Claremont School Board Finance Committee — January 5, 2024 | The $688,426.17 answered, and the meeting nobody could watch

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 subject matter, and the district’s approved board minutes of 20 December 2023, 3 January 2024 and 17 January 2024, whose mastheads print the board and the SAU 6 central-office roster. Segment and word counts are from the dialogue file (1,131 rows, 16,834 words).
Name	Role	Participation
Mary Henry	Business Administrator, Claremont School District / SAU 6	The heaviest speaker — 296 segments, 5,055 words, 30.0 per cent of everything said, and she is not in the room when the meeting starts. The chair opens without her (“my questions that I have really to miss Henry was not here yet, so.”, 0:00:36); the board chair answers “She is on her way.” She is in the room by 0:21:26, where the board chair explains the running order in the past tense: “the only reason we went to this is because Mary wasn’t here.” Her first recorded words are at 0:24:16. She then holds the floor for most of the next hour, delivering the account of the $688,426.17 that the committee had asked three sessions running for, walking the committee line by line through her corrected figures, and conceding the wording of her own summary memo. Named repeatedly by every member.
Candace Crawford	Claremont School Board member; Finance Committee member	317 segments, 4,043 words. The version-tracker. She is the only person in the room who has been diffing the successive budget drafts against each other, and she says so at 0:47:55. She finds the zeroed alternative-education line, the $100,000 psychologist question and the “add a science position currently open” wording; she does the 3.75 per cent arithmetic aloud; and she is the member who stops the chair conflating a warrant article with the operating budget. Addressed as “Candy” by the board chair and as “Candace” by the business administrator, in the same minute. She had been absent from the 3 January public hearing — the district’s approved minutes of that night record “Absent: Candace Crawford” — which is why several things aired at the hearing reach her for the first time here.
Heather Whitney	Chair, Claremont School Board; Finance Committee member	194 segments, 3,425 words. First voice on the tape after the chair. She sets the meeting’s one substantive decision in motion at 0:00:49 — instructional coaching for the elementary schools — works from her own handwritten notes of the administration’s presentation (“That’s what I wrote down for the presentation.”, 1:17:31), takes the strategic and public-facing frame throughout, asks for the whole budget including grants, and closes the meeting. She is also the person who raises, and answers, the question of whether the next session will be televised.
Frank Sprague	Chair, Finance Committee; Vice Chair, Claremont School Board	150 segments, 2,487 words. Presided, without ever calling the meeting to order. His own contribution is a line-by-line audit of the FY24 column he had done at home — Maple media retirement, CMS water and sewer, Stevens substitutes, a secretary carried at 0.4 for years — which he had emailed the business administrator the previous evening. He speaks from his own district career at 1:22:44 (“when I was working for the district”) and describes himself as a senior citizen on Social Security at 1:33:01. This corpus records at least five different accounts of his professional background, in his own words, across 2023–24; this page quotes only the one he gives here.
Michael Tempesta	Superintendent of Schools, SAU 6	43 segments, 866 words, from 0:07:13 to 1:19:35. The board chair adopts a shorthand for the two Mikes in the room at 0:07:14 — “I’ll call you a t so T and K.” — and he confirms it: “That’s what we do in the office.” He explains the middle-school academic and discipline rooms, proposes the social-worker-to-coach swap, and gives the meeting’s clearest statement of what the district’s job titles actually mean. This is the last recording in this archive at which he speaks. Six days later the SAU 6 board terminated his contract; he is not present and does not speak at that meeting. Nothing on this tape anticipates it. See flag 9.
Mike Koski	Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum, Instruction, Innovation and Assessment, SAU 6	38 segments, 433 words, from 0:02:26 to 1:50:12. Explains what an instructional coach does and why the administration did not ask for an elementary one (“we were trying not to ask for too much”), describes the multi-grade and split-subject teaching the middle-school reductions imply, and closes the meeting’s most quotable process request: give the administration a percentage target at the start of the budget cycle.
Ben Nester	Director of Special Education, SAU 6 — participating remotely	22 segments, 342 words, from 0:47:28 to 1:01:24. Called in mid-meeting from a conference at the business administrator’s initiative: “I’m only interrupting because I message Ben Nestor he’s at a conference but he’s willing to be called in.” The video takes a minute to work — he answers “No.” to “Can you see us?” He supplies the location code and the classroom count behind the alternative-programme reduction and the behavioural-specialist arithmetic, then drops off unnoticed; the business administrator discovers it at 1:11:46. He is staff, not a member of the public body, so RSA 91-A:2, III’s conditions on remote membership participation are not engaged and no finding is made about it. His resignation had been announced in December 2023, effective July 2024.
Unattributed fragments	—	71 rows (6.3 per cent of the file, 183 words — an average of two and a half words each) carry no named speaker: bare acknowledgements (“Yeah.”, “Okay.”, “Right right.”), page numbers read aloud, and the crosstalk while the remote connection is set up. No claim on this page rests on any of them.
“Steve”	Present, never heard, never identified	The last words on the recording, at 1:51:28, are the board chair’s: “Oh. It’s Mike’s. Thank you. Thanks, Mike. Thanks, Steve.” Somebody called Steve was in the room and is thanked; he never speaks and no document places him here. This page does not name him. The corpus records one Steve in the district in this era, but nothing in this record connects the two, and a wrong name is worse than none.
Noelle Kronberg	Clerk, Claremont School Board — not present	Appointed 15 November 2023 and the author of every full-board minute in this period, including the three this page relies on. She is neither present nor mentioned. Her absence is why this meeting produced no written record.
Chris Pratt	Principal, Stevens High School — not present	Named once, at second hand, as the source of a service-level figure: Crawford at 0:17:20 — “they only spend, according to Chris, 35% of their time with that population.” He was the high-school principal on this date; he became interim superintendent six days later.
Richard Seaman	Former Assistant Superintendent for Finance and Operations — not present	Never named in full on this recording: he is “Richard” once and “he” throughout. He is the author of the $688,426.17 credit: the business administrator says at 0:27:29 that she “went back to Richard’s spreadsheets and looked at what he had listed for people”. He retired effective 14 April 2023. The page names him only because the recording does, once, by first name; the surname comes from the corpus record of his retirement, not from this meeting.

