all purposes and amounts of appropriations be disclosed or discussed at the final hearing, and these are the numbers that were fourteen days from that hearing. In fairness — and this is genuinely to the administration’s credit — every one of these concessions was volunteered under questioning rather than extracted after a denial, and the superintendent’s “All these were estimates” is an honest description of a document that never claimed to be more. The defect is that a document of estimates was the committee’s only written basis for a decision of this size, and that it was never published.
Sources: RSA 32:5 as codified in 2023 — all purposes and amounts of appropriations disclosed or discussed at the final hearing; gross-basis appropriations; RSA 40:13 — official ballot (SB 2) procedure; Finance Committee dialogue, 13 December 2023 source of the unresolved pre-K and $333,000/$300,000 exchanges five days earlier.
MEDIUM ESSER-funded posts are being absorbed into the local tax base and no one can say how many or at what total cost — nine months before the federal obligation deadline
What the committee establishes. Crawford states the problem at 0:06:52: “this Esser [ESSER] has ended and how the Esser positions either are phased out or incorporated into this budget is not clear at all.” The district-wide sheet, worked through at 2:13:38, turns out to be a list of exactly that: an arts coordinator “under behavioral. Esser [ESSER] moved to a general budget” (2:14:03), a board-certified behaviour analyst, an occupational therapist — “The occupational therapist I know was moved into the general budget from SR [ESSER]” (2:16:27) — a district-wide instructional coach “it was an air [ESSER] and now it’s going to be in district wide” (2:18:52), an ESL teacher, and behaviour interventionists at Bluff the chair believed had been removed: “I thought we were getting rid of all of those” (2:15:09). The board chair draws the conclusion at 2:18:59: “so that’s important to know is that we actually have added positions” — “A multitude of esser [ESSER] position.”
Nobody has the number. The only total offered is the board chair’s own partial count from one page, at 2:20:40: “because I’m seeing a quarter of a million already in just salaries that were Esser [ESSER] funded last year.” Salaries only — she has just confirmed at 2:20:32 that “these are just simply the salaries… These were not salaries and benefits”, and Crawford adds a rule of thumb rather than a figure at 2:20:51: “If you had 25% isn’t an average of benefits.” The business administrator can produce the total but has not: “I could do for you on those is I could get you the overall cost in the salaries, in an overall cost of everything else if you wanted it” (2:21:03). The one written figure anywhere near it is on the 13 December sheet the chair reads at 0:09:13: “Estimated additional impact 300,000”, for the middle and high schools alone. No ESSER balance is stated at any point, and no one asks for one.
Why the timing matters. ARP ESSER funds had to be obligated by 30 September 2024 — nine months and twelve days after this meeting — with liquidation within the following 120 days. The federal rule that carries the obligation period is the Tydings Amendment, 20 U.S.C. §1225(b), which makes formula funds available for one additional fiscal year; the closeout and liquidation rule sat at 2 CFR 200.344(b) in the text in force in 2023. Every post the district moved from ESSER into the general fund became a permanent local tax cost at the moment it moved, which is precisely what the board chair identifies at 2:18:59, and it is being identified for the first time in the last eleven minutes of the final working session of the budget season, from a single sheet, without the report that was supposed to carry it.
What is not asserted. No federal violation is alleged. Absorbing ESSER-funded staff into a local budget is exactly what districts were told to plan for, and the superintendent’s middle-school proposal is an attempt to do it by restructuring rather than by simply adding cost. What is flagged is that the committee approving the absorption never obtained its size, that the sheet listing it arrived without benefits attached, and that a member had to reconstruct even a partial figure from a page in front of him. 2 CFR 200.303 requires effective internal control over federal awards; a transition of this size with no running total is where such control would show.
Sources: 20 U.S.C. §1225(b) — Tydings Amendment: federal education formula funds available for obligation one additional fiscal year; U.S. Department of Education — ARP ESSER obligation deadline of 30 September 2024, liquidation by 28 January 2025; 2 CFR 200.344 — closeout: 120-day liquidation period the 120-day rule sat at paragraph (b) in the 2023 text and at (c) in the text eCFR serves today, after the 2024 Uniform Guidance revision; the 2023 lettering is the one that applied here; 2 CFR 200.303 — internal control over federal awards; RSA 32:5 as codified in 2023.
OBSERVATION The administration arrived fourteen and sixteen minutes late, still printing; the one document carrying most of the chair’s questions never arrived at all; and three questions first asked five days earlier were still unanswered when the session closed
The arrivals. The committee sat alone for fourteen minutes. The superintendent’s first words, at 0:14:14, are “We have a new schedule and that’s why we’re a little late”; at 0:14:45, “Mary’s on her way. She had the summary that Frank wanted. She was just printing that. We got caught up printing”; and at 0:18:11, “Thank you. We knew we were a 15 minutes but.” The business administrator arrives at 0:16:25, distributing sheets, and apologises at 0:18:17: “Okay one almost one before I apologize guys.” The middle-school principal arrives at 0:34:22 having covered a class: “So I sub today, so I apologize. Just getting over here.” Roughly one-tenth of a two-hour session ran without the officers who held the answers.
The document that never came. The district-wide section is where the chair says his questions are — “So that’s where half my questions are is in district wide” at 0:18:14, revised upward at 1:32:38 to “probably 70% of my questions have to do with district wide.” At 0:18:06 the business administrator explains it is missing “because I’m not done with it, so I’m going to finish it”, promises it digitally, and at 1:32:46 reports: “The I actually got it done. I just haven’t sent it to you. But you guys don’t have it in front of you, so… I don’t know who I can get to print it.” It was eventually worked through forty minutes later from a single sheet somebody had, at 2:13:38 — eleven minutes before the session ended.
The questions that outlived the meeting. Field trips: asked on 13 December, asked again at 1:18:16, answered “That is a good question… I’m not sure I’m going to have to find out for you.” Paraprofessional counts by school: deferred at 1:21:01 to a director who is not present. The isolated budget effect of the middle-school redesign: “Do not have that information” (1:04:03). The rationale for keeping behaviour interventionists at Bluff: “I don’t remember his rationale” (2:14:27). None was assigned an owner or a date, and with no minutes there is no list of them anywhere.
Why this is an OBSERVATION and not a flag with a rule behind it. No statute or rule sets a punctuality standard for administrators attending a subcommittee, requires a business administrator to have a report finished by a particular hour, or obliges a district to answer a member’s question within a set time. This is recorded because it is the practical mechanism by which the substantive flags on this page came about: a committee that cannot see the district-wide detail cannot test the district-wide numbers, and a committee with no minutes has no register of what it is owed. In fairness, the delay was caused by producing more material for the committee, not less — a revised budget and a new schedule, both prepared in response to the committee’s own questions five days earlier — and every officer apologised without being asked to.
Sources: this recording, at the times cited. No rule-based finding is made. RSA 91-A:2, II is noted only for the point that minutes would have produced a written list of the outstanding requests; it is not asserted as the basis of this observation.
OBSERVATION A member’s description of the district’s special-education floor, offered while the committee weighed a programme serving about thirty-five children
What was said. Testing where the “bare minimum” sits, the chair said at 1:51:47: “somebody give an example of, of nice to have some must haves. So we, we must have a special ed program for preschool kids” — and then, at 1:52:09: “That depends on your model. You’re only required to provide services to special ed kids. That’s the requirement. And those services are really just pr…” He develops the point at 1:52:41: “that’s an example of I think of. So we have to ask ourselves, you know, given the fact that we’re going to revamp that, do we want to inves…” The number of children in the programme had been stated at 1:36:55 as “approximately 35 students”, and the superintendent had explained at 1:37:23 that “you have to have the program for special ed students, but they have to have typical peers.”
Why it is recorded as a characterization and nothing more. The speaker was arguing a budget method — distinguishing a legal floor from a service level the district chooses — not delivering a legal opinion, and the sentence is cut off by the recognizer before it finishes. No view is expressed here on whether the characterization states the law correctly. A reader who wants to check it against the provisions themselves would read RSA 186-C, which states New Hampshire’s policy on educating children with disabilities and defines a “child with a disability” as one between the ages of 3 and 21 inclusive; 34 CFR 300.101, under which a free appropriate public education must be available to all children residing in the State between those ages; and 34 CFR 300.124(b), which requires that by a child’s third birthday an IEP or IFSP has been developed and is being implemented. Those provisions bear on what a district must provide and to whom; whether they permit the delivery model the chair had in mind is a question this page does not decide.
The related decision the committee did not get to make. The 13 December session had before it a proposal to delete the pre-K director post in order to part-fund a district special-education coordinator, put by a director who said on camera that he thought the district should have a pre-K director. That proposal is not resolved on this recording either. Its author was not in the room, and his own $60,000 estimate was reconciled against the superintendent’s $100,000 in his absence (flag 6).
Sources: RSA 186-C:1 — state policy on the education of children with disabilities; RSA 186-C:2 as codified in 2023 — “child with a disability” means a child “between the ages of 3 and 21, inclusive” further amended in 2025, after this meeting; 34 CFR 300.101 — FAPE must be available to all children residing in the State between the ages of 3 and 21, inclusive the regulation says “all children”, not “all children with disabilities”; quoted here in its own terms; 34 CFR 300.124(b) — by the child’s third birthday an IEP or IFSP has been developed and is being implemented.
POSITIVE Live collective bargaining was kept out of open session, correctly, and the officers said on camera why — then the agreements were ratified in public two days later
What happened. At 2:21:21 the chair asks: “So is it appropriate to talk about what the impact of any of the negotiated agreements are?” The business administrator: “Not yet. Because I haven’t been okay. Yeah.” The chair, at 2:21:29: “That’s why I didn’t just learn it out. My inner voice is saying, don’t talk about that. Okay. All right.” The same restraint appears earlier, from the other side of the table: at 1:35:52 the superintendent stops himself mid-topic on a paraprofessional meeting — “So, yeah, we shouldn’t talk about this right now” — and at 1:36:02 defers the logistics to a conversation outside the meeting: “We can talk after… we shouldn’t talk.”
Why this is right rather than evasive. RSA 91-A:2, I(a) places “[s]trategy or negotiations with respect to collective bargaining” outside the definition of a “meeting” altogether — so this is not an exemption that had to be claimed by motion, it is subject matter the open-meeting rule does not reach. Discussing a live paraprofessional negotiation across a public table would have disclosed the employer’s position to the other side mid-negotiation, which RSA 273-A:3’s good-faith obligation gives both parties an interest in avoiding. The committee got the doctrine right without a lawyer in the room, and the chair’s “my inner voice is saying, don’t talk about that” is an unusually candid piece of self-policing on live television.
And the sequence completed properly. Two days later the board took the agreements in open session: its approved minutes of 20 December 2023 record the ratification of the CAS and CAMCE contracts and of a one-year paraprofessional agreement, with the business administrator stating the tax impact of one of them as “about 6.5 cents per $100,000”, movers and seconders named, and one member’s abstention recorded. Bargaining strategy stayed private; the cost of the bargain was disclosed and voted in public. That is the order the statute contemplates.
One point recorded without criticism. At 1:35:56 Crawford asks “should Frank and I be there? Should we plan to be there?” about the Wednesday negotiation session. Two of three members is a quorum of this committee, so their joint attendance would ordinarily raise a notice question — but collective-bargaining strategy and negotiations are outside the definition of a meeting, so it does not. Noted here so that a reader who spots the quorum point can see it has been considered.
Sources: RSA 91-A:2, I(a) as codified in 2023 — “Strategy or negotiations with respect to collective bargaining” is excluded from the definition of a “meeting”; RSA 273-A:3 — obligation of the public employer and the certified employee organization to negotiate in good faith last amended 2013, 244:1; RSA ch. 273-A — public employee labor relations; approved Claremont School Board minutes, 20 December 2023 — ratification of the CAS, CAMCE and paraprofessional agreements in open session.
POSITIVE The state minimum staffing standard was read into the public record accurately, and used to open a question rather than close one
What was said. Testing whether Stevens High School’s two guidance counsellors were enough, the chair asked at 1:53:16: “Did I read Stephen’s [Stevens] High School right. That you have two guidance counselors there?” The board chair supplied the rule from memory at 1:53:35: “No, it’s 300 students per one guidance counselor. And we have under 600 students.” The figure is right. The New Hampshire minimum standards in force in December 2023 required one full-time certified school counsellor for every 300 students enrolled at middle and high school level. Two counsellors for a school of under 600 meets it.
What makes it worth a card. She did not stop at compliance. At 1:54:01: “when I look at the state minimums and I compare it to our district, we are still doing far, far better”, and Crawford immediately supplied the counterpoint at 1:53:51 and after: “Keep in mind that the state you’re talking about state minimums” … “Well, yeah, because the state minimums are so under.” Neither member treated the minimum as the answer — one used it as a floor to argue from, the other as a floor to argue against — which is the use a minimum standard is for. The exchange runs straight on into the board chair’s judgement that the elementary schools, not the secondary ones, are where the district’s problem is (1:54:32).
A vintage caution for anyone checking the citation. The rule quoted here was numbered Ed 306.15, “Provision of Staff and Staff Qualifications”, in December 2023. The Department of Education’s readoption effective 13 December 2024 renumbered the part: Ed 306.15 is now “School Year”, an entirely different rule. Anyone verifying this against the current Ed 300 rules will look at the wrong text.
Sources: N.H. Admin. Code Ed 306.15 as it stood in 2023 (“Provision of Staff and Staff Qualifications”) — one full-time certified school counsellor per 300 students enrolled at middle and high school recovered from the Department of Education’s own March 2023 side-by-side revision draft, existing-rule column; N.H. Admin. Code Ed 300 — current rules, as readopted effective 13 December 2024 the renumbering trap described above.
POSITIVE Four officials conceded the limits of their own proposals on live television without being caught out first, and the committee sat twenty-eight minutes past its allotted window rather than cut the questioning short
The concessions. The middle-school principal, asked whether the staff his model needs are funded, at 0:57:35: “They’re not in this budget currently. I would like them to be”; and on the data the committee wanted, at 1:04:03: “Do not have that information.” He also stated the limit of his own advocacy, at 1:04:37: “I get and I know you have to do what you do. My job is to absolutely advocate for the needs of my building.” The schedule’s author bounded her own document at 0:58:43: “that’s all I was tasked with doing and that’s why that’s all that addresses.” The superintendent, on his own $100,000 estimate at 1:30:33: “No. All these were estimates”; and, asked whether textbooks had been costed, at 1:31:09: “you know, I never asked that specific question. So that’s a good. Catch there.” The business administrator corrected herself, unprompted and against her own account of a minute earlier, at 0:59:03: “I need to correct myself. Yes. It is still in there. Thank you”, and named the error as her own at 0:59:09: “That’s my bad for not putting that.” In none of these cases had the committee caught the point first.
The time. The session was booked 1 to 3 p.m. At 1:56:29 Crawford flags the clock — “We have two, two, three minutes on the” — and the board chair answers “I mean, I’m willing to go over if you guys are willing to go over, I’m willing to go over.” They went over by twenty-eight minutes, and the whole of the district-wide review, the $688,426.17 exchange and the forensic-audit question happened in that overrun. Every substantive finding on this page after 1:56:29 exists because three volunteers stayed late.
And the reason any of it can be checked. This session is public because a member asked for it to be. On 1 December, proposing the members-only session, the board chair said: “For a caucus. I would like it still to be recorded and we can have a discussion.” that quotation is from the 1 December recording, not this one Nobody had raised a Right-to-Know question; the request came from inside the committee. Two hours and twenty-four minutes of it duly went out on the district’s channel and can be watched today. That instinct is the single most creditable fact in this record — and it is also what makes the last twenty minutes, which nobody recorded, so conspicuous (flag 2).
Sources: this recording, at the times cited; Finance Committee dialogue, 1 December 2023 source of the board chair’s request that the caucus be recorded. Recorded as good practice observed, not as compliance with any rule; no provision requires any of it.
Appendix — source files
Official and public sources
- Recording: Claremont Community Television, Cablecast show 15451 — “School Board Finance Mtg 12/18/23”. Title reproduced exactly as the Cablecast API returns it, confirmed 2026-08-29;
totalRunTime 8,692 seconds (2:24:52), eventDate 2023-12-18T00:00:00-05:00. The show record carries a custom field Agenda whose value is null. The dialogue file’s last row ends at 2:24:25.
- No agenda and no packet exists for this meeting in any district share. No minutes exist, for this session or for the caucus that followed it. The search was two-stage, as this project’s convention requires before a negative is written: (1) the meeting’s own date and the surrounding folders — the 2023 Meeting Documents archive and the next board meeting’s packet folder, 28. CSB 12.20.23, whose five documents are listed in MAP.md §35 and contain no Finance Committee material; (2) every later folder by filename date, plus both candidate year folders in the district’s Meeting Minutes share, every entry in which is a full-board, deliberative-session or public-hearing document. Recorded in MAP.md §34 as verified 2026-08-28. Drive title searches for
12.18.23, 12-18-23, 121823 and 12.18.2023, re-run independently for this page on 2026-08-29, return nothing at all, from any share. Method caution: this project has established that the Drive search API under-reports on these shared folders — a folder-contents query for the 20 December packet folder, which demonstrably holds five documents, returned empty when run for this page. The negatives above therefore rest on the folder-by-folder enumeration recorded in MAP.md, not on API searches alone.
- Claremont Finance Sub Committee — a Drive folder owned by
sau6webmaster@sau6.org, created 27 October 2022 and containing no files (verified 2026-08-29). It is where this committee’s material would go if it were ever posted. The district’s other subcommittee folders created the same day — Capital Improvement, Claremont Policy Sub Committee, Curriculum Committee and Ad Hoc SAU Exploratory Subcommittee — are likewise all empty.
- Updated Claremont School District Budget 12.20.23 district document; 55 pages of account detail, filed in the 20 December board packet — the FY2025 proposal as it stood on the day of the board vote, and the only budget document of this cycle in any public share. Carries “Grand Total: 36,313,407.97” against an increase of $1,433,096.06, or 4.11 per cent; still carries the Board Voted Expense Reduct line at ($688,426.17) for FY2023–24, falling to zero in the proposal; shows the Stevens alternative-education lines at $0.00 for the proposed year against a (100.00) per cent change; and is stamped
Printed: 12/20/2023 2:06:15 PM. Used on this page for flags 3, 4 and 5.
- Approved Claremont School Board minutes, 20 December 2023 district document — two days after this meeting. Source of “Subcommittee meetings and minutes are available online for people to review” (item 6(b)); of the motion “to move the budget forward to the hearing phase” by Sprague and Gallagher, carried unanimously with no amount stated; of the ratification of the CAS, CAMCE and paraprofessional agreements; of the attendance (Skillen and Hawkins absent); and of the seven citizens who spoke, six of them Claremont Middle School teachers opposing the schedule change presented at this meeting. The document disagrees with itself on one point: its masthead lists the student board members as Nicole Bouchard and Kylee Plummer, while the attendance line names “Nicole Bouchard and Alex Barney”. Reported, not reconciled.
- Approved Claremont School Board minutes, 6 December 2023 district document — twelve days before this meeting. Names the committee’s three members, records that “Sessions have been recorded on CCTV”, that a “Budget binder provided- a revised version will be available”, and that the committee “Will be presented to the board in two weeks”. That is this meeting and the 20 December presentation, described in advance.
- Companion recordings in the same FY2025 budget sequence: Finance Committee, 30 November 2023 (show 15443 — has a page: 30 November 2023); Finance Committee, 1 December 2023 (show 15444, where this session was booked for “1 to 3 p.m.” and where the board chair asked that it be recorded — has a page: 1 December 2023); Finance Committee, 6 December 2023 (show 15452 — has a page: 6 December 2023); Finance Committee, 13 December 2023 (show 15471, the session that issued the two handouts read aloud here — has a page: 13 December 2023); School Board, 20 December 2023 (show 15483, where the $36,313,407.97 was moved); School Board FY25 budget public hearing, 3 January 2024 (show 15505); Finance Committee, 5 January 2024 (show 15510, where a member reconstructed the difference between “the 1218 budget” and “the 1220 budget”); School Board, 17 January 2024 (show 15531, budget adopted at $36,117,406.87). This page completes the five-session set for the FY2025 budget committee; the January sessions do not yet have pages.
- Companion page in this archive — Claremont School Board Finance Committee, 19 November 2024: the same three-member committee, one budget cycle later, with the same absence of agenda, packet and minutes.
- Secondary reporting, cited as reporting and not as law: New Hampshire Bulletin, 15 November 2024, on catastrophic-aid proration in the years either side of this budget; Valley News, 2 January 2026, on the district’s later audit findings. Neither is relied on for any flag on this page.
Project files
Relative links work when this page is opened from Output/HTML/.
- Output/Dialogue/15451 SchoolBoardFinance121823.mp4.CSV — speaker-attributed dialogue, 1,466 rows and 21,902 words. Every quotation and every timestamp on this page comes from it unless the sentence says otherwise.
- Input/Transcripts/15451 SchoolBoardFinance121823.mp4.json — diarized transcript with per-word confidences.
- Input/Videos/15451 SchoolBoardFinance121823.mp4 — local copy of the recording.
- Input/SupportingDocuments/MAP.md — meeting-to-documents map, section 34, which records the negative findings above and the date they were verified.
- Output/Dialogue/15444 SchoolBoardFinance120123.mp4.CSV — the 1 December session, 1,762 rows: source of the “1 to 3 p.m.” window and of the board chair’s “I would like it still to be recorded”.
- Output/Dialogue/15471 SchoolBoardFinance121323.mp4.CSV — the 13 December session, 586 rows: source of “The caucus on the 18th is just us”, “admin is welcome but not required”, and the unresolved pre-K and $333,000/$300,000 exchanges.
- Output/Dialogue/15483 SchoolBoard122023.mp4.CSV — the 20 December board meeting, 334 rows: source of the $36,313,407.97 motion.
- Output/Dialogue/15510 SchoolBoardFinance010524.mp4.CSV — the 5 January 2024 finance session, 1,131 rows: source of “we had one, two, three, four”, of the “1218 budget” / “1220 budget” comparison, of “where the 350,000… came from”, and of “We weren’t informed that some program got cut”.
- Output/Dialogue/15531 SchoolBoard011724.mp4.CSV — the 17 January 2024 board meeting, 787 rows: source of the $36,117,406.87 motion.
Laws and rules cited on this page
New Hampshire statutes and rules, cited in the text in force on 18 December 2023. Where the text served today differs, both are given and the difference is stated, because roughly half of the provisions this project relies on have been amended since 2023.
- RSA 91-A:1 — statement of purpose: “the greatest possible public access to the actions, discussions and records of all public bodies”
- RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d) — “public body” includes “any committee, subcommittee, or subordinate body thereof, or advisory committee thereto” unamended since 2008, 354:1. The section runs paragraphs I–VI only and contains no definition of “meeting”; a citation to a paragraph IX of this section would be to a provision that does not exist
- RSA 91-A:2 as codified in 2023 — I, definition of “meeting”; I(a), the collective-bargaining exclusion; I(c), the party-caucus exclusion; II, 24-hour notice, minutes naming members, persons appearing, subject matter and final decisions, the movers and seconders of motions, and inspection within 5 business days the governing text was 2023, 188:1, eff. Oct. 3, 2023. The mover/seconder requirement is older — 2018, 244:1, eff. Jan. 1, 2019 — so it binds every meeting in this archive. The current text adds start-time, end-time and minutes-producer requirements from 2025, 112:1, eff. Aug. 22, 2025, which do not apply here; subparagraph I(c) is word-for-word identical in both
- RSA 671:30 — “Every school district in the state, except one having a special statute relative to election of its district offices, shall use the non-partisan ballot system for the election of district officers, in the same manner as in towns as provided in RSA 669:19-669:25” 1979, 321:1, eff. Aug. 21, 1979 — unamended. Verified for this page on 2026-08-29; this is the provision that closes the caucus question in flag 2
- RSA 669:12 — partisan official ballot system, adoptable by a town for the election of town officers one of the two routes named in RSA 91-A:2, I(c); neither reaches school district officers
- RSA 91-A:3 as codified in 2023 — nonpublic sessions: motion stating the specific II exemption and a roll-call vote in public session; minutes disclosed within 72 hours unless sealed by a recorded 2/3 vote on a statutory finding amended by 2023, 189:1, eff. Oct. 3, 2023, which added paragraph IV (10-year review of sealed minutes); the I(b) motion-and-roll-call requirement is older and unchanged. Note: 2023, 188:1 amended RSA 91-A:2 and 2023, 189:1 amended RSA 91-A:3 — the two are commonly crossed
- RSA 91-A:4, I as codified in 2023 — right of any person to inspect governmental records the section was later amended by 2024, 49:1–2, eff. Aug. 13, 2024, after this meeting; paragraph I’s inspection right long predates it. Cited only to note that no request appears in this record, so no refusal is alleged
- RSA 32:5 as codified in 2023 — budget preparation and public hearing: all purposes and amounts of appropriations “shall be disclosed or discussed at the final hearing”; gross-basis appropriations; comparative columns showing prior-year appropriations and actual expenditures source note then ended 2021, 134:3–4; the current text carries a further amendment, 2025, 144:1, eff. Aug. 30, 2025, which does not apply here
- RSA 40:13 — official ballot (SB 2) procedure, under which the Claremont School District’s annual meeting runs in two sessions unamended since 2019, 192:2, so the current text governed
- RSA 21-J:19 — audits of political subdivisions by independent public accountants cited for the holding only; the section imposes no deadline of its own, so a decision not to commission a further audit is a control question, not a missed statutory date
- RSA 197:23-a — the district treasurer’s custody of district money and independent books of account context only; no treasurer conduct is in question
- RSA 273-A:3 — obligation to negotiate in good faith; RSA ch. 273-A — public employee labor relations
- RSA 186-C:1 — state policy on the education of children with disabilities; RSA 186-C:2 as codified in 2023 — “child with a disability” aged “between the ages of 3 and 21, inclusive” further amended in 2025, after this meeting
- N.H. Admin. Code Ed 306.15 as it stood in 2023 (“Provision of Staff and Staff Qualifications”) — one full-time certified school counsellor per 300 students enrolled at middle and high school recovered from the Department of Education’s own March 2023 side-by-side revision draft, existing-rule column. Vintage trap: the current Ed 300 rules serve the readoption effective 13 December 2024, in which Ed 306.15 is “School Year” — a different rule entirely
Federal:
Provisions deliberately not cited on this page, so a reviewer does not look for them: RSA 189:74 (school board public comment period, no less than 30 minutes) is not applied to this subcommittee — its text speaks of “a meeting of the school board held under RSA 91-A:2”, and whether it reaches a subcommittee is unsettled, so no public-comment finding is made even though no public-comment period was offered. RSA 186-C:18, III (catastrophic aid) is not cited: no aid rate or entitlement figure is stated at this meeting, and the current text’s 80-per-cent-of-entitlement floor was added by 2025 N.H. HB 2 §137 and did not exist in 2023. RSA 198:40-a (adequacy amounts) is not cited: no per-pupil figure is spoken here. RSA 21-J:34 and RSA 21-J:35 (DRA filings and tax-rate setting) are not cited: the late-filing problem that carried a HIGH flag on the 13 December page had been resolved by the day before that meeting, and nothing on this recording bears on it — the tax-rate discussion here is prospective, about FY2025. RSA 32:10 (transfers between appropriations) is not cited: no transfer is proposed here.