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 round-robin that opened the 30 November session, which named the same committee and the same administrators — 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 (586 rows, 14,320 words).
| Name | Role | Participation |
|---|
| Candace Crawford | Claremont School Board member; Finance Committee member | The heaviest questioner — 173 segments, 3,538 words, 24.7 per cent of everything said. Drove three of the meeting’s four subjects. On the middle school she pressed the superintendent to a plain answer on whether eight positions were cuts (0:16:21) and named the process objection that the full board would hear from CMS teachers a week later: “it hasn’t been cross-referenced with teachers, with the union, with parents” (0:18:53). On the elementary schools she worked page by page through Disnard, Maple Avenue and Bluff — social workers, guidance, field trips, a $58,000 addition at Bluff. On pre-K she found the arithmetic that its own author could not defend (1:12:10). She is addressed as “Candy” by Whitney at 0:43:13 and by Nester at 1:03:13 (rendered Andy by the recognizer — a documented garble in this corpus and one that can manufacture a phantom attendee), and as “Candace” by Henry at 1:29:39. |
| Michael Tempesta | Superintendent of Schools, SAU 6 | 90 segments, 3,076 words, 19 minutes of floor time — almost all of it in the first half hour, presenting the schedule-change analysis he had e-mailed the board “over the weekend.” He is careful on camera about what the analysis does and does not propose: “It’s very important for people on TV. I’m not saying that we are definitely going to reduce eight positions” (0:15:34). He speaks of Principal Romeo in the third person throughout and confirms he has not yet met the teachers’ union: “So I have a meeting with the Serra [SREA] coming up” (0:13:36). Referred to Sprague by name at 0:05:35 and addressed as “Mr. Tempesta” by Crawford at 0:37:07. He was dismissed by the SAU 6 board four weeks later, on 11–12 January 2024. Nothing in this record anticipates that. |
| Heather Whitney | Chair, Claremont School Board; Finance Committee member | 124 segments, 3,038 words. Returning after missing the 6 December session, which the chair notes in the opening seconds (see the 6 December page). Took the structural and evidentiary questions: what separates an academic from a non-academic class (0:03:51); whether the $300,000 middle-school increase is additional to the $333,000 reduction or funded by it (0:27:58); and what the pre-K move is actually for (1:20:51). She read the state minimum staffing standard into the record from Ed 306 (0:54:23, flag 10) and set the meeting’s evidentiary bar: “it cannot be testimonial. It has to be quantitative. And if I, I will I’m a no for anything that doesn’t have that” (1:32:41). She is a nurse and says so obliquely here (“Standard of care is what I would use in my biz”). |
| Frank Sprague | Chair, Finance Committee; Vice Chair, Claremont School Board | Presided. 103 segments, 2,697 words. Opened and closed; set the agenda by announcement, not by document. Argued the high-school seven-period case on educational rather than budget grounds and against its stated rationale — “we need to sell it for what it is, not dropout prevention” (0:25:11). Delivered the meeting’s central admission at 1:27:46 and its condition at 1:29:51: “I cannot support moving anything forward unless I know where specifically the money is going as far as staffing goes.” Gives yet another version of his own career here — “when I started working at Newport back in the early 90s” (0:20:03) — which is the sixth distinct account in this corpus; this page quotes his words for this meeting and does not reconcile them with the others. |
| Ben Nester | Director of Special Education, SAU 6 | 48 segments, 1,184 words, all between 1:03:13 and 1:31:09. Presented the pre-K relocation and the special-education coordinator proposal he had first put to the committee on 6 December (1:07:59). Corrected the committee’s understanding of the modular units twice (1:03:13, 1:03:35), and then conceded that his own handout did not reconcile: “That doesn’t make sense to me either. I’m not sure why there’s a increase proposed there at your budget” (1:12:35). Named by Whitney at 1:31:44 and addressed as “Ben” by Crawford at 1:07:42. He announced his resignation the following day, 14 December 2023, effective July 2024 — a fact from elsewhere in this corpus, not from this recording. |
| Mary Henry | Business Administrator, Claremont School District / SAU 6 | Only 29 segments and 709 words — under four minutes of floor time in a ninety-seven-minute budget meeting, and she is silent for the first 38 minutes. She speaks to three things. First, the district’s late filings with the Department of Revenue Administration and the city’s unset tax rate, at 0:38:38 (flag 2): “I turned in the stuff yesterday … a lot of these things should have been uploaded back in March and April. So. And they weren’t uploaded … I understand we’re late. I get it, and it’s it’s later than I want it to be.” Second, that the binder’s summary figure was already out of date and a new report was coming (1:29:00). Third, that she will not project grant revenue: “I don’t do projections on grants because they can change based on a lot of things” (1:30:48). She had been in post about five months at this date, appointed 11 May 2023 and starting in early July. |
| Unidentified senior administrator | Not named in the record deliberately unresolved | Three segments inside one 25-second window, 1:31:09 to 1:31:33, and nowhere else in the file: “So if we receive title funds, those funds pay for title of staff. If the funds don’t exist, right, the staff don’t exist,” then “And the state doesn’t send up projections like Mary said.” The voice is not Mary Henry — she answers it in the next row. Michael Tempesta is the leading candidate on the arithmetic of who is in the room and silent at that moment, but no name, self-identification or direct address ties the voice to anyone, so the dialogue file leaves it unnamed and so does this page. |
| Unattributed fragments | — | 16 further rows (2.7 per cent of the file, 78 words) carry no named speaker — bare acknowledgements (“Okay.”, “Right.”, “Sure.”, “Yeah okay. Yep.”) with nothing to anchor them. One of them is quoted on this page and is marked where it appears: the interjection “K12 not is not K-12” at 1:26:10, inside the exchange about principals’ certification. No claim on this page rests on any other unattributed row. |
| Frank Romeo | Principal, Claremont Middle School — not present | Absent, and the meeting is largely about his school. The superintendent describes meeting him and his leadership team before the analysis reached the board (“I met with Mr. Romeo in his leadership team and presented this before it was ever presented to you folks”), and Crawford twice measures the superintendent’s account against Romeo’s own presentation to the committee on 1 December: “he said that there were six cuts in your presentation. You said there would be a reduction.” Romeo is not on this recording and does not answer. |
| 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 both 6 and 20 December 2023, and Nester refers to a “Mike” twice — “We’ve been Mike and I’ve been talking about using SR three [ESSER III] monies” and “if Mike and Mary are agreeable” — but in a room containing Michael Tempesta those references cannot be assigned. This page does not place him in the room. |
Agenda
No agenda was posted for this meeting and none has since appeared in any district share. The item list below is reconstructed from the chair’s own transitions on the recording and from members announcing a change of subject (“Can I change the topic?”, “I have a different topic”), 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 |
|---|
| 0:00:10 | 1. Opening | The whole of the formal opening is twenty-one seconds and contains no call to order, no roll and no statement of the meeting’s authority. Sprague: “Welcome everyone to the latest installment of our, Finance Subcommittee or Finance Committee meeting. We have had the Whitney back with us, and she had a number of questions, which I think that, the administration has attempted to.” The sentence completes in the next segment (“Answer.”), where he sets the first item: “we received some email over the, over the weekend from the administration regarding potential changes at the high school and at the middle school.” |
| 0:00:49 | 2. Middle-school and high-school schedule changes — Superintendent Tempesta | The largest item by far: 37 minutes. The superintendent walks the committee through a “CMS schedule change impact document” he had e-mailed over the weekend, showing how moving middle-school core teachers from three classes to six would leave eight budgeted positions unfilled. Questioned hard by all three members on class size, staffing structure, union consultation and the $333,000 / $300,000 pair of numbers in the binder. Disposition: not resolved. Whitney: “is it safe to say we’re just not ready to like talk about this further because we don’t have the.” A further presentation was promised and no date was set. |
| 0:37:40 | 3. Interlude — the city tax rate and the Department of Revenue Administration | Raised by the chair as “just an odd one off question” after seeing residents on a local page asking why their tax bills were late and being told the city was “waiting on the school district.” The business administrator answers that she filed the outstanding material the previous day and that some of it “should have been uploaded back in March and April.” Disposition: information only. The chair’s purpose was to separate the two processes in public — “this is yeah. That’s their separate things.” See flag 2. |
| 0:44:22 | 4. The committee’s standing information requests | The chair lists what the committee has had from previous business administrators and does not have now: “a breakdown in addition to an actual proposed budget. Obviously, a proposed tax rate impact, on the local, on the local level, what we will be receiving in grants, what we would get in state aid, what we would get in Medicaid reimbursements, projections, what we would get special ed aid for, for, what used to be catastrophic aid.” Plus a staffing breakdown by position and certification, and the default budget. Disposition: requested; no owner named and no date set. See flag 8. |
| 0:49:21 | 5. The three elementary-school budgets — Crawford | “Okay, I’m. Can I change the topic? Okay, so I was I was studying the three elementary budgets, and, and I was trying to understand, again, I was trying to understand the hierarchy there and trying to understand equity. Among the three budgets.” Questions on assistant principals, secretaries, the 20 per cent social worker shared across three schools, guidance staffing, field trips funded at one school and not the others, salary movements at Maple Avenue, and a roughly $58,000 addition at Bluff. Whitney reads the state minimum standard into the record. Disposition: answers requested from staff; nothing resolved. |
| 0:59:36 | 6. Scheduling — the 18 December caucus and the 20 December board presentation | The chair believes the 18 December session is “to caucus with with the the rest of the board.” Whitney corrects him: “The caucus on the 18th is just us.” Crawford: “That’s what I thought too.” Sprague: “Oh, it’s just us three.” Whitney sets the terms: “we’ve got three hours, two hours allocated. So admin is welcome but not required.” Crawford fixes the dates: “So the 18th is the three of us and that’s next Monday. And then followed by on Wednesday at seven days from now when we present to the board.” Disposition: confirmed by consensus, not by motion. See flag 4. |
| 1:02:21 | 7. Pre-K relocation, and a special-education coordinator in place of a pre-K director — Nester | Crawford opens it — “so, so the preschool, and I think that’s another topic that’s going to drive a lot of citizens comments” — and it runs 25 minutes. Modular units at Bluff and Disnard bought with ESSER money outside the operating budget; the pre-K director post proposed for elimination to fund a district special-education coordinator; an accreditation study not yet commissioned; a one-page handout whose figures do not match the $100,000 impact stated for the move. Disposition: the special-education director asked for time “to clean that up”; nothing decided. See flags 5 and 6. |
| 1:27:02 | 8. What the committee needs before the caucus; close | “Move toward wrapping things up here. So I want to cast our focus to the the upcoming caucus that we’ll have the three of us and sort of nail down what we’re going to need to do our our” — the sentence completes as “Job with.” The chair then states that the committee does not know the budget’s overall figure; the business administrator confirms the binder’s summary page is out of date; both other members set conditions for their support. Crawford to the administrators: “I think we need a lot of information from you folks before we can hash out what we can support or not support.” Disposition: the session ends with no total, no recommendation and no vote. See flag 3. |
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 |
|---|