Agenda

No agenda was posted for this meeting, none has since appeared in any district share, and the Cablecast record’s own Agenda field is empty. The item list below is reconstructed from the recording and is this page’s work, not the district’s. Hover over (or Tab to) a clipped entry to read it in full.

Taken up	Item (reconstructed)	What was said, and the disposition
0:00:01	1. Opening	Thirty-five seconds. The chair names the body, states why the committee is still sitting after the public hearing — “the board has not approved the final number to go to, the voters at this point” — and hands over because the business administrator has not arrived. Disposition: none; the meeting simply begins.
0:00:49	2. An instructional coach for the elementary schools, and where the money comes from	Opened by the board chair as unfinished business from the 3 January hearing. The assistant superintendent explains why the post was left out; the members agree in principle; the superintendent proposes funding it by dropping one of three proposed elementary social workers. Disposition: agreed by consensus — two elementary social workers and one coach. No motion, no second, no vote. Reconfirmed at 1:39:46. See flag 13.
0:04:06	3. What is actually new since before the pandemic, and where the ESSER positions went	The board chair reads her own list of ESSER-funded posts back to the administration and asks how many positions the district is genuinely adding. The assistant superintendent confirms earlier ESSER money went to Stevens and the tech centre in prior years, not this one. Disposition: the administration confirms the arc coordinator and the in-school-suspension room are additions to the pre-pandemic establishment; no total is ever produced.
0:22:28	4. The $688,426.17 — the answer	The chair opens it as the thing he “can’t. Stand to have that in the budget”; the business administrator gives the full account of what it was and what she did with it, ending with the $16,830 she could not place and the account code, which she has memorised. Disposition: resolved, on the record, in about fifteen minutes. See flag 12.
0:37:53	5. The chair’s own audit of the prior-year column	“So so here’s my problem okay. So I still have what I found.” Four worked examples, then the number: “in my efforts to find the 688, I actually I actually found a number like, like a half $1 million of this kind of stuff.” The business administrator does not contest any of it. Disposition: unresolved, and left unresolved — the committee agrees the prior-year column is unreliable and proceeds on the bottom line instead. See flag 3.
0:46:21	6. The special-education director is called in; the alternative programme and the behavioural specialists	Crawford’s version-by-version comparison produces the question the meeting cannot fