| 0:00:04 | Call to order, Pledge, roll | Whitney: “I’m calling the January 3rd, 2024 Claremont School Board meeting and, public hearing meeting into order and all rise for the Pledge of Allegiance.” The Pledge is led from the floor at 0:00:21. The chair then calls for the roll (0:00:36), and the clerk’s reading arrives as one merged segment: “Here, here. Jennifer Gallagher, present. Eileen Hawkins here” (0:00:43). Six of seven members were present per the approved minutes; Candace Crawford was absent. | |
| 0:00:53 | The chair sets the order — and the hearing begins | Whitney: “Our first item on the agenda this evening is an overview of fiscal year 2025 budget by the Claremont School District administrative team, to be followed by an overview of the 2025 default budget. And then we will open the forum up to citizens comments for the public hearing section of this meeting.” This is the moment the statutory hearing opens; it closes 40 minutes 56 seconds later at 0:41:49. | POSITIVE |
| 0:01:17 | The superintendent hands the budget to the business administrator | Tempesta: “So thank you. Put a lot of time into this and we really appreciate the the feedback from the Finance Committee as well throughout this. And I’m going to hand it over to Mary, who has really put together some nice summary documents and also a general overview that she wants to open up. So I’ll come in for the, the scheduling piece and the other pieces as, as needed, but okay.” He speaks for 22 seconds and does not return to the budget as a whole; his own material is the middle-school schedule. | |
| 0:01:44 | How this budget was built — and whose first it is | Henry: “First, I want to say it’s the first time I built the Claremont budget, and I want to thank everybody on the administrative team, the board, the staff and everybody else for their assistance, especially Frank, who has all of his knowledge, a wealth of knowledge that is definitely very beneficial when you’re trying to go back and figure out what happened in the past.” The process (0:02:09): the administrative team, then the principals individually, then the Finance Committee “on several occasions”. And the caveat that frames everything after it (0:02:33): “I want to make sure that everybody understands that this is not the final budget. It is up to the school board to determine the final budget that will be brought to the taxpayers during the deliberative session.” | OBSERVATION |
| 0:02:56 | Benefit and contract increases | Health insurance up 8.8 per cent for paraprofessionals, maintenance and secretaries, 5.7 per cent for teachers; dental up 4.7 per cent for all (0:02:56, 0:03:21). Contract wage increases, from the packet memo: year 2 of the teachers’ contract $573,097, year 3 of the Claremont Administration Association $51,736, year 3 of the paraprofessional contract $109,376. Henry ties the last of these to the warrant (0:03:48): “we’re near three are going into year three of the paraprofessional contract, which per the warrant was 109,376. These items will be on the default budget as well as items being added in.” | |
| 0:04:14 | School by school — three social workers added, eight behavioural support specialists removed | A social worker at each of Disnard, Maple Avenue and Bluff at $91,696 apiece, and a reading specialist at Maple at $110,534. Against them, behavioural support specialists come out: one at Disnard, three at Maple, three at Bluff, one at Stevens. Henry corrects herself live on the Maple figure (0:04:47): “We removed two or, excuse me, three behavioral support specialists. Around 127,500.” The packet memo carries the same slip in print — “Removed two (3) Behavior Support Specialists. Total ($127,500.00)” the ‘two (3)’ is the district’s and $127,500 is three at $42,500. She also states her costing rule: “when I budget for these people, I’m budgeting them with a two person health plan. I try to go in the middle and hope one falls on either side.” | |
| 0:05:46 | Claremont Middle School — the reductions | Henry (0:06:08): “We’re going to reduce math by 0.6. We currently have 4.6 positions in math. Reduce two English teachers six is currently what we have. Reduce three social studies teachers. We currently have seven reduced one guidance counselor. We currently have three. We removed two campus monitors previously funded by Esser.” Esser is ESSER, the federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief fund Added at CMS: one science position (already open), a campus monitor / assistant athletic director, and an ARC coordinator to parallel Stevens. She flags the item as the one the superintendent will take: “Seems is the big one” ‘Seems’ is CMS. | |
| 0:06:38 | The ESSER cliff, named out loud | Henry: “And all these next ones that I’m going to list were funded by Esser. We remove two academic deans, one English teacher and three behavioral support specialist. I do want to say though, I say reduce and I say remove, but we have openings within the district, and I want to make sure people are aware that it’s more of a it’s a restructure.” And (0:06:59): “I don’t want people to panic, to think we’re not going to have a job, because that’s not what we’re saying here.” The approved minutes render the same point as “Positions that were reduced/removed are more of a ‘restructuring’ due to other open positions in the district.” | POSITIVE |
| 0:07:57 | The technical centre — a health teacher and an open guidance post | Henry: “The total cost of salary and benefits that’s in the budget is $96,621, and the cost for the supplies to start the program in the budget are 3000. We also still have an open position from fiscal year 24 budget for career guidance counselor. The total cost of that with salary benefits is 92,284.” The health course is picked up again by Gallagher at the very end of the meeting (1:27:06). | |
| 0:08:29 | The $688,426.17 line — first appearance | Henry: “We had a line item that was labeled board voted expense reductions. It was reduction of $688,426.17 sitting on the budget. So it’s it is funds that have not been allocated back to lines that they probably belonged. This was uploaded before my time.” Then (0:09:49): “So it’s really skewing some of our district wide numbers because that’s where it ended up getting put. So again, like I said, I’m not sure where the allocation belonged. But your bottom line budget is what you voted.” And (0:10:09): “These reductions did not get allocated across the salary lines.” The packet memo gives the account: 100.40.1100.113.5.00000, a district-wide regular-instruction salary line. | MEDIUM |
| 0:10:09 | Positions moved off ESSER onto the general budget | A board-certified behaviour analyst at $109,521 (0:10:09–0:10:28; Sprague supplies the term at 0:10:26: “Board certified analyst”). Professional-development coaches at $208,388 (0:11:46). Against them, two ESSER-funded administrative posts come out — a staff accountant and a grant specialist — and the district-wide substitute line drops $125,000 “based on previous and current year expenses” (0:11:16). Henry also corrects a coding error out loud (0:10:28): the ESL teacher moves from district-wide regular salaries to ESL salaries, “This should be a function, a 1260 function, which is for state reporting.” | POSITIVE |
| 0:12:23 | A secretary who was budgeted in the wrong entity | Henry: “District wide year round secretary is not in the fiscal year 24 budget, but it is in this year’s. It should have been in 24. Again, this is one of those things that Frank had some great information for me, that it was budgeted in the saw last year and it should have been budgeted or anyways, it belongs in Claremont.” ‘the saw’ is the SAU Cost $86,479 per the packet memo. This is the example the vice chair returns to an hour later to argue that the $688,426.17 double-counts (1:03:47). | MEDIUM |
| 0:13:32 | The middle-school schedule — the only programme fight in the budget | Tempesta opens on staffing, not savings (0:13:57): “And frankly, some of the difficulties we’ve had getting core, particularly math and science teachers. We haven’t had a full complement.” He works from the packet’s social-studies slide (0:14:43), gives the enrolment — “There’s a total of 332 students now in the regular ed classes” (0:15:18) — and reaches the English department (0:17:29): “we currently have six teachers in the English department. We we would only need four at those staffing levels. And there’s still the same. And if you look across the current class sizes 17.78. Okay. And that’s with 18 sections.” The packet slide states the same in print: “Reduce 2 teachers ELA (6)… Class size 17.78 (18) to 16 (20)”. | |
| 0:19:18 | Handoff to the assistant superintendent: three years of failing to staff the schedule | Tempesta: “And I’ll give you the numbers and then I’ll let Mr. Kosky talk about it” Kosky is Koski. Koski (0:21:31): “with this schedule and the number of teachers needed to fill the schedule, we haven’t been able to fully staff the schedule for the past three years. Unfortunately, the trend for new teacher hires is not going in the right direction. And so, some creative adjustments have had to be made.” And the plain version (0:22:26): “Because I, I just don’t see us being able to hire more teachers next year. When for the past three, really since since Covid, we haven’t been able to hire enough staff.” The packet’s CMS position table is the documentary version: science falls from 5 teachers in 2022-23 to 3 in 2023-24, with “Online classes - VLACS/Edgenuity” filling the gap. | |
| 0:22:40 | The chair puts the trade in one sentence | Whitney: “So are you saying that the schedule that is proposed would allow more students to be in front of a teacher?” Koski: “Yes.” Whitney: “Versus having to get their education virtually or online?” Koski (0:22:56): “if we were to, for example, this year, if we were to can keep this year schedule, we would need to hire two math and two science teachers.” The comparison with Stevens follows at 0:24:24–0:26:32: Stevens is moving to a seven-period day, its core teachers already teach six content classes, and the proposal puts CMS core teachers at five content classes plus one enrichment. | |
| 0:27:16 | The default budget — the handout nobody had | Henry: “Over default, which I didn’t pass out to you? Sure. Sorry.” Then (0:27:30): “I’m just going to go over it quickly. I know you guys don’t have it in front of you yet, but, this is a quick, where I’m at so far with the default. I don’t know of any big one time purchases within last year’s budget that would impact default. So what I did is I took the approved budget for fiscal year 24, the 34,880,312.” That base is right: the packet’s summary page prints FY24 appropriated as $34,880,311.71. Copies are handed round mid-item (0:28:01): “Does everybody have a mess up? Oh, I got some extras.” | POSITIVE MEDIUM |
| 0:28:22 | The default derivation | Henry: “So the total reductions from the fiscal year 24 budget would be $3,445,245. So then what I do is I added in the increased items that would go into to contractually obligated the bond payment for fiscal year 25, the teacher contract of year two health insurance increases the expense. The Claremont Administration Association third year of their contract or and the support staff third year of their contract, for a total addition of 4,471,000.” The additions figure as rendered is short: the net she states next requires $4,471,707, and $4,471,707 − $3,445,245 = $1,026,462 exactly. | MEDIUM |
| 0:29:01 | The sentence the whole hearing turns on | Henry, verbatim: “So the net increase or decrease which should increase is 1,000,026 for 62. The next thing I do is I take. So our projected default budget would be 35,000,960 774, but the proposed budget is 36 million. The one we have in front of us that I spoke about earlier is 36,000,313 408, which means right now our proposed budget is 406,634 over default.” Read as spoken: net increase $1,026,462; default, as the transcript renders it, 35,960,774 [$35,906,774]; proposed $36,313,408; gap $406,634. The correction is proved twice inside this one passage. $34,880,312 + $1,026,462 = $35,906,774. And $36,313,408 − $35,906,774 = $406,634, the gap she states in the same breath; the transcript’s own figure would give $352,634 and match nothing. The recognizer agrees: that numeral carries confidence 0.65, the lowest in the sentence, against 1.00 on every other figure in it. | MEDIUM OBSERVATION |
| 0:29:34 | What a default vote would mean | Henry: “So currently if they if if default is voted, there will be a 406,634. We will have to look for that money to find it to cut the budget, to reach default.” She restates it later (0:46:22): “that default budget is going to stay at what it is right now. The 35 million. Unless I find something that I have missed, which I will go back through again, the budget to see if there’s any other one time expended. But that number is not going to change. The only number that’s going to change on this is going to be your budget number.” | |
| 0:29:51 | The tax question — and two answers that cannot both be right | Sprague: “So could you just. I’m sorry. Just for everyone’s information. How much is that on the. Is 406,000 on the tax rate? What is that sense per?” ‘sense per’ is cents per Henry: “Let me pull up my spreadsheet, Frank, because I want to make sure I have it right. Okay. Didn’t we say it was. Is it $0.08?” Whitney: “It’s roughly eight.” Sprague: “It’s eight.” Henry (0:31:06): “So it would be so yeah $0.08 per thousand. So times that.” Sprague: “32.” Henry (0:31:13): “Yeah. Would be $32 on 100,000.” She never finds the sheet: “I can’t believe I can’t find it” (0:31:33). The approved minutes settle it as “Would be approximately 32 cents per thousand”. | OBSERVATION |
| 0:32:05 | The revaluation — who now carries the bill | Henry: “Residential went up by 42%. Commercial went up by 23%. So again what that means is the residential burdens more of that increase or the increase.” Sprague, unprompted (0:32:29): “I was told Walmart’s taxes were reduced by a quarter of a quarter of $1 million.” Henry on the knock-on to state aid (0:32:53): “Higher property values means more statewide education, property tax that you will be told you have to pay out of that. So adequacy aid may go down based on your increase in your property values.” The approved minutes record the exchange as “Mary Henry discussed property tax impacts and potential future impacts as well as assessed values”. | |
| 0:33:19 | “You held 420” — the retained fund balance | Henry: “This year we only returned $316,566 back to the taxpayers on unassigned fund balance. You held 420.” And on the prior year (0:33:56): “If we look at this year’s or excuse me, fiscal year 23, which was just happened, we gave back 1.2 million $85,605. That is huge.” Her own view (0:34:31): “I personally don’t like to give back a lot of money, and it’s because when we budget, we want to budget for what we need”, and (0:34:46): “We’re not your bank. We want you to get your money now, not later.” Nothing at this hearing tells the board or the public what the district must do before it may spend the retained $420,000; the business administrator raises that on 17 January. | OBSERVATION |
| 0:35:12 | SWEPT, the county, and the amounts actually raised | Henry: “Again, your sweat tax, that’s another thing that played a big role in statewide education, property tax” ‘sweat tax’ is SWEPT, the statewide education property tax, “And last year they decided to let people have a break and they lowered it. Good and bad. But you went from 975,000 having to be raised to 1.3 million.” And (0:35:34): “looking at the town, they went up, you’re raising 12,653,000 last year, 11,000,793 the previous year, 11,000,322. You also had a $300,000 increase on your county tax.” Rates (0:36:52): “the current school rate is $14.15” and “the state school rate is $1.19”. Her conclusion (0:37:21): “your tax rate dropped, but you’re still raising the same amount.” | HIGH |
| 0:37:58 | Has the union seen the schedule? | Gallagher: “Has the teachers union had a chance to review and respond to the schedule? And if they haven’t. Are we contractually obligated to discuss it with them because of something in their contract about the schedule that I. That’s not, like, clear to me. And and if it’s not obligated, should we have the conversation anyway.” Tempesta (0:38:20): “we are sending them the schedule. We have a meeting with them next week. It has to be. There’s nothing we feel everything in here meets the language. But if the if they view it as a change. They we would have to impact bargain that.” The approved minutes: “the district believes the changes meet the language in the current contract and won’t need to be negotiated”. | |
| 0:39:03 | A line on the summary sheet nobody at the table can name | Sprague: “Just a clarifying question on this, on this sheet about halfway down. Yep. Alternative support programs. I’m wondering what is that?” Henry: “That’s the autism program. And the, Oh. Hang on.” An unnamed administrator takes over (0:39:18): “I, I can speak”, then “That’s that’s, the autism program. One room and then another room, which is behavior focused” and “Called the pride program. Years ago, when we started that, that’s it. Lived under a different budget code” and “We reduced it by one room which included the staff and the teacher.” The line falls 69.78 per cent on the packet’s summary page, from $368,430.35 to $111,321.90. | |
| 0:40:34 | Three behavioural support specialists out of the middle school | Gallagher (0:40:56): “And like, what is our plan with the removal of three behavioral support specialists?” Tempesta (0:41:06): “This is something that the finance committee identified as a as something we wanted to work on. And so we’re, we’re getting rid of those and we’re, we’re replacing them with paraprofessionals. Okay. So, so that there’s only, there’s one group, and then we focus on the one group and make that, that contract more robust, less turnover.” Gallagher (0:41:35): “Is it the intention to have all 11 positions replaced with professionals.” Koski and Tempesta together: “Absolutely.” The approved minutes record the same answer. | |
| 0:41:49 | The hearing is closed — with nobody having spoken | Whitney: “I think we may want to officially close the public hearing. Did you have any interest in, sir, in making a comment? Yes. Yeah. So I’m going to I’m going to because we have a vacant room. I’m going to officially close the public hearing. And if it’s okay with the board, we’ll just move on with the board agenda.” The approved minutes record the item as “No members of the public present for comment” and close the hearing at 7:13 pm. The whole passage sits inside one diarized cluster, so the page cannot say who said “Yes.” | OBSERVATION |
| 0:42:45 | The consent agenda — the 20 December minutes approved without a vote | Whitney: “So I would like to move to, the consent agenda, which is essentially, requesting if there’s any amendments to the agenda and approval of the minutes as written. Is there any request for changes to the agenda or changes to the minutes as written? Seeing none. We’ll close that part of the meeting. And we have no citizens citizens here to comment, so we will bypass that as well.” No motion, no second, no vote. What was approved by silence includes the 20 December minutes recording a 50-year seal of a two-and-a-half-hour nonpublic session and a budget motion with no dollar figure in it. | MEDIUM MEDIUM |
| 0:43:15 | The Finance Committee will not endorse the budget | Whitney: “And moving into discussion and action items. Mr. Sprague will chime in if he feels appropriate, but, the budget subcommittee or the finance subcommittee at this time didn’t feel like we could officially endorse the budget as proposed. We felt that we needed to scrutinize it a little bit more, ask some more questions, discuss some more align items.” The posted agenda had noticed “A. Fiscal 2025 Budget Approval” for 7:15 p.m. She then sets the real schedule (0:43:40, 0:44:18, 0:44:40): the Finance Committee meets “Friday at 10:00”, the board returns “on the 17th”, and “we’ll be ready to present a budget to the group at that time”. | OBSERVATION |
| 0:43:40 | Every finance meeting televised — “pop some popcorn” | Whitney: “I want to remind the board and to communicate to the public as well that this year we are televising, recording and televising all of our finance subcommittee meetings for complete and utter transparency. So we do encourage the community members to pop some popcorn.” And (0:44:18): “the board two can take time and view that. And so when we come back on the 17th, you may have had some of the questions that you thought you had answered by watching those, those recordings, those riveting recordings.” Hawkins confirms it works, at the end of the night (1:31:33): “those televised meetings were so helpful to be able to watch and to see and to feel like we’re knowing what’s happening.” | POSITIVE |
| 0:44:47 | “Why don’t we just” adopt the default? | Sprague sets it up (0:44:47): “so, Mary, can I just I want to ask a quick question that I know the answer to, but I want to I want everybody to hear it.” Then (0:44:56): “so one of the things that people ask is, okay, so if there’s a $406,000 difference between the default and between the regular budget, why don’t we” — the sentence continues into Henry’s answer (0:45:09): “It’s there as a, I want to say a safety net for the district to say that we have contractual obligations that we have to meet, and that’s what we’re adding back in. We’re taking away the one time expenditures, but adding in the things that we know we have to pay no matter what.” And (0:45:32): “Sometimes they do come close. And sometimes I’ve had default budgets be more than a regular budget.” | POSITIVE |
| 0:45:39 | Does the default move when the budget moves? | Sprague: “But it is a moving target, is it not? So if we if we make reductions.” The sentence completes two segments later (0:45:46): “They’re mirrored in the default budget as well. So we try to move closer to it. But as we move closer to it it’s moving farther away from us.” Henry corrects him twice (0:45:54, 0:46:22): “If you lower down your budget amount, it’s going to bring that. Say you drop a by $100,000, it’s going to lower it down to 306” and “that default budget is going to stay at what it is right now.” On contracts (0:46:44), Sprague: “if we go there, all of our negotiated agreements become null and void”; Henry: “Not not the current ones that are in place. So the teacher’s contract. Right. But any new ones? Well, let me but those are separate Warren articles” ‘Warren articles’ is warrant articles. | |
| 0:47:53 | The chair asks the board what to scrutinize | Whitney: “I’m I’m interested on what the board feels that the subcommittee should be really focusing on and what questions that you’re, like, churning around in your head right now that you want us to learn fourth, through the administration and have a really fleshed out answer to, what’s the kind of sticking out for you?” ‘learn fourth’ is the recognizer’s rendering of draw forth or bring forth; the sense is not recoverable and no word is supplied This is the hinge of the second hour: from here to 1:21:52 the board is briefing its own three-member committee on what to cut and what to protect, in public, on camera, two days before that committee meets. | POSITIVE |
| 0:48:20 | Bonnie Miles carries the teachers’ objection into the hearing | Miles: “The teachers that were here last week. Last time we were here. What they had to say. And so and then I’m looking at, unless I’m getting this wrong, but if I’m looking at the schedule and what’s happening, which is not what the teachers wanted, how that’s do they how’s this going to work play out. Are we going to lose teachers because of that?” She names one of them (0:52:05): “They would get less classroom time for a time in classes, and that was a big concern. And I remember the last one was Rebecca Duska” — the district’s own 20 December minutes name that Ward 1 speaker “Rebecca Vendesco”. Her closing point (0:52:31): “how they feel is important to us. But of course what happens to the children in the classes and the structure is, is more so.” | |
| 0:51:31 | The chair states the board’s burden of proof to the public | Whitney: “So it sounds to me, Bonnie, that you would like us to make sure that we come to the board with a clear explanation of why this is, well, academically benefit our students, not just for parity reasons, but other reasons”, then “Correct me if I’m wrong” (0:52:01). Later, on the social workers (1:15:36): “But to your point, we’re gonna have to justify that to the community.” Koski quantifies the schedule trade at 0:52:49: “I think it’s 6 or 7, maybe eight minutes difference between the two schedules as to amount of time in class”, then “every student will have a teacher in every class” (0:53:10). | |
| 0:54:10 | The professional-development coaches move onto the tax base | Gallagher: “the one area where I just see a major number that I’m a major, not a major increase, a large increase, PD support.” Then (0:54:30): “I know that we’re moving the PD coaches from Esther to the general budget, which is causing this increase right here” ‘Esther’ is ESSER and (0:55:04): “Are there other things that we need to be thinking about now that we have to accept this 208,000 expense under the general budget?” Koski (0:55:46): “We do have an open position for a third. It was Esser funded, but that money is running out and we didn’t want to stretch the budget, increase too much and and ask for a third position.” The packet summary page shows the line at $208,388.83 against $0 in FY24. | POSITIVE |
| 0:56:41 | Where the least experienced teachers are | Whitney: “which of our schools have the most, junior teachers…” Koski (0:57:11): “Right now, the middle school has our youngest, least experienced staff.” Sprague pushes back toward the elementary schools (0:57:18), and Koski names the constraint on state help (0:58:13): “There’s rumored state money that we haven’t seen it yet.” Hawkins returns to this an hour later and asks for an elementary coach to be funded (1:19:44). | |
| 0:59:39 | The $212,000 on the special-education line | Gallagher, whose question arrives in four clipped segments from 0:59:35, ends it (0:59:39): “Summary page, the special education line item, what is accounting for the $212,000 increase?” The packet’s summary page shows special education falling, not rising: $8,305,293.13 to $8,093,124.57, a decrease of $212,168.56, or −2.55 per cent. Henry’s answer ties it straight to the unallocated line (0:59:53): “that I think that some of that money should have been allocated in there. And it’s all sitting in regular instruction under district wide.” And (1:00:50): “I just don’t think they were allocated the way that they should have been allocated. So but again, I wasn’t here, so I can’t.” | MEDIUM |
| 1:01:37 | Twenty minutes on $688,426.17 — the only decision of the night | Sprague: “so the 688,000, it’s on the bottom of the bottom district under district wide changes. So is that that’s still in the budget that number.” Henry (1:01:49): “it’s basically a blank line. It gets added back in because it’s a negative sitting in the other one not allocated up through the lines. Right. So it’s basically there’s nothing there to offset it.” Sprague names the risk (1:03:06): “there could be a quarter of a million over here that that’s in both places.” His worked example is the Disnard secretary (1:03:47): “I’m going to use the secretary of Disney example where she was budgeted last year at half time. Yep. It got fixed. Yep. In the Disney hard lines. But the money.” He closes it at 1:04:39 — “What I’m suggesting is you already did that. I’m going to go back to the secretary of Disney again. You fixed it. It’s it’s in this year’s budget.” — and 1:04:50: “Yes, but it’s still in the 688.” ‘Disney’ in the transcript is Disnard elementary school | MEDIUM |
| 1:03:19 | The business administrator asks permission before touching it | Henry: “if the board wants me to I’ll do that. But I would never go back and make that kind of an adjustment to a budget without asking you permission to do so first, because it’s 688,000. I would go back and look, and I’m not going to spend a lot of time. I’m going to tell you that right now, because I could spend hours and go down that rabbit hole.” And the point that matters most (1:04:24): “in reality, though, you’re not, you’re not. You’re not changing your bottom line. You’re still not changing your bottom line. All you’re doing is reallocating the credit across the debits.” So the reallocation cannot be where the $196,001.10 came from. | OBSERVATION |
| 1:04:20 | The vice chair states the goal: get close to the default | Sprague: “Because I’m thinking we can get a lot closer to the default number if we do that.” And, after Henry’s correction (1:05:41): “I would like based on what you said tonight, if we can get as close to that, the default number without really affecting the budget in any way.” This is the only statement at the statutory hearing of where the board intends to take the number, and it is what makes the reduction adopted on 17 January something the public was told about here, in direction if not in amount. | OBSERVATION |
| 1:06:31 | “I think we have consensus” — a decision without a motion | Whitney: “I think we have consensus. If nobody objects, we can document everyone.” Hawkins (1:06:36): “More credibility to have that correctly allocated. And we should be.” Henry (1:05:51): “So what I’ll do is I’ll work on that and hopefully I can have it done for Friday’s meeting.” The approved minutes record it as “Mary Henry will amend and reallocate the ‘board voted expense reductions for FY24’ item for Friday” — with no mover, no seconder and no vote, because there was none. Henry adds that her predecessor’s stand-in saw the same thing (1:06:40): “And Dave Jack actually looked at it for me when we were both working together, and he just looked at me and tossed his hands in the air.” | MEDIUM |
| 1:07:18 | Three social workers — a $428,053.80 line | Gallagher: “Where do we currently have social workers employed in the district?” Tempesta (1:07:22): “We we have a social worker at the high school. The middle school. And that’s it.” Gallagher (1:07:28): “And so the three that we’re hiring are to put one in every school.” Her efficiency question (1:08:34): “is it according to, like, what we know or like best practices and standards to have one social worker per elementary building and does that will they have a similar caseload as the middle school and elementary social workers?” Tempesta concedes there is no benchmark (1:09:24): “So in terms of comping it out in a like community, I don’t think we’ve gotten to that.” On the packet’s summary page the social-worker line rises from $72,500.47 to $500,554.27 — 590.42 per cent, the largest percentage movement in the budget. | HIGH |
| 1:11:05 | What a social worker does that a guidance counsellor cannot | Whitney: “there’s a difference between the way a guidance counselor would manage situations versus the social workers can extend into the community and actually be engaged more with the family to create a wraparound support system.” Gallagher tests the existing model (1:11:46): “is the operational model we’re using for social work in the middle school and high school currently working for our families” — the same segment ends “like is the system working as intended in the middle school and high school?” Tempesta names the incumbent (1:12:21): “I can’t say enough about Courtney Porter, who’s our who’s our longest.” | |
| 1:14:12 | The vice chair’s own account of why it works | Sprague: “So when I, was it Stevens, I was able to negotiate a three day a week social worker through Doctor Bissell over Orion House. And, it was, I have to say, it was it was pretty much triage, rather than any real standard kind of plan.” And (1:15:04): “it was unbelievable to have that layer of triage to come in and allow guidance counselors to actually do guidance things rather than reacting to crisis.” the corpus records at least five different versions of Frank Sprague’s own history at Stevens in his own words; this page quotes only the one he gave on this night Whitney draws the political conclusion (1:15:36): “But to your point, we’re gonna have to justify that to the community.” | |
| 1:15:41 | What is still holding the Finance Committee back? | Gallagher, to the committee: “what are the areas that you’re still closely scrutinizing that are holding you back from feeling fully confident?” Whitney answers as a committee member (1:15:54): “For me, it’s fleshing out the seems schedule and really trying to parse out the benefit of that academic benefit of that” ‘seems’ is CMS. Sprague answers for himself (1:16:05): “The, the, the Frugal Yankee is making sure that this is” — continuing at 1:16:10 — “That every line”. Two of the three committee members answer; the third, Crawford, is absent. | OBSERVATION |
| 1:16:18 | Does a class of 16 beat a class of 18? | Gallagher: “is there a clinical significance to reducing class size from 18 to 16 or 17 to 16, like instead you have statistical significance and then you have clinical significance where it’s like it may not be meaning in the stats, but it’s meaningful in the doctor’s office.” Tempesta (1:16:50): “It’s less meaningful the higher you go up. So it’s more meaningful in an elementary setting that is a middle school setting. I think it’s negligible.” He then corrects the framing outright (1:18:00): “I just I want to be clear. We’re not trying to reduce the class size at the school” and (1:18:05): “we’re trying to have the certified teachers teach more students. Currently they all teach about 50, 50, 56 students. Now they would be up around 80 or 90 students.” | |
| 1:18:40 | The one research answer on the record | Koski: “And to kind of get your statistical. Yeah statistics statistical question. There’s a window of between 12 and low 20s that has no impact. Okay. Below 12 and above that low 20s number is when you start to see impact okay.” No study, author or source is named for that window, here or anywhere in the packet, and no board member asks for one. Whitney frames why it was asked (1:19:02): “I think that you were pointing that out just because there was issues. People have been talking about class size.” | OBSERVATION |
| 1:19:25 | Arlene Hawkins’s four asks | Field trips (1:19:25): “One has to do with the elementary field trips. I, I have not, I’m not. I’d like to make sure that that’s in there, if possible, because of an earlier conversation that we had about schools inequity.” An elementary coach (1:19:44). Professional development for the paraprofessionals taking over behaviour support (1:20:05): “I noticed that we have removed some support and replacing them with paraprofessionals, and I believe that Paras are fabulous support for a classroom. I also believe we need to provide professional development as to the role and strategies for people working at all of the levels.” And middle-school identity (1:20:35): “as a former middle school teacher, I am going to ask about not the class sizes, but just making sure that we are maintaining the middle school focus.” | |
| 1:21:34 | The grants that do not appear in the budget | Koski: “a lot of our professional development is funded by title two grant monies, which is separate from the local budget. So it even though we’ve reduced it in the local budget, there’s still a large pot of money for professional development.” Whitney immediately asks for the whole picture (1:21:59): “Is there any way we can get an overview? Of what? Everything. Not just dollars that are being spent from local dollars, but so we can see what the supports are that are being provided.” Henry gives the aggregate from memory (1:23:01): “This year for fiscal year 24, we have just over $1 million in title one money and just over half a million in Ida” ‘Ida’ is IDEA “we still get 1.7 million in funds from grants.” | HIGH |