| 0:00:10 | Opening — the board chair is back | Sprague: “Welcome everyone to the latest installment of our, Finance Subcommittee or Finance Committee meeting. We have had the Whitney back with us, and she had a number of questions, which I think that, the administration has attempted to.” The sentence finishes in the next segment: “Answer. So I think what we’ll start today is, we received some email over the, over the weekend from the administration regarding potential changes at the high school and at the middle school.” No call to order, no roll call, no statement of what the meeting is for beyond that. “the Whitney” is the recognizer’s rendering of Heather Whitney, who had missed the 6 December session. | HIGH |
| 0:00:49 | The schedule proposal, in the superintendent’s words | Tempesta: “So the, the the schedule at the high school, they were going to a seven period schedule where teachers teach six classes and I think. Mr.. That was presented previously and will be presented again. When we were looking at that schedule, we also, no, because of obviously exiting the S or Esser [ESSER].” Then the middle school: “the teachers are teaching three classes. So we knew that that had to change for next year because that was also, on purpose, because Principal Romeo wanted to create a smaller learning environment.” | |
| 0:02:36 | Six core teachers per subject; four under the new model | Tempesta: “And that’s what I sent to Principal Romeo, as well as the board with a few screenshots of how we could convert that. And basically, and I’m not saying and it’s important to, to say this, I’m not saying we would if we shifted. Currently we have in the math, English, science and social studies at the middle school. We have six teachers, okay, in each of those subjects budgeted.” Then the consequence: “And if we shifted to have only four teachers increasing the number of sections they they taught, you wouldn’t need to fill eight positions.” | OBSERVATION |
| 0:04:25 | The document: 18 sections, 332 students, 338 enrolled | Tempesta: “I’m sorry I didn’t number the pages. But if you look at the CMS schedule change impact document, current staffing, FY 24 and social studies.” He explains the teachers are anonymised “teacher one, two, three” and that “there are six of them, very total of 18 sections teaching 332 students, which is almost all the students right now in the in the middle school, there’s 338 students, okay.” This document was never posted; it exists in the public record only as described on the recording. | HIGH |
| 0:03:51 | What counts as an academic class | Whitney: “So can you describe the difference between an academic class and a nonacademic class?” Tempesta: “Well, so I don’t want to be disparaging about specials, but what I mean that is special.” The exchange establishes that non-core teachers already teach six and core teachers three — Whitney: “Because one core teachers are teaching six courses… The non-core teachers.” Tempesta: “Yes. And so.” | |
| 0:09:08 | Whitney projects the public reaction — and asks for the numbers to be clear | Whitney: “I have a lot of questions about this because my I’m going to project forward that I think that at the hearing or when the budget comes to the community, there’s going to be a lot of emotions… And what I want to be I just want to get our numbers crystal clear.” Her reading of the plan: “It looks like the number of kids per class will not change that much, if at all… The requirement is, is that the teachers that are going to be teaching these core courses will be teaching a higher number of classes.” Tempesta: “That’s accurate.” | POSITIVE |
| 0:13:30 | The union has not been met; the teachers have | Crawford: “So how do how did the staff, how’s the staff and, and the Syria [SREA] responding to this?” Tempesta: “So I have a meeting with the Serra [SREA] coming up.” Crawford: “So you haven’t met with them yet?” Tempesta: “No, I’ve, I’ve told them about all of all of this.” Crawford, on the teachers: “Oh, the teachers don’t know about this.” Tempesta: “The teachers do know about this. Mr. Romeo had a meeting with them. I met with Mr. Romeo in his leadership team and presented this before it was ever presented to you folks.” | OBSERVATION |
| 0:15:21 | Six cuts, or eight positions, or neither | Crawford: “One of the things when, Mr. Romeo presented, he said that there were six cuts in your presentation. You said there would be a reduction.” Tempesta, deliberately for the camera: “So I’m not saying there’s a here. It’s very important for people on TV. I’m not saying that we are definitely going to reduce eight positions. What I’m saying is with this schedule, you could allocate those positions to other areas, both within CMS or within the district.” | OBSERVATION POSITIVE |
| 0:16:21 | “If we needed to, could we cut all eight out. Yes.” | Crawford: “So if if you’re saying they’re not cut, how can there be a reduction in the the salary line?” Tempesta: “There can be a reduction in the salary line… That there’s eight positions, okay. That we. If we needed to, could we cut all eight out. Yes. But what I’m uncomfortable doing and saying right now is we still have to look at what else might be needed in this schedule.” And then: “And this is it’s going to be tough to hear… We still haven’t done the nuts and bolts of the actual scheduling in the detail yet.” | OBSERVATION |
| 0:17:22 | The cart before the horse — and science and maths taught on computers | Crawford: “I’m, I’m concerned about putting the cart before the horse… And it sounds like we’ve got a plethora of teachers at the middle school. Which to me begs the question, if we’ve got if we got so many teachers, why are we having seventh grade science and math being taught on computers?” Tempesta answers that the district “couldn’t find enough math and science teachers” and that the online sections still have “live teachers” assigned. Crawford: “Well assigned. But they’re not being taught.” | OBSERVATION |
| 0:18:53 | The objection the full board would hear a week later | Crawford: “One of my concerns is again the before the horse, agreeing to this budget and this level of expenditure for the teaching line before pretty much anything has worked out. I mean, it sounds like you have a plan, but that it hasn’t been cross-referenced with teachers, with the union, with parents. Correct. And that’s a concern for me.” Seven days later six Claremont Middle School teachers and a parent addressed the full board against this schedule change — recorded in the district’s approved minutes of 20 December 2023, not on this recording. | OBSERVATION POSITIVE |
| 0:20:03 | Sprague on the high school: sell it for what it is | Sprague: “I’m old enough that, when I started working at Newport back in the early 90s, we were transitioning from a seven period day to two block scheduling, and one of the one of the advantages at that time, was the fact that we were told that would reduce dropout rates.” His objection is to the stated rationale, not the change: “I am concerned that we can that I can show and explain quantitatively how that reduces dropout rates.” And at 0:25:11: “I think we need to sell it for what it is, not dropout prevention, because I actually personally think that this could drop outs.” | POSITIVE |
| 0:25:58 | Crawford counts the adults at the middle school | Crawford: “A principal, two assistant principals. Is that true? There are two deans. There’s a social worker, three deans.” Whitney adds “And three guidance counselors.” Crawford’s summary at 0:29:20: “Two assistant principals, three deans, a social worker, three guidance counselors. And thinking it’s all about the education of what the kids in the class teaching… the concept of deans, academic deans that are Paris [paras] drives me nuts.” | |
| 0:27:58 | Is the $300,000 increase on top of the $333,000 reduction? | Whitney: “But the impact to the budget was going to be a $300,000 increase to the budget. So is this 300 if, if, if we have a fairy wand and we can say, yes, we’re going to keep all these things that are being requested. Is this $300,000 increase in include is above and beyond. Is it still going to increase our budget for the middle school, even after reallocating the dollars that would be associated?” Tempesta: “I think it would. I think it would be less, but we haven’t done it yet.” | MEDIUM |
| 0:31:36 | The two numbers in the binder, and nobody can reconcile them | Sprague: “So, so let me just I’m going to try to get some clarity. So so I’m looking at the in the blue book, the binder. The first line CMS regular instruction salaries. I’m showing the cut of 333,000.” Then: “And that’s on page 15 of the of the eight eight tab number eight, tab 50, page 15. So then I’m looking over here an increase of 300,000. So I think that’s where the confusion is.” Tempesta: “Yeah. That’s we we need to break that out so you can see all of it. So it’s unclear in this.” | MEDIUM |
| 0:32:26 | What the increase is actually for | Crawford: “Three, 300,000. But but the, the verb verbiage says it’s summer school and it’s a CMS deans. And if it’s the CMS deans who are not academic, I don’t want to replace the 333,000 who are academics with nonacademic.” Sprague puts the same point at 0:36:10: “it looks like we’re, we’re switching out academic, highly trained people and replacing them with Paris [paras], and that’s what it sounds.” Whitney: “I don’t see that, but I think that I think the community.” | MEDIUM |
| 0:33:51 | The evidentiary bar goes up | Whitney: “Well, I haven’t seen any evidence that there’s been academic achievement with this model.” And at 0:34:34: “if I see a correlation between behaviors and school culture leading to increased academic achievement. So if it’s antidotes [anecdotes] that there’s improvement in behavior and and climate and culture, it doesn’t mean anything to me unless I actually see it play out academically.” At 0:43:58: “I’ve just heard testimonials. And so for me testimonials are for church.” | POSITIVE |
| 0:43:13 | Whitney recalls warning about the ESSER cliff when the academic centres were approved | Whitney to Crawford, who was not yet on the board: “And just so, so you know, Candy, because you weren’t on the board and this came forward and I’m just.” Then: “when the academic center request came forward, I think Frank and I, I don’t know, I was very much opposed to it because my greatest concern was, is that when Esser [ESSER] money ran out, yeah, they’re going to stand up. We’re going to be asked… you have to start planning now for phasing this out.” Crawford was appointed to the board on 19 July 2023. | MEDIUM |
| 0:37:40 | The chair raises the late tax rate on behalf of residents | Sprague: “I’m going to ask just an odd one off question. And and then we can onto some other thoughts. So I was looking on what’s up Claremont yesterday and well, it’s a legit thing. And people were wondering about and people are legitimately worried about their tax rate.” At 0:38:00: “And there was several people had asked city councilors Nick and Bill and they said, we’re waiting on the school district.” His question at 0:38:25: “what what what is the Dre [DRA] waiting for at this point for setting the tax rate?” | HIGH |
| 0:38:38 | “I turned in the stuff yesterday” | Henry: “I turned in the stuff yesterday. I was waiting on getting a signed copy of the certified ballot, and also a signed copy of minutes from the deliberative that I did not have. I had reached out the beginning of December to who then put me in touch with someone else, and I don’t know if it just got okay.” Then: “I mean, it it goes on, both of us because I didn’t follow up and but so that’s what it is.” The 2023 annual meeting had closed on 14 March 2023, nine months earlier. | HIGH |
| 0:39:46 | “a lot of these things should have been uploaded back in March and April” | Henry: “That is. That is true. And a lot of these things should have been uploaded back in March and April. So. And they weren’t uploaded. So again. But I searched through emails. I couldn’t find them. So I reached out and now I have them.” At 0:40:13: “And I have been in constant contact with the Dre [DRA], you know, and Jamie over there. I sent her an email yesterday letting her know what I had uploaded… I understand we’re late. I get it, and it’s it’s later than I want it to be.” | HIGH |
| 0:40:40 | What a late tax rate does to cash flow | Crawford: “Well, and it also means that that the city and the school district don’t have the money because people pay their taxes on the last day. Yeah. That January. So how are we going to fund from January 1st through the 10th or 12th when people actually pay their taxes?” Henry: “Well, they said they could get it out within a week from what Donna said to me.” Crawford: “So that’s. So that’s December 15th. So that’s a half a month.” | HIGH |
| 0:44:22 | What the committee has always had, and does not have now | Sprague, framing it as help for a new business administrator: “trying to get the expectations to what what’s been helpful to us in the past as a board, we’ve received a breakdown in addition to an actual proposed budget. Obviously, a proposed tax rate impact, on the local, on the local level, what we will be receiving in grants, what we would get in state aid, what we would get in Medicaid reimbursements, projections, what we would get special ed aid for, for, what used to be catastrophic aid.” | OBSERVATION |
| 0:45:17 | Staffing broken out by position and certification | Sprague: “Also, again. Again, specifically breaking out these big clumps of people into specific positions and also their, their certifications.” And the reason at 0:45:54: “And when we put in people who are not qualified to do what they should be doing because we want to get somebody in there, it’s got predictable results.” This is the same request the committee made on 30 November and 1 December and had not been met. | OBSERVATION |
| 0:46:11 | Three collective bargaining agreements ahead, and the “sacrificial lambs” risk | Sprague: “the negotiated agreements, the collective bargaining agreements that we’re going to negotiate this year with the Paris [paras] and with secretaries and with our maintenance folks… One of the things that can happen is they can sort of be the sacrificial lambs when it comes to the people voting on the budget, because they’ll all be in separate Warren [warrant] articles.” Whitney adds the teachers’ agreement at 0:47:34: “our, collective bargaining agreement with our teachers is two years.” | |
| 0:49:21 | The three elementary budgets, side by side | Crawford: “Okay, I’m. Can I change the topic? Okay, so I was I was studying the three elementary budgets, and, and I was trying to understand, again, I was trying to understand the hierarchy there and trying to understand equity. Among the three budgets.” At 0:50:23 she describes the shared social worker: “Right now she has a basically a 20% social worker… because that person is at the high school, and that person works 35% at the high school, which leaves 65% to be divvied out among three elementary schools.” | |
| 0:51:53 | Field trips budgeted at one school and not the other two | Crawford: “And if it’s not equitable, what’s the reasoning for it? I don’t know that answer. And another question I had is Dessner [Disnard] put in for field trips. I’m a big supporter. Field trips, I, I didn’t see it.” And at 0:52:26: “why is it not in Maple and Bluff? They said that the parent teacher group support that. My concern is if it’s if it’s if field trips are part of the curriculum, then all three elementary schools should have the field trips as part of the curriculum, and it should be part of the budget.” | |
| 0:54:23 | The state minimum staffing standard, read into the record | Whitney: “Just for us to know and for the community to know that, the minimum standards in the state of New Hampshire are one certified school counselor per 500 students at the elementary school level and one full time certified school counselor per 300 students at the middle school and high school level.” She then reads the rule itself at 0:54:54, naming it “the 306 requirements.” Crawford supplies the enrolments at 0:55:50: “I’ve got Dessner [Disnard] at 256 and, Maple at 269… And bluff at 176.” | POSITIVE |
| 0:56:35 | “we are already far and exceeding” the minimum | Whitney: “That’s the only reason I’m bringing it up is so when, when we’re having these discussions that folks are aware that we are already far and exceeding m[inimums].” Crawford does not accept the standard as an answer, at 0:58:21: “And and you know, I understand the minimum is 500, but I want the staff to explain why the model that they’re projecting meets the needs.” And at 0:58:52: “When you say social worker, I need more specificity… Show me some some correlation.” | POSITIVE |
| 0:59:36 | The chair thinks the 18 December caucus is with the board; it is not | Sprague: “So it looks like we’re going to be meeting on the 18th to caucus with with the the rest of the board. Which is five days from now.” Whitney: “The caucus on the 18th is just us.” Crawford: “That’s what I thought too.” Sprague: “Oh, it’s just us three.” Whitney at 1:01:51: “But we’ve got three hours, two hours allocated. So admin is welcome but not required.” All three members of a three-member committee is a full quorum. | MEDIUM |
| 0:59:58 | “I don’t know what’s in this budget” | Sprague: “my my concern is that, that we’re going to have. Something presentable, I guess that, right. Because at this point in time, I can’t again, I’m still hung up on the same stuff I’ve been hung up on in that I don’t know. I don’t know what’s other than supplies and such. I don’t know what’s in this budget.” And at 1:00:26: “the vast majority of the budget being personnel. I want to be able to, trust but verify.” Crawford at 1:00:51: “five days from now, we all are responsible for explaining this budget to the rest of the board, and we hardly understand.” | MEDIUM |
| 1:02:21 | Pre-K: four classrooms, two modular units, ESSER money | Crawford: “so, so the preschool, and I think that’s another topic that’s going to drive a lot of citizens comments. And we want to be prepared to explain those… that there are going to be four, classrooms, they’re going to be purchased this year with Esser [ESSER] money not in the budget, and two are going to desired [Disnard] and two are going to bluff.” Nester corrects the count twice, at 1:03:13 — “we’re still only budgeted for three classrooms total for pre-K in the current budget” — and at 1:03:35. | MEDIUM |
| 1:04:16 | No pre-K director; the elementary principals take it on | Crawford: “So I asked the question if there was going to be a, preschool director that coordinates the program that oversees, accomplishments, meeting requirements. You said no, there wasn’t going to be a director and that the current principals at those two schools will take will be responsible for those preschool programs. And that doesn’t make sense to me because my concern is, do those principal or those principles [principals] certified in preschool?” | MEDIUM |
| 1:06:48 | A special-education coordinator funded by cutting the pre-K director | Nester: “Again, I made a recommendation that in lieu of a director that would oversee the program, we should hire a special ed coordinator that would work at the elementary levels, would also support that.” At 1:08:22 he is explicit about the trade: “I, I looked at it as fiscally responsible as possible. And that’s where I, you know, we considered reducing the pre-K director position to fund the special ed leader position.” He also says at 1:07:16: “Absolutely. We should have a director for pre-K 100%.” | MEDIUM |
| 1:08:36 | “The only reason we have preschool is for special education” | Whitney: “so our preschool, our preschool program here exists, it may serve other groups, but it exists exclusively to serve our special education population.” Nester: “That’s our obligation.” Whitney at 1:09:48: “The only reason we have preschool is for special education.” Nester at 1:24:51 gives the size of the obligation: the programme currently serves “about 35” special-education students. | MEDIUM |
| 1:09:53 | How bare-bones could the district legally go? | Sprague: “if we were truly, truly bare bones on pre-K, we are we’re not required to have a program. True just for special ed. So so our our obligation is to provide services to special ed students. Correct. And so if they were at Head Start or if they were one of the various preschools, we would be pushing services in to them where we would we’re only obligated to provide services.” Nester: “I mean, legally, you might be able to get away with that. I don’t I’m not aware of of the district so that but but I think.” | MEDIUM |
| 1:10:33 | Why not send them out of district? Because there is nowhere to send them | Crawford: “The question what why aren’t those preschool special ed needs situations? Why aren’t they funneled into existing programs outside of the district? Because of the cost.” Nester: “They don’t exist. Those programs don’t exist.” | MEDIUM |
| 1:11:42 | A handout that does not reconcile with the figure the committee was given | Crawford: “So it was a handout. It’s called pre-K proposed budget FY 2425. It was a separate handout. It wasn’t in the packet. Right. And so if I look at the total here the total increase is 60,000. And yet this says 100,000. And I’m trying to correlated to.” Nester: “That doesn’t make sense to me either. I’m not sure why there’s a increase proposed there at your budget.” Crawford at 1:12:45: “you’ve got preschool teacher salaries down 10,000, but Perry’s [paras] up 61,000.” | MEDIUM |
| 1:13:15 | “I’d like to take some time to clean that up” | Nester: “Yeah. I mean, again, if if Mike and Mary are agreeable, I’d like to take some time to clean that up. That doesn’t that doesn’t make sense to me either.” No date was set and no one was assigned to confirm it had been done. The pre-K figures do not surface again anywhere in the rest of this recording. | MEDIUM OBSERVATION POSITIVE |
| 1:13:53 | An outside evaluation of the programme — not commissioned, not budgeted | Nester: “So the basic overall plan for pre-K is to is to bring in an independent firm or to have a study done so that we can take the recommendations of that study, much like a knee ask [NEASC] visit.” Crawford: “Is that part of this budget?” Nester: “No.” Five bodies approached, three declined; the live option at 1:14:47 is “the National Association for the Education of Young Children… It is a two year process.” Cost at 1:16:21: “the cost is minimal. We’re talking 2000 bucks.” | MEDIUM |
| 1:17:12 | Whitney anticipates the public reaction to the pre-K move | Whitney: “I’m just kind of anticipating what the concerns and questions from the public will be. I think there’s going to be, there’s going to be two sides of the coin. People are going to be happy that the preschool is moving out of the tech center for a number of reasons, to provide space, and also to reduce that ambiguity on whether or not it’s a CTE program compliant.” Her second point at 1:17:37: that some will read a modular classroom as “somehow diminishing… Those structures could be really beautiful.” | |
| 1:18:08 | ESSER III money for playgrounds, described as budget neutral | Nester: “This is a great, great question. We’ve been Mike and I’ve been talking about using SR three [ESSER III] monies to revamp some of the playground structures. Okay. We believe would be a great use of the, you know, the final Esser [ESSER] monies that are available.” Whitney restates it: “So we would be updating the current elementary school playground structures to be compliant with Esser [ESSER] money. That would be budget neutral.” No cost figure is given for either the playgrounds or the modular units. | MEDIUM |
| 1:19:45 | Why the move, in the superintendent’s account | Tempesta: “historically the early childhood was in Disney [Disnard]. Okay. It’s important to know that before it came over here. It’s also important to know that, there is a specials and electives in nurses and office staff that we don’t have currently when they’re in isolation here.” Whitney summarises at 1:20:51: “this move out of the technical center is not necessarily a invigorate of the program. It’s not really redesigning the program. It is freeing space up.” | |
| 1:22:46 | The gain the committee could actually test: five days instead of four | Nester: “One being if they’re at the elementary schools and students now have specials and they can rotate through, right. The teachers have planning time and the pre-K students will begin to attend Monday through Friday.” Whitney at 1:23:21: “We will now be able to have preschool five days a week. So the special education preschool students will be in school five days a week instead of four.” | POSITIVE |
| 1:24:00 | Crawford is not satisfied: nobody is coordinating the programme | Crawford: “But they’re still remains no coordination. For the program. And you’ve got principals who get an added responsibility with no preschool special ed centric.” Henry answers from her own experience at 1:25:15: “It is not uncommon for a principal to oversee a pre-K at Fall Mountain. We don’t have a director of pre-K… we saw a big difference when those preschool students were with their peers within those schools.” An unattributed voice at 1:26:10 objects: “K12 not is not K-12.” that interjection carries no named speaker in the dialogue file | MEDIUM |
| 1:24:59 | The evaluation has not happened yet, and the decision is being taken anyway | Sprague: “When we’ve got a pending evaluation of the programing, right to make presumptions from us as to what’s needed. Maybe contrary to what comes through in the study.” Nester at 1:26:42: “Again, it’s certainly not my my blatant recommendation to cut positions, but just in the interest of trying to be fiscally responsible, it’s a proposal that the Finance Committee can consider.” | MEDIUM |
| 1:27:19 | “I don’t think we really do” — the committee does not know the total | Sprague: “I’m not sure where I think the whole budget, for example, I think we’re looking at the local piece here.” Then, at 1:27:46: “We and we don’t know what that do. We know what that overall number is. I don’t think we really do. And so what we have so far with the changes, what’s what’s that impact.” The middle sentence is garbled; the recognizer has dropped a word and this page does not supply it. Read with what follows it and with the rest of the passage, the plain sense is that the committee does not know the overall number. | MEDIUM |
| 1:28:02 | No revenue side, no ESSER balance | Sprague: “What’s the what again what else will be folded into the total budget. As far as expenses and, revenue, the revenue side we haven’t we have not seen. So again, what are we going to be bringing in for grants? I don’t have a sense of at all of what’s left with SR [ESSER]. I don’t have any idea.” And at 1:28:25: “We keep talking about it, but we haven’t seen a report in a long time on what still we still have for us or funds.” | MEDIUM MEDIUM |
| 1:28:32 | The binder’s summary figure — and the news that it has already changed | Crawford: “And this is Mary, in the budget packet on in tab eight, which is kind of a summary of the budget on the final page on page 55, it shows, a million 316 as an increase over last year’s budget.” Henry: “That has changed with some of the changes that you had you make?” Then, at 1:29:05: “So I will be getting you a new report. Okay. Because I had to update some things within the budget now.” The document the board voted on seven days later shows an increase of $1,433,096.06. | MEDIUM |
| 1:29:11 | Last year’s comparatives are not reliable, and both members know it | Crawford: “And one of my concerns and I, I really I hesitate to use the percentage increase and decrease from last year’s budget because as we’ve discovered, last year’s budget has a number of, variations in it.” Henry: “But the bottom line is right. The bottom line of the budget is correct. Amount voted on. That is correct.” Whitney: “It’s the allocation.” Henry: “The allocation within those squirrely. But I, I understand what you’re saying, Candace. But the bottom line budget.” | MEDIUM |
| 1:29:51 | The chair states his condition | Sprague: “And so again as staffing is the big is the lion’s share of this. Again I, I want to know I cannot support moving anything forward unless I know where specifically the money is going as far as staffing goes. I would like to know what we’re what we are anticipating for grants, the different federal and state aid that would be that typically would be coming in.” Seven days later he moved the budget to public hearing. | MEDIUM |
| 1:30:33 | “I don’t do projections on grants” | Henry: “And I don’t know what our grant numbers are going to be for next year. They don’t get them to us until… Before the year begins. So I can’t tell you what our title one allocations next.” Sprague: “We’re always given a projection. I can’t do it.” the dialogue file assigns this whole row to Sprague, but the two sentences answer each other and the second reads as the business administrator’s; the row is quoted as the file has it Henry at 1:30:48: “I don’t it’s not I’m going to tell you I’ve never done I don’t do projections on grants because they can change based on a lot of things.” An unnamed administrator adds at 1:31:09: “if we receive title funds, those funds pay for title of staff. If the funds don’t exist, right, the staff don’t exist.” | MEDIUM |
| 1:32:08 | Whitney’s closing terms: quantitative or no | Whitney: “the elephant in the room is CMS and the staffing challenges that are there. And, I need a lot more justification for the requests for staff… I need to have be able to connect the dots between the requests and academic achievement.” Then, at 1:32:41: “And it can’t be it cannot be testimonial. It has to be quantitative. And if I, I will I’m a no for anything that doesn’t have that.” | POSITIVE |
| 1:33:41 | Crawford’s closing terms | Crawford: “But I don’t want the support staff to be running the show. I want the support staff to be support staff. I want the focus on education and and delivery of services to those kids to improve their scores.” Her worked example at 1:34:50: “in the three elementary school budgets, there is one social worker, okay. If you show that you’re going to have two social workers at the elementary school, show me how that would be allocated… there’s 54000 plus benefits times three in the budget if that can be reduced.” | |
| 1:34:24 | What the committee asks for before the caucus | Crawford: “So next week? Yeah. Next week when we meet, What we. Have, I think we need a lot of information from you folks before we can hash out what we can support or not support.” Whitney: “And really, a short priority list would be helpful to like if if you do nothing else, do this please.” Sprague adds one item of his own at 1:35:43: “the formula for the tax impact for every dollar on the tax rate. What is that? What is that number?” | OBSERVATION |
| 1:36:16 | The question the chair says voters will ask | Crawford: “And the other thing they look at is, okay, so, so you you’re asking me to spend another, $2, for example, $2 per 100,000. On the assessment. What am I getting for my money? I see that the, achievement rates at the elementary schools have dropped. Why should I give you more money? That’s the question that.” | |
| 1:36:49 | Close — and a webinar at noon | Sprague: “All right, so I think we’re good.” “Any questions?” “Thank you.” No motion to adjourn. Whitney, after the close, at 1:36:58: “Just so you guys know, there’s a webinar at noon about potential impact on” — Crawford, “Right on what?” — “State aid. State aid.” Sprague’s reply, at 1:37:15, is partly garbled: “Hold my breath. Come in. Ignore the Supreme Court.” the referent is not established on this recording and this page does not supply one | |
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 13 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 district’s approved board minutes for the meetings either side of it, and on the district’s own budget document of 20 December 2023.
HIGH A televised meeting of a public body, at the decisive point of the budget cycle, with no notice, no agenda, no packet and no minutes — and 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, so the committee sat with a full quorum for ninety-seven minutes. It transacted a great deal short of a vote: it received the superintendent’s middle-school staffing analysis, extracted the concession that eight positions could be cut, took the special-education director’s pre-K proposal and his admission that his own figures did not reconcile, fixed the terms of the 18 December caucus, and set the conditions on which two of the three members would support a budget. 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.
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 — ten weeks before this meeting. It required notice posted at least 24 hours in advance; 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. Nothing was posted within five business days and nothing has been posted in the two years and eight months since.
The district’s own two answers, and why neither works. Asked in effect where this committee’s record lives, the district has answered twice in approved board minutes. The minutes of 6 December 2023 open the Finance Sub-Committee item with: “Sessions have been recorded on CCTV.” That is true — it is why this page can exist — but a video recording is not minutes. It carries no list of members present, no list of persons appearing, no description of subject matter and no record of final decisions, and RSA 91-A:2, II requires all four. It also does not satisfy the five-business-day inspection duty, because nothing was recorded in the statute’s sense at all. Then the minutes of 20 December 2023 go further, recording under the same item: “Subcommittee meetings and minutes are available online for people to review.” The second half of that sentence is not true. No minutes of any 2023 Finance Committee session exist in any district share, and none has since appeared. A citizen who read the board’s approved minutes and went looking would have found only video.
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. It contains no files (queried directly for this page on 2026-08-29; the folder listing returns empty). 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 on the same verification date. The first subcommittee material of any kind ever filed into the district’s main packets share is a folder named 5. 8.19.2026 -- Policy Subcommittee, created 18 August 2026 — two years and eight months after this meeting. So the destination existed, was labelled for exactly this body, and stayed empty through the whole FY2025 budget season.
Why the gap bites hardest at this particular meeting. This was the last session at which the committee met the administration before it reported to the board. Everything the board was told on 20 December about the middle-school schedule and the pre-K move was shaped here, and the only surviving account of that shaping is a video with no index. The consequences were not hypothetical: the district’s approved minutes of 20 December record six Claremont Middle School teachers and a parent speaking against the schedule change, one of them saying it “would decrease instructional time,” another that it “would overburden teachers and lead to them leaving.” The evidence they were arguing against — the superintendent’s “CMS schedule change impact document,” his statement that eight positions could be cut, and the committee’s own unresolved $333,000/$300,000 problem — exists nowhere in writing.
Two documents distributed at this meeting survive only because someone read from them at the next one. On 18 December the chair told the room: “one of the things we received from the administration on December 13th is this this handout… 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.” He read its content: it “talks about elementary and middle and below. It talks about middle and high school and estimated impact to the budget of 300,000.” Later in the same session Crawford put a second figure to the superintendent from the same source: “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,” and he answered “Yes.” all three quotations are from the 18 December recording, not this one Neither the sunset sheet nor the block-to-traditional cost is mentioned anywhere on the 13 December recording, which spends thirty-seven minutes on the schedule changes those documents cost out. Neither has ever been posted. So the record of this meeting is not merely thin — it is missing material that the committee itself was working from, and that a citizen can now know about only by watching a different meeting five days later.
In fairness. The committee did the opposite of meeting in private: it broadcast the session live and had done so for every session of the season. 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 13 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” unamended since 2008, 354:1; 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; RSA 91-A:1 — “the greatest possible public access to the actions, discussions and records of all public bodies”; Claremont Finance Sub Committee (Drive folder, created 27 Oct 2022, empty — verified 2026-08-29); approved Claremont School Board minutes, 6 December 2023; approved Claremont School Board minutes, 20 December 2023.
HIGH Statutory filings owed to the State within 20 days of the March annual meeting were made on 12 December, and the city’s tax rate was still unset a fortnight before the tax year closed
At 0:37:40 the chair raised it as “just an odd one off question,” on behalf of residents: “people are legitimately worried about their tax rate,” and city councillors had told them “we’re waiting on the school district.” His question at 0:38:25: “what what what is the Dre [DRA] waiting for at this point for setting the tax rate?” The business administrator answered directly and without being pressed.
What she said. At 0:38:38: “I turned in the stuff yesterday. I was waiting on getting a signed copy of the certified ballot, and also a signed copy of minutes from the deliberative that I did not have.” At 0:39:46: “a lot of these things should have been uploaded back in March and April. So. And they weren’t uploaded. So again. But I searched through emails. I couldn’t find them. So I reached out and now I have them.” And at 0:40:13: “I have been in constant contact with the Dre [DRA], you know, and Jamie over there… I understand we’re late. I get it, and it’s it’s later than I want it to be.” The two named documents — the certified ballot and the deliberative-session minutes — are the district’s record of what the voters appropriated.
The deadline those documents missed. Claremont School District operates under the official-ballot (SB 2) procedure of RSA 40:13, so its annual meeting runs in two sessions: the deliberative session of 8 February 2023 and the ballot vote of 14 March 2023. RSA 21-J:34, IV requires that the minutes of the meeting “at which appropriations are voted or rescinded… shall be certified by the clerk” and “shall be filed within 20 days of the date of the close of the meeting”; paragraph VI requires the budget filing within 20 days of the close of the annual meeting; paragraph II requires the appropriations certification on the same 20-day clock. That clock closed in early April 2023. The filing described on this recording was made on 12 December 2023 — roughly eight months late, on the district’s own account of it. Separately, paragraph III (revised estimated revenues) and paragraph V, together with RSA 198:4-d, set a 1 September deadline for the school district’s financial report, which RSA 198:4-d requires the chair of the governing body to certify as “true, accurate and complete” under penalty of perjury. Nothing on this recording establishes whether those September filings were made on time; the business administrator’s “a lot of these things” is not itemised, and this page does not assume more than she said.
Why the lateness had a public consequence. Under RSA 21-J:35 the commissioner of revenue administration “shall compute and establish the tax rate of each town, city, or unincorporated place,” and must first examine the reports filed under RSA 21-J:34 to confirm that appropriations were voted in accordance with statutory procedure and that revenue estimates are accurate. The rate cannot be set until the district’s filings are in. The effect on residents was described in the room: Crawford at 0:39:07, “I’m a taxpayer December 1st you’re going to get your tax bill”; and at 0:40:40, “it also means that that the city and the school district don’t have the money because people pay their taxes on the last day… So how are we going to fund from January 1st through the 10th or 12th when people actually pay their taxes?” The business administrator’s estimate, at 0:41:03, was that bills could go out “within a week” — which Crawford immediately dated: “So that’s December 15th. So that’s a half a month.”
Why this is graded HIGH. It is the missed-statutory-deadline limb, and it does not depend on inference: the officer responsible said on camera that material owed in March and April was filed in December, that it had not been uploaded, and “I understand we’re late.” The consequence — a municipal tax rate unset in the last month of the calendar year, and a city and district without collected revenue at the turn of the year — is described on the same recording by an elected member.
In fairness, and it matters. The business administrator took office in early July 2023, three months after the deadline had already passed; the documents she needed were the previous administration’s to file, and she describes searching old e-mail for them. She volunteered the whole account without being asked for it, accepted a share of the responsibility rather than deflecting it (“it goes on, both of us because I didn’t follow up”), and had resolved the filing the day before this meeting. The chair’s purpose in raising it was to separate the two processes for the public rather than to assign blame — “that is a different process really” — and the business administrator’s closing point was about the difficulty of explaining any of it: “that that’s the hard part about educating the public is that they don’t know.”
Sources: RSA 21-J:34 as codified in 2023 — reports required of school districts: appropriations certification and certified minutes within 20 days of the close of the meeting (II, IV), revised estimated revenues by September 1 (III), financial report by September 1 (V), budget within 20 days (VI) stable: source note ends 2007, 182:2, eff. April 1, 2007, so the current text is the text that governed; RSA 21-J:35 — the commissioner computes and establishes each municipality’s tax rate after examining those reports last amended 2017; RSA 198:4-d as codified in 2023 — school district financial report on or before September 1, certified “true, accurate and complete” further amended by 2025, 141:401, eff. July 1, 2025 — after this meeting; RSA 40:13 — official ballot (SB 2) procedure, under which the annual meeting runs in two sessions unamended since 2019, 192:2; RSA 189:28 — statistical reports to the department of education; state and federal aid withheld until complete and accurate information is submitted cited as context; no withholding is asserted to have occurred.
MEDIUM Seven days before the board sent a $36,313,407.97 budget to public hearing, its own finance committee could not say what the total was — and the figure in the members’ binder had already been superseded
What the record shows, in order. At 1:27:46, winding the meeting up, the chair said: “We and we don’t know what that do. We know what that overall number is. I don’t think we really do. And so what we have so far with the changes, what’s what’s that impact.” The middle sentence is garbled — the recognizer has dropped a word and this page does not supply it; read with the sentence that follows and with the rest of the passage, the plain sense is that the committee did not know the overall figure. He went on at 1:28:02: “the revenue side we haven’t we have not seen. So again, what are we going to be bringing in for grants? I don’t have a sense of at all of what’s left with SR [ESSER]. I don’t have any idea.” Crawford then produced the only total-budget figure spoken anywhere in the meeting, at 1:28:32, reading from the binder: “in the budget packet on in tab eight, which is kind of a summary of the budget on the final page on page 55, it shows, a million 316 as an increase over last year’s budget.” The business administrator’s answer, at 1:29:00 and 1:29:05: “That has changed with some of the changes that you had you make?… So I will be getting you a new report. Okay. Because I had to update some things within the budget now.”
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 no, and the record is unusually clean on the point. The figure is never spoken at this meeting; no total is. What the committee had was a binder summary showing an increase of roughly $1,316,000 over the FY2024 appropriation of $34,880,312 — a total in the region of $36.20 million — and the officer who produced it telling them it was already out of date. The document the board actually voted on, the district’s Updated Claremont School District Budget 12.20.23, carries “Grand Total: 36,313,407.97” against an increase of $1,433,096.06, which reconciles to the same FY2024 appropriation of $34,880,312 to within a penny. That is about $117,000 above the binder figure in front of this committee — but the budget did not travel between the two dates in a straight line, and the intervening figure is the one that matters.
What the record shows between this meeting and the vote — a gap, reported as a gap. At the 18 December session (flag 4) the working increase spoken on camera was larger again. The committee chair put it to the business administrator as “So, Mrs. Henry, so we’re looking at 1.783.” She gave the percentage a minute later: “even though the budgets up 5.7%, the overall increase to the amount we have to raise is nine.” both quotations are from the 18 December recording, not this one An increase of $1,783,000 on the same FY2024 base is about $36,663,000 — roughly $350,000 above the $36,313,407.97 the board moved two days after that. The three figures in the public record therefore run: about $36.20 million in the binder here on 13 December, about $36.66 million spoken on tape on 18 December, and $36,313,407.97 moved on 20 December. The figure discussed on tape and the figure that was moved are not the same number, and this page does not treat them as one. the $36.66 million is arithmetic on a spoken increase and a printed base drawn from two different records, and the percentages spoken on 18 December do not reconcile to a single total. It is what the available figures imply, not a number anyone stated.
What that does not establish. A gap between what was discussed on tape and what was moved is worth reporting, because no public record accounts for it. It is not proof of what was decided off the record, and this page does not claim it is. The only committee member to speak to the point said the opposite: three weeks later, at the finance session of 5 January 2024, Crawford was still reverse-engineering the difference herself — “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” — work she described as “comparing the 1218 budget to the 1220 budget to see where the variations were.” both quotations are from the finance meeting of 5 January 2024, not from this recording Nothing on this recording, and nothing this page has found in the public record, shows where or by whom that reduction was settled. What can be said is that it was not settled here, and that the 18 December document it was measured against has never been published.
And the $196,001.10 reduction does not originate here either. 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”; on 17 January 2024 Crawford moved that “the school board approve a budget for fiscal year 25 of $36,117,406.87.” both quotations are from those meetings’ recordings, not this one The difference is exactly $196,001.10, and the whole of it was worked out after this meeting: at the finance session of 5 January 2024 Crawford framed the choice for the other two members as “are you are you okay with the 36 million 318. Or do you want to see that reduced to 36188?” — her spoken renderings of the figure then on the table and of a 3.75 per cent benchmark she had derived a minute earlier (“I multiply the 34,000 times 1.0375. I get 36188. I’m rounding”). The line items examined in that January session — the alternative-support programme already zeroed out between the 18 and 20 December documents, at about $240,000, the behaviour specialists, a district psychologist line — are not discussed at this meeting at all, and the two items this meeting did press hardest, the middle school’s $333,000/$300,000 pair and the pre-K $100,000/$60,000 discrepancy, do not appear as identified components of the January reduction. Nothing in the available public record traces any part of the $196,001.10 to 13 December 2023, and this page does not claim any. The adopted figure in fact landed about $71,000 below Crawford’s own 3.75 per cent benchmark.
Why this is graded 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 working session with the administration it had neither a current total, nor the revenue side, nor a federal-grant balance — and it knew the prior-year comparatives were unreliable, which both Crawford and the business administrator said out loud at 1:29:11. Two of its three members stated conditions they could not yet test: the chair, “I cannot support moving anything forward unless I know where specifically the money is going as far as staffing goes” (1:29:51); the board chair, “it cannot be testimonial. It has to be quantitative. And if I, I will I’m a no for anything that doesn’t have that” (1:32:41). Seven days later the chair moved the budget forward and the vote was unanimous.
A related documentary gap, which is what makes this hard to audit at all. The district’s 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 — public hearing on the budget; all purposes and amounts disclosed or discussed; comparative columns showing 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 32:1 — application of the chapter, which names school districts; RSA 40:13 — official ballot (SB 2) procedure; RSA 91-A:2, II as codified in 2023 — minutes to carry subject matter and final decisions; Claremont School District, Updated Claremont School District Budget 12.20.23 — “Grand Total: 36,313,407.97”, increase $1,433,096.06; approved Claremont School Board minutes, 20 December 2023; Finance Committee dialogue, 18 December 2023; School Board dialogue, 20 December 2023; Finance Committee dialogue, 5 January 2024; School Board dialogue, 17 January 2024.
MEDIUM The session that produced the board’s budget figure was set up here as a members-only caucus — a full quorum of a public body, meeting for two to three hours on the district’s central business
Ten minutes of this meeting, from 0:59:36, are spent establishing what the 18 December session is. The chair had it wrong: “it looks like we’re going to be meeting on the 18th to caucus with with the the rest of the board. Which is five days from now.” Whitney corrected him — “The caucus on the 18th is just us” — Crawford agreed, “That’s what I thought too,” and the chair accepted it: “Oh, it’s just us three.” Whitney set the terms at 1:01:51: “we’ve got three hours, two hours allocated. So admin is welcome but not required.” Crawford fixed its purpose and its output at 1:01:36 and 1:01:59: “the caucus is on the 18th where we’re going to try to hash out what our recommendations are to present to the board” on “Wednesday at seven days from now.”
Why the word “caucus” does not change the legal character of the gathering. This committee has three members. All three attending is not a subset of the committee — it is the committee, with a full quorum. RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d) makes a subcommittee of a school board a public body in its own right, and RSA 91-A:2, I defines a “meeting” 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.” Hashing out budget recommendations for presentation to the board is squarely that. So the 18 December session carried the same 24-hour notice duty and the same five-business-day minutes duty as this one — and, like this one, it produced neither. Nor is there a caucus exemption to fall back on. The Right-to-Know Law’s only caucus exclusion, RSA 91-A:2, I(c), reaches “[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 on a partisan ballot adopted by a town or city under RSA 669:12 or RSA 44:2. No element of it can fit a New Hampshire school board: 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” — unamended since 1979, 321:1, eff. Aug. 21, 1979. Claremont board members are elected as district officers on a non-partisan ballot, so none of them was “elected on a partisan basis”, and the two adoption routes the paragraph names are routes for town and city officers, not school district officers. The exemption is not available here, and this page does not offer it as a defence. What raises this above a labelling quibble is what sits in the gap it leaves. The budget figure spoken on camera on 18 December was about $350,000 higher than the figure the board moved two days later (flag 3), and no notice, no minutes and no published document account for the difference. That is a hole in the public record; it is not a finding about what the three members decided.
What actually happened on 18 December, and it cuts both ways. The session was recorded and is public as Cablecast show 15451, running two hours and twenty-three minutes — and the board chair is the reason. At the close of the 1 December session she proposed it in these terms: “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.” that quotation is from the 1 December recording, not this one The members-only plan settled here also did not survive contact: the full administrative team attended on 18 December and held the floor for a substantial part of it. So the practical secrecy risk did not materialise. The notice and minutes duties were still not met, and a citizen who wanted to know what a quorum of this committee agreed on 18 December has, again, only a video.
Why MEDIUM rather than HIGH. The mitigating facts here are real and on the record: the body itself asked for the session to be recorded before anyone raised a Right-to-Know question, it was recorded, it was broadcast, and it was in the event not members-only. That is the pattern this project’s severity rule treats as mitigation. What it does not do is create notice or minutes.
Sources: RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d) — “public body” includes any committee, subcommittee, or subordinate body of a school district or school administrative unit this section runs I–VI only; the definition of “meeting” is in RSA 91-A:2, I, not here; RSA 91-A:2, I as codified in 2023 — definition of “meeting”; RSA 91-A:2 as codified in 2023 — notice and minutes; RSA 91-A:2, I(c) — the party-caucus exclusion, quoted above the 2023 codification carries I(c) in word-for-word the same terms as the text served today; 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; RSA 669:12 — partisan official ballot system, available to towns for the election of town officers; Cablecast show 15451, Finance Committee, 18 December 2023; Finance Committee dialogue, 18 December 2023; Finance Committee dialogue, 1 December 2023 source of the board chair’s request that the caucus be recorded; Finance Committee dialogue, 5 January 2024 source of the member’s own search for the $350,000.
MEDIUM The pre-K figures put to the committee do not reconcile with each other, the sheet carrying them was not in the packet, and the officer who wrote it could not explain it
Three numbers were in play. The committee had been told the pre-K relocation carried an “estimated impact” of $100,000 — Crawford at 1:05:34: “I see and hear that the estimated impact of this is $100,000. And why couldn’t why is there an increase.” The special-education director’s own one-page handout showed something else. Crawford at 1:12:10: “It’s called pre-K proposed budget FY 2425. It was a separate handout. It wasn’t in the packet. Right. And so if I look at the total here the total increase is 60,000. And yet this says 100,000. And I’m trying to correlated to.” And inside that sheet, at 1:12:45: “you’ve got preschool teacher salaries down 10,000, but Perry’s [paras] up 61,000” — a composition that is the opposite of the certified-staff-led programme the discussion assumed.
The author’s answer was that he could not account for it either. Nester at 1:12:35: “That doesn’t make sense to me either. I’m not sure why there’s a increase proposed there at your budget.” And at 1:13:15: “if if Mike and Mary are agreeable, I’d like to take some time to clean that up. That doesn’t that doesn’t make sense to me either.” No date was set, nobody was assigned to confirm the correction, and the pre-K figures do not return anywhere in the remaining twenty-five minutes of the recording. Whether they were corrected before the budget went to the board on 20 December is not establishable from any public document, because this committee produced none.
The classroom count needed correcting twice in the same exchange. Crawford’s understanding at 1:02:21 was “four, classrooms, they’re going to be purchased this year with Esser [ESSER] money not in the budget, and two are going to desired [Disnard] and two are going to bluff.” Nester at 1:03:13: “we’re still only budgeted for three classrooms total for pre-K in the current budget.” It took three further exchanges to land: two modular units, each containing two classrooms, only three of the four to be staffed. That two elected members and the presenting officer needed five turns to agree on how many classrooms were being bought is itself a measure of what the missing packet cost.
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: a figure of about $100,000 was before the board’s only budget reviewer on a sheet that was not in the packet, whose own totals differed from it by roughly 40 per cent, and whose author could not reconcile the two on camera. In fairness — and this is the more creditable half of the exchange — the discrepancy surfaced because a member had read the handout line by line, the officer conceded it immediately rather than defending it, and he asked for time to correct it rather than letting it pass.
Sources: RSA 32:5 as codified in 2023 — all purposes and amounts of appropriations to be disclosed or discussed at the budget hearing; 2 CFR 200.303 — non-federal entities must maintain effective internal control over federal awards engaged because the modular units and playground work were proposed to be funded from ESSER; no federal finding is asserted.
MEDIUM A proposal to delete the pre-K director post, to part-fund a special-education coordinator, put to the committee before the evaluation that was supposed to inform it — for a programme that exists only to discharge the district’s special-education duty to about 35 children
What was proposed. Nester at 1:06:48: “I made a recommendation that in lieu of a director that would oversee the program, we should hire a special ed coordinator that would work at the elementary levels, would also support that.” He put the trade in terms at 1:08:22: “we considered reducing the pre-K director position to fund the special ed leader position.” His own view of the merits, at 1:07:16, was the opposite: “Absolutely. We should have a director for pre-K 100%.” And at 1:26:42: “it’s certainly not my my blatant recommendation to cut positions, but just in the interest of trying to be fiscally responsible, it’s a proposal that the Finance Committee can consider.”
What the programme is for, established in the room. Whitney at 1:08:36: “our preschool, our preschool program here exists, it may serve other groups, but it exists exclusively to serve our special education population.” Nester: “That’s our obligation.” Whitney again at 1:09:48: “The only reason we have preschool is for special education.” The size of the obligation, at 1:24:51: “Currently about 35” children. The chair tested the floor at 1:09:53 — if the district were “truly, truly bare bones on pre-K, we are we’re not required to have a program… we would be pushing services in to them” — and got a candid non-answer: “I mean, legally, you might be able to get away with that. I don’t I’m not aware of of the district so that but but I think.” Crawford asked why the children could not be placed elsewhere; Nester at 1:10:48: “They don’t exist. Those programs don’t exist.”
The legal frame, and what it does and does not settle. The chair’s premise is broadly right and worth stating plainly, because it went unanswered on the recording. Under IDEA the duty is to make a free appropriate public education available to every eligible child from the third birthday — 34 CFR 300.101 requires FAPE for “all children residing in the State between the ages of 3 and 21, inclusive,” and 34 CFR 300.124(b) requires that “[b]y the third birthday of a child… an IEP or… an IFSP, has been developed and is being implemented.” New Hampshire adopts the same age range: RSA 186-C:2 defines a “child with a disability” as one “between the ages of 3 and 21, inclusive.” Neither federal nor state law requires a district to operate its own preschool, so a district may in principle discharge the duty by serving children in other settings — which is why this is graded MEDIUM and not HIGH. But the duty attaches to the child, not to the building, and the record here says the alternative settings do not exist locally. What the law does not settle at all is whether a special-education coordinator with district-wide responsibilities can also serve as the programme’s educational leader; that is a staffing judgement, and this page does not assert an answer.
The sequencing objection, raised by the chair. Nester had told the committee minutes earlier that the plan for pre-K was “to bring in an independent firm or to have a study done so that we can take the recommendations of that study” (1:13:53), that it was not in the budget, that three of five approached bodies had already declined, and that the live option — “the National Association for the Education of Young Children” — runs “a two year process” costing “2000 bucks.” Sprague’s objection at 1:24:59 follows directly: “When we’ve got a pending evaluation of the programing, right to make presumptions from us as to what’s needed. Maybe contrary to what comes through in the study.” A structural staffing decision was being asked for ahead of the review that would tell the district what structure it needed, and the review had not been commissioned.
Certification, which nobody resolved. Crawford’s question at 1:04:16 — “do those principal or those principles [principals] certified in preschool?” — was answered by the business administrator from her prior district rather than from Claremont’s certifications: “It is not uncommon for a principal to oversee a pre-K at Fall Mountain. We don’t have a director of pre-K” (1:25:15), and “A principles [principal’s] certifications when encompass pre-K if they’re a principal”. An unattributed voice objects immediately: “K12 not is not K-12” (1:26:10). that interjection carries no named speaker in the dialogue file, and this page does not attribute it The certification question is left where it started. The state’s administrator credentials are set by Ed 500; nothing on this recording establishes what the two elementary principals actually hold, and this page does not guess.
In fairness. The special-education director volunteered that he did not favour the cut, framed it as a fiscal option for the committee rather than a recommendation, and set out real educational gains from the relocation that the committee could test — five-day attendance instead of four, access to specials, proximity to nursing (flag 12). The business administrator’s account of embedding preschool in elementary buildings elsewhere was specific and reported measured results over three years. Nothing here suggests anyone was trying to reduce services to disabled children; the flag is about deciding structure before the evidence, on figures that did not reconcile.
Sources: 34 CFR 300.101 — FAPE available to all children residing in the State between the ages of 3 and 21, inclusive; 34 CFR 300.124(b) — an IEP or IFSP developed and being implemented by the child’s third birthday; 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 2025, eff. Sept. 5, 2025, after this meeting; RSA 186-C:1 — state policy on education of children with disabilities; N.H. Admin. Code Ed 300 — minimum standards for public school approval cited as the part; the site now serves the 12-13-2024 readoption, so subsection numbers are not asserted.
OBSERVATION Eight middle-school positions could come out of the budget, the superintendent will not say whether they will, and the teachers’ union had not been met
The proposition. Tempesta at 0:02:36 and 0:03:06: “Currently we have in the math, English, science and social studies at the middle school. We have six teachers, okay, in each of those subjects budgeted… And if we shifted to have only four teachers increasing the number of sections they they taught, you wouldn’t need to fill eight positions. Now some of those positions are already vacant, i.e. the math and science teachers that we haven’t been able to find.” Pressed by Crawford on the difference between a cut and a reduction, he answered at 0:16:42: “If we needed to, could we cut all eight out. Yes. But what I’m uncomfortable doing and saying right now is we still have to look at what else might be needed in this schedule.” And at 0:15:34, explicitly for the broadcast: “It’s very important for people on TV. I’m not saying that we are definitely going to reduce eight positions.”
Meanwhile the reduction was already in the document. Sprague at 0:31:36: “I’m looking at the in the blue book, the binder. The first line CMS regular instruction salaries. I’m showing the cut of 333,000.” So the budget the committee was reviewing carried the saving whether or not the decision had been taken, and carried a $300,000 increase elsewhere that nobody in the room could characterise. Crawford at 0:42:05: “if you’re cutting 333 339,000, how are you not cutting staff and… how are you going to reallocate that?”
Consultation, as the record has it. Crawford at 0:13:30: “how’s the staff and, and the Syria [SREA] responding to this?” Tempesta: “So I have a meeting with the Serra [SREA] coming up… No, I’ve, I’ve told them about all of all of this.” On the teachers, after Crawford said “Oh, the teachers don’t know about this”: “The teachers do know about this. Mr. Romeo had a meeting with them. I met with Mr. Romeo in his leadership team and presented this before it was ever presented to you folks.” Asked their response: “They were concerned.” Crawford’s conclusion at 0:18:53: “it hasn’t been cross-referenced with teachers, with the union, with parents. Correct. And that’s a concern for me.”
Why this is an OBSERVATION and not a rule-based flag. New Hampshire’s public-employee labour law does not settle this on its text. RSA 273-A:1, XI defines “terms and conditions of employment” as “[w]ages, hours and other conditions of employment other than managerial policy within the exclusive prerogative of the public employer,” and it expressly puts within managerial policy “the functions, programs and methods of the public employer… the public employer’s organizational structure, and the selection, direction and number of its personnel.” The decision to run four teachers per subject instead of six therefore sits on the managerial side; the effect on teaching load may not. Whether a particular schedule change is negotiable in New Hampshire turns on decisions of the Public Employee Labor Relations Board that this page has not examined, so no violation is asserted and none is implied. What the record supports is narrower and factual: a change with an $333,000 salary-line consequence was in a budget document before the employer had met the exclusive representative, and the superintendent said so.
What happened next. The union meeting he referred to was set for 14 December, the day after this session. Seven days after this meeting the district’s approved board minutes of 20 December 2023 record six Claremont Middle School teachers and one parent addressing the board against the change, and a seventh speaker in support of another matter — the first public opposition of the budget season, and precisely the sequencing failure Crawford had named here.
Sources: RSA 273-A:1, XI — “terms and conditions of employment”, and the managerial-policy exclusion covering organizational structure and the number of personnel stable; last amended 2014, 13:1–2, eff. July 13, 2014; RSA 273-A:3 — obligation to negotiate in good faith stable; last amended 2013, 244:1; approved Claremont School Board minutes, 20 December 2023; Finance Committee dialogue, 1 December 2023 the middle-school principal’s own presentation of the schedule change, twelve days earlier.
OBSERVATION Every request this committee made left the room without an owner, a date or a written record — including requests it had already made twice
The committee asked for a great deal and resolved nothing. The chair’s standing list at 0:44:22 is the clearest instance: a tax-rate impact, expected grants, state aid, Medicaid reimbursement projections, special-education aid, a staffing breakdown by position and certification, and the default budget. Every item on it had been asked for at the sessions of 30 November and 1 December and had not arrived. To it this meeting added: a further middle-school presentation (0:32:50), an explanation of the $333,000/$300,000 pair (0:31:36), corrected pre-K figures (1:13:15), an equity explanation across the three elementary schools (0:58:21), a “short priority list” from the administration (1:34:36) and a per-dollar tax-impact formula (1:35:43). Not one was moved, seconded, minuted or given a date.
Why that is more than housekeeping here. The next event was the caucus at which this committee settled its recommendation, and the one after that was the board vote. Crawford put the position plainly at 1:34:28: “I think we need a lot of information from you folks before we can hash out what we can support or not support,” and at 1:00:51: “five days from now, we all are responsible for explaining this budget to the rest of the board, and we hardly understand.” With no minutes, there is no list anywhere of what was owed, by whom, or by when — so there is also no way for a citizen, or for the four board members not on this committee, to check whether any of it was delivered before the vote.
Why OBSERVATION. Nothing in law requires a subcommittee to log action items, and a working session that takes no vote is entitled to proceed by consensus. The concern is a control weakness rather than a rule breach, and it is inseparable from the missing minutes (flag 1) — a body that kept minutes would have a record of its own requests almost automatically. In fairness, the requests themselves were specific, testable and repeatedly restated, which is the opposite of vague oversight; what is missing is the mechanism, not the diligence.
Sources: RSA 91-A:2, II as codified in 2023 — minutes to include a brief description of the subject matter discussed and final decisions; RSA 32:5 as codified in 2023 — all purposes and amounts to be disclosed or discussed at the budget hearing.
MEDIUM Nine months from the federal obligation deadline, the committee had no ESSER balance — while new ESSER commitments for modular classrooms and playgrounds were being described to it without a figure
The gap, in the chair’s words. At 1:28:02: “I don’t have a sense of at all of what’s left with SR [ESSER]. I don’t have any idea.” And at 1:28:25: “We keep talking about it, but we haven’t seen a report in a long time on what still we still have for us or funds.” At the same meeting two new uses of that money were put to the committee. Crawford’s understanding of the modular classrooms, at 1:02:21: “they’re going to be purchased this year with Esser [ESSER] money not in the budget.” And Nester at 1:18:08: “We’ve been Mike and I’ve been talking about using SR three [ESSER III] monies to revamp some of the playground structures… the final Esser [ESSER] monies that are available.” Whitney restated it as “budget neutral.” No cost is given for either the units or the playground work anywhere on this recording.
And the $300,000 the committee argued about all morning appears to be an ESSER number. Whitney put it at 0:27:58 as “a $300,000 increase to the budget” for the middle school, and neither she, Sprague nor the superintendent could say what it comprised (flag 3). Five days later the chair read the same figure off the handout he says the administration gave the committee at this meeting: the sheet is headed “sunset. Additional staff funded by federal Esser [ESSER] positions intended to mitigate student learning loss due to impact the impact of Covid,” and “it talks about middle and high school and estimated impact to the budget of 300,000.” both quotations are from the 18 December recording, not this one This is an inference, not a statement anyone made on 13 December, and it rests on one figure matching in one later reading. If it is right, then the $300,000 the committee could not characterise is the local cost of federally funded posts continuing after the federal money stops — which is the transfer Sprague suspected when he said the district looked to be “switching out academic, highly trained people and replacing them with Paris [paras]” (0:36:10), and exactly the phase-out Whitney says she demanded when the academic centres were approved (0:43:20).
Why the timing matters. ARP ESSER funds had to be obligated by 30 September 2024 and liquidated within the following 120 days, under the Department of Education’s administration of the Tydings period at 20 U.S.C. §1225(b) and the closeout rule at 2 CFR 200.344. This meeting sat nine and a half months from that obligation date. A committee reviewing an operating budget built on the assumption that certain posts move off federal money and others stay on it, without a statement of the remaining federal balance, cannot test either assumption. Whitney had raised exactly this risk when the academic centres were first funded, and says so here at 0:43:20: “my greatest concern was, is that when Esser [ESSER] money ran out, yeah, they’re going to stand up. We’re going to be asked… you have to start planning now for phasing this out.”
“Budget neutral” is true of the local appropriation and not of the district. Spending federal money on a capital improvement leaves the tax rate untouched and still commits a finite balance and creates an asset to be maintained. That distinction is drawn correctly elsewhere in the same meeting on the operating side — Crawford at 1:31:20: “It impacts the quality of education we have, but it doesn’t impact the cost to the taxpayer” — but it is not applied to the capital proposals, because nobody had the balance.
Why MEDIUM. This is the internal-control limb. 2 CFR 200.303 requires a non-federal entity to maintain effective internal control over federal awards providing reasonable assurance it is managing them in compliance with the terms of the award; a governing body’s budget committee being unable to state the remaining balance of the district’s largest federal grant, in the final year of that grant, while new commitments against it are proposed, is the kind of weakness that provision is aimed at. No finding of non-compliance is made or implied — nothing on this record shows a misused dollar, and the committee was asking the right question. In fairness, the ESSER-funded modular units were being used to solve a real problem the committee agreed on, and the request for a balance report came from the committee itself.
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 liquidation period the 120-day rule sat at paragraph (b) in 2023 and at (c) in the text eCFR serves today, after the 2024 Uniform Guidance revision; the 2023 lettering is the one that applied; 2 CFR 200.303 — internal control over federal awards.
POSITIVE The state minimum staffing standard was read into the public record, accurately, from the rule — and used to frame a budget question rather than to end one
At 0:54:23 the board chair stopped the elementary-staffing discussion to put the governing standard on the record: “Just for us to know and for the community to know that, the minimum standards in the state of New Hampshire are one certified school counselor per 500 students at the elementary school level and one full time certified school counselor per 300 students at the middle school and high school level.” She then read the rule itself at 0:54:54, naming it: “This is the 306 requirements counseling load of each elementary school should not exceed the equivalent of one full time certified school counselor per 500 counseling load in each middle school, and each high school shall not exceed the equivalent of one full time certified school counselor per 300 students.”
Checked against the rule as it stood on 13 December 2023, both ratios are right. The provision was Ed 306.15(b), “Provision of Staff and Staff Qualifications”: “The counseling load in each elementary school shall not exceed the equivalent of one full-time certified school counselor per 500 students enrolled” and “The counseling load in each middle school and each high school shall not exceed the equivalent of one full time certified school counselor per 300 students enrolled.” Her reading is that text, with the recognizer eliding the words between the two clauses. Vintage note, and it matters for anyone checking her: Ed 306.15 is now a different rule. The Ed 306 readoption effective 13 December 2024 — a year to the day after this meeting — renumbered the part, and Ed 306.15 today is “School Year.” The counselling ratios quoted here are recovered from the Department of Education’s own March 2023 side-by-side revision draft, which prints the then-existing text, and are corroborated in the Department’s minimum-standards guidance.
One part of her reading is a paraphrase and should be marked as one. She continued: “and the school board shall require that each school with an enrollment of 500 or more students provide the services of an assistant principal,” and restated it at 0:55:31 as “the school board is required to provide funding for an assistant principal in schools with over 500.” The rule — Ed 306.15(c) in the 2023 text — requires each school of 500 or more to provide “the services of an associate principal or 2 or more persons with administrative certification under Ed 506 who together act as a full-time equivalent.” So the rule permits two part-time certified administrators in place of one assistant principal, and it speaks of providing services rather than providing funding. The threshold and the direction of the duty are right; the mechanism is looser than she stated. Nothing turned on it here: none of the three elementary schools was near 500.
What she did with it is why this is graded POSITIVE. She used the standard to give the public a floor, not to close the argument: “That’s the only reason I’m bringing it up is so when, when we’re having these discussions that folks are aware that we are already far and exceeding m[inimums]” (0:56:35). And Crawford declined to let the floor answer the question, at 0:58:21: “I understand the minimum is 500, but I want the staff to explain why the model that they’re projecting meets the needs.” That is the right use of a minimum standard in a budget review, and it is the opposite of the failure mode this corpus records elsewhere, where a statutory rate was stated to this same committee from memory and was wrong.
One arithmetic caveat, recorded rather than resolved. Crawford supplied the enrolments at 0:55:50 and 0:56:08 — “I’ve got Dessner [Disnard] at 256 and, Maple at 269… And bluff at 176. So that looks like you need 1.25, social workers, no guidance.” The three figures total 701, which at one counsellor per 500 is 1.4 full-time equivalents across the three schools, not 1.25; her working is not on the recording and nobody checked it. The point she was making — that the three schools together need somewhat more than one such post — survives either number.
Sources: N.H. Department of Education, Proposed Revisions — Ed 306, March 2023 side-by-side, existing-rule column: Ed 306.15(b)(1)–(2) counselling load, and Ed 306.15(c) associate principal at 500 or more students the department’s own document, and the recoverable source for the text in force in December 2023; N.H. Department of Education, minimum standards for school approval guidance — Ed 306.15(b)(1)–(2) quoted; N.H. Admin. Code Ed 300, current text serves the 12-13-2024 readoption, in which Ed 306.15 is “School Year” — do not read today’s numbering back onto this meeting.
POSITIVE Three elected members set an explicit evidentiary standard for a staffing request, on live television, and refused to accept testimony in place of data
The committee televised this working session as it had televised the three before it, and the members used the camera deliberately. Whitney’s reason for wanting the middle-school numbers pinned down, at 0:09:08: “I’m going to project forward that I think that at the hearing or when the budget comes to the community, there’s going to be a lot of emotions… And what I want to be I just want to get our numbers crystal clear.” She then corrected the misunderstanding she expected the public to have — that class sizes would double — before it could form: “It looks like the number of kids per class will not change that much, if at all.”
The standard itself. On the academic centres, at 0:33:51: “Well, I haven’t seen any evidence that there’s been academic achievement with this model.” At 0:34:34: “if it’s antidotes [anecdotes] that there’s improvement in behavior and and climate and culture, it doesn’t mean anything to me unless I actually see it play out academically.” At 0:43:58: “I’ve just heard testimonials. And so for me testimonials are for church.” And in the closing minutes, at 1:32:41: “And it can’t be it cannot be testimonial. It has to be quantitative. And if I, I will I’m a no for anything that doesn’t have that.” She also stated the corollary that keeps it honest, at 0:43:58: “You have to have an evaluation plan in place and be working on that valuation plan.”
The chair applied the same test against a change he supports. Sprague favours the high school’s seven-period move and says so; what he refused was the justification offered for it. At 0:20:40: “I am concerned that we can that I can show and explain quantitatively how that reduces dropout rates.” At 0:22:04: “The the continuity is the reason to do it. Yeah. Not the dropout rate.” And at 0:25:11: “I think we need to sell it for what it is, not dropout prevention, because I actually personally think that this could drop outs.” A board member arguing down the case for his own preferred policy, in public, is not common in this corpus.
And Crawford’s process warning was vindicated within a week. At 0:18:53 she objected to “agreeing to this budget and this level of expenditure for the teaching line before pretty much anything has worked out… it hasn’t been cross-referenced with teachers, with the union, with parents.” On 20 December the district’s own approved minutes record six middle-school teachers and a parent addressing the board against the schedule change, with “General agreement from other staff present” noted after each. The committee had been told what was coming and had said so on camera.
Set against the rest of this page. None of this cures the missing minutes (flag 1) or the requests that left the room without an owner (flag 8). It is recorded because the Right-to-Know Law’s stated purpose is “the greatest possible public access to the actions, discussions and records of all public bodies,” and this committee volunteered the actions and the discussions in full. What it did not do was leave the records.
Sources: RSA 91-A:1 — statement of purpose: “the greatest possible public access to the actions, discussions and records of all public bodies”; approved Claremont School Board minutes, 20 December 2023; School Board dialogue, 20 December 2023.
POSITIVE Two administrators corrected the public record against their own interest, on camera, without being caught out first
The superintendent, on the difference between a reduction and a cut. Crawford had put to him that the middle-school principal “said that there were six cuts in your presentation” while his own paper said eight. His answer at 0:15:34 opens by naming the audience: “So I’m not saying there’s a here. It’s very important for people on TV. I’m not saying that we are definitely going to reduce eight positions.” When Crawford pressed the arithmetic anyway, he conceded the harder half rather than retreating into it: “If we needed to, could we cut all eight out. Yes… And this is it’s going to be tough to hear” (0:16:42, 0:17:09). He also volunteered the limits of his own work: “We still haven’t done the nuts and bolts of the actual scheduling in the detail yet.”
The special-education director, on his own handout. Asked why his one-page sheet totalled $60,000 against the $100,000 the committee had been given, he did not defend it: “That doesn’t make sense to me either. I’m not sure why there’s a increase proposed there at your budget” (1:12:35), and then asked for time to fix it (1:13:15). Earlier he had twice interrupted a member’s summary to correct it in the district’s favour on the harder side of the ledger — “we’re still only budgeted for three classrooms total for pre-K in the current budget” (1:03:13) — and stated a view against the proposal he was presenting: “Absolutely. We should have a director for pre-K 100%” (1:07:16).
And one concrete, testable gain came out of it. Amid a discussion the committee found unsatisfactory in most respects, the pre-K relocation was shown to produce something a reviewer can check afterwards. Nester at 1:22:46: “if they’re at the elementary schools and students now have specials and they can rotate through, right. The teachers have planning time and the pre-K students will begin to attend Monday through Friday.” Whitney restated it in the form a citizen can hold the district to, at 1:23:21: “the special education preschool students will be in school five days a week instead of four.”
Why this is worth a card. The corpus records the opposite behaviour often enough that its absence is not neutral. Both concessions here were made before anyone had documentary proof to force them, in a meeting whose only record was a live broadcast, and both made the administration’s own position harder. They are also the reason several findings on this page can be stated at all.
Sources: the recording of this meeting, at the timestamps given. No legal provision is asserted; this card records conduct, not compliance.
Appendix — source files
Official and public sources
- Recording: Claremont Community Television, Cablecast show 15471 — “School Board Finance Mtg 12/13/23”. Title reproduced exactly as the Cablecast API returns it, confirmed 2026-08-29;
totalRunTime 5,878 seconds. The dialogue file’s last row ends at 1:37:23.
- No agenda and no packet exists for this meeting in any district share. No minutes exist. 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. Drive title searches run independently for this page on 2026-08-29 for
12.13.23, 12-13-23, 121323 and 12.13.2023 return nothing at all, from any share.
- Claremont Finance Sub Committee — a Drive folder owned by
sau6webmaster@sau6.org, created 27 October 2022 and containing no files (the folder listing was queried directly for this page on 2026-08-29 and returned empty; the folder’s own metadata records a modification on 1 December 2025, but it holds nothing). 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 all likewise empty as of 2026-08-29.
- The first subcommittee material of any kind filed into the district’s main packets share is a folder named 5. 8.19.2026 -- Policy Subcommittee, created 18 August 2026 — two years and eight months after this meeting. A Drive-wide title search for
Finance Subcommittee, Finance Sub Committee and Finance Sub-Committee, run for this page on 2026-08-29, returns exactly three items: the empty district folder above, and two 2026 working documents owned by this project’s own maintainer — not district-share material.
- The one Finance Committee minutes document held anywhere in the district’s own shares for this era is Exhibit B- Meeting Minutes Finance Subcommittee 7.22.24 (2).pdf the district’s own filename, trailing
(2) included, filed as an exhibit inside an August 2024 board packet — seven months after this meeting. It establishes that this committee could minute and post a session, and did once.
- Approved Claremont School Board minutes, 6 December 2023 district document — the meeting a week before this one. Its Finance Sub-Committee item 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,” that there were “Upcoming meeting(s) next week to answer further questions,” and that the committee “Will be presented to the board in two weeks.” That is this meeting, the 18 December caucus and the 20 December presentation, described in advance.
- Approved Claremont School Board minutes, 20 December 2023 district document — seven days after this meeting. Records the Finance Subcommittee item, the claim that “Subcommittee meetings and minutes are available online for people to review,” the motion “to move the budget forward to the hearing phase” by Sprague and Gallagher carried unanimously with no amount stated, and the seven citizens who spoke, six of them Claremont Middle School teachers opposing the schedule change discussed at this meeting.
- Updated Claremont School District Budget 12.20.23 district document; 55 pages of account detail — the FY2025 proposal as it stood on the day of the board vote. Carries “Grand Total: 36,313,407.97” against an increase of $1,433,096.06 over FY2024, and still carries the Board Voted Expense Reduct line at ($688,426.17) for FY2023–24, falling to zero in the proposal. Used on this page only for flag 3.
- Companion recordings in the same FY2025 budget sequence: Finance Committee, 30 November 2023 (show 15443, the elementary-schools session — has a page: Claremont School Board Finance Committee, 30 November 2023); Finance Committee, 1 December 2023 (show 15444, the three-hour secondary and district-wide session, and the source of this meeting’s 9 a.m. scheduling — has a page: Claremont School Board Finance Committee, 1 December 2023); Finance Committee, 6 December 2023 (show 15452, the session the board chair missed and this one resumes — has a page: Claremont School Board Finance Committee, 6 December 2023); Finance Committee, 18 December 2023 (show 15451, the caucus set at this meeting); School Board, 20 December 2023 (show 15483); School Board FY25 budget public hearing, 3 January 2024 (show 15505); Finance Committee, 5 January 2024 (show 15510); School Board, 17 January 2024 (show 15531, budget adopted). Of these, the 30 November, 1 December and 6 December sessions have pages in this archive; the 18 December caucus, the 20 December board meeting, the 3 January hearing, the 5 January session and the 17 January adoption do not yet.
- 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.
- Adjacent full-board page — Claremont School Board, 1 November 2023: the meeting at which this body was renamed from the Budget Subcommittee to the Finance Committee and the two student representatives were seated.
Project files
Relative links work when this page is opened from Output/HTML/.
- Output/Dialogue/15471 SchoolBoardFinance121323.mp4.CSV — speaker-attributed dialogue, 586 rows and 14,320 words. Every quotation and every timestamp on this page comes from it unless the sentence says otherwise.
- Input/Transcripts/15471 SchoolBoardFinance121323.mp4.json — diarized transcript with per-word confidences.
- Input/Videos/15471 SchoolBoardFinance121323.mp4 — local copy of the recording.
- Input/SupportingDocuments/MAP.md — meeting-to-documents map, section 32, 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 “9 to 12” scheduling of this meeting and of the board chair’s request that the 18 December caucus be recorded.
- Output/Dialogue/15452 SchoolBoardFinance120623.mp4.CSV — the 6 December session, 871 rows: source of “Next Wednesday from 9 to 12”, which fixes this meeting’s day of the week.
- Output/Dialogue/15451 SchoolBoardFinance121823.mp4.CSV — the 18 December caucus, 1,466 rows: the session set at this meeting; where the working figure spoken on camera stood about $350,000 above what the board moved two days later (flag 3); and the only place in the public record where the two documents handed out at this meeting — the ESSER “sunset” staffing sheet and the superintendent’s block-to-traditional cost — are read aloud.
- 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 the “1218 budget to the 1220 budget” comparison and of the January reduction discussion.
- 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 13 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 I–VI only, and the definition of “meeting” is not in it — it is at RSA 91-A:2, I
- RSA 91-A:2 as codified in 2023 — I, definition of “meeting” (a quorum convened to discuss or act on a matter within the body’s supervision, control, jurisdiction or advisory power); 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 still — 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
- RSA 21-J:34 as codified in 2023 — reports required of school districts: appropriations certification and certified minutes of the meeting at which appropriations were voted, both within 20 days of the close of the meeting (II, IV); revised estimated revenues by September 1 (III); financial report by September 1 (V); budget within 20 days (VI) stable — source note ends 2007, 182:2, eff. April 1, 2007, so the current text is the text that governed
- RSA 21-J:35 — the commissioner of revenue administration computes and establishes each municipality’s tax rate, after examining the RSA 21-J:34 reports for statutory compliance and accurate revenue estimates last amended 2017
- RSA 198:4-d as codified in 2023 — school district financial report filed on or before September 1, certified by the chair of the governing body as “true, accurate and complete” further amended by 2025, 141:401, eff. July 1, 2025 — after this meeting
- RSA 32:5 as codified in 2023 — budget preparation and public hearing: all purposes and amounts of appropriations disclosed or discussed; 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
- RSA 32:1 — application of the chapter, which names school districts
- 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” 1979, 321:1, eff. Aug. 21, 1979 — unamended. Cited in flag 4: it is why RSA 91-A:2, I(c)’s political-party caucus exclusion cannot reach this body
- RSA 669:12 — partisan official ballot system, a route available to towns for the election of town officers, not to school district officers
- 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 189:28 — statistical reports to the department of education; state and federal aid withheld until complete and accurate information is submitted cited as context in flag 2; no withholding is asserted to have occurred
- RSA 273-A:1, XI — “terms and conditions of employment”, excluding managerial policy, which expressly includes the employer’s organizational structure and “the selection, direction and number of its personnel” last amended 2014, 13:1–2
- 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 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, eff. Sept. 5, 2025; RSA 186-C:1 — state policy on the education of children with disabilities
- N.H. Admin. Code Ed 306.15 as it stood in 2023 (“Provision of Staff and Staff Qualifications”) — (b)(1) one full-time certified school counselor per 500 students enrolled at elementary; (b)(2) per 300 at middle and high school; (c) a school of 500 or more provides the services of an associate principal or 2 or more persons with administrative certification acting as a full-time equivalent recovered from the Department of Education’s own March 2023 side-by-side revision draft, existing-rule column, and corroborated in the Department’s minimum-standards guidance. 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: the chair mentions “what used to be catastrophic aid” in passing, but no 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.