| 1:23:22 | The chair asks for the revenue side — and is told it will be e-mailed | Whitney: “So can we get a breakdown of what we get from the state overall to not just.” Henry: “You mean just from the, are you talking about adequacy? Oh, yeah. Yeah, there’s there’s a sheet for that. I can send you the spreadsheet” (1:23:27). Whitney makes it explicit (1:23:36): “Where they actually what the whole what the actual budget looks like. Not just, but we spend not necessarily what we bring in us.” Henry (1:23:44): “So I’ll get you the estimated that we have for fiscal year 25, and I’ll get you fiscal year 24 spreadsheet.” A revenue sheet exists. It was not in the packet, was not before the board, and was not before the public at the statutory hearing. | HIGH |
| 1:23:50 | How the public and the board are told to reach the committee | Whitney: “if you think of anything that you want us to kind of hammer down on or focus on, please just email one of the members of the subcommittee”. Taken with the invitation to watch the recordings (0:43:40) this is the whole of the participation route offered on the night: no member of the public was in the room, and the alternative offered is e-mail to a three-member subcommittee. | OBSERVATION |
| 1:24:42 | A detour: the middle-school bathrooms | Henry: “it’s probably spending money though, which is not a good time to talk about that, but it was just an improvement that I thought that we could have used it. One of the schools, because, other parents come here for games and it’s the, the middle school.” She contrasts it with what she saw at Stevens (1:25:49): “I couldn’t believe what I saw. It was the most beautiful hotel.” She marks it as off-topic herself (1:26:44): “And this is off the budget, but I was bugging me to say it.” The approved minutes record it as “Discussion regarding updating the entryway bathrooms at the middle school”. No figure is attached and no action follows. | |
| 1:27:06 | The health course at the technical centre | Gallagher: “What’s the general topic for the health position health course?” Tempesta (1:27:14): “we spoke about that. I think Doctor Herzog one want it to be a general one.” Alex Herzog, director of the Sugar River Valley Regional Technical Center His case for it (1:27:36): “I had the opportunity to meet someone from Dartmouth-Hitchcock, the head of respiratory Patrick, and at a recent event and, he was really saying you can’t go wrong because you’re hired instantly in that field.” Whitney (1:28:26): “An associate’s degree will will start you at about 70 grand in almost any of those professions, out of the technical college, up the road.” The position costs $96,621 plus $3,000 of supplies. | |
| 1:29:02 | The board has not seen the bell schedule it is being asked to fund | Gallagher: “Is there, like, a am I missing the proposed, like, actual schedule for the middle school? Like, not just the changes, but like, what the Bell schedule would look like.” Tempesta (1:29:11, 1:29:19): “they the last time they, they proposed a, a five total classes doing for one less” and “when I spoke to them, I just said, well, you could make one. And at one point Frank said, well just tell me what you want to make.” The approved minutes list it as an outstanding item: “Discussion of bell schedule that reflects the proposed changes at the middle school”. No bell schedule is in the packet. | |
| 1:30:47 | A subcommittee meeting that did not happen | Whitney: “Jen, did you have a Disruptive Behaviors committee meeting today?” Gallagher (1:30:51): “Did, but I was actually at my doctor’s office. Sorry.” An unattributed voice (1:30:57): “We canceled because Jen is so.” A noticed subcommittee meeting of a public body was cancelled the same day; nothing on this recording says whether the cancellation was noticed, and the district’s Drive folder for the Ad Hoc SAU Exploratory subcommittee, like its three sister folders, holds no files at all. | OBSERVATION |
| 1:31:07 | Unified arts, and thanks to the committee | Hawkins (1:31:15): “Are there still consideration of two periods a day of the arts?” and (1:31:26): “So that students would get two periods a day of the year.” The approved minutes record it as “Question regarding unified arts offerings”. Then (1:31:33): “I just want to thank the people who are on this finance committee because of the hours that you have put in, along with the administrative team. But those televised meetings were so helpful to be able to watch and to see and to feel like we’re knowing what’s happening.” | POSITIVE |
| 1:32:18 | Closing activities — a job fair, and adjournment by consent | Koski: “HR is hosting a job fair here at the tech. January 13th. Two Saturdays from now, nine to noon”, repeated for the record at 1:33:04: “Nine to noon. Saturday, January 13th.” Henry: “And we send notices home with the kids” (1:32:56); Tempesta: “Robo calls and the whole” (1:32:59). The chair adjourns (1:33:12): “There’s no objection to adjourning there. No journey.” ‘No journey’ is the recognizer’s rendering of no adjourning or an equivalent The approved minutes record “Consent to adjourn” at 8:04 PM. The last words on the tape are Sprague’s at 1:33:15: “The snow plow on today.” | MEDIUM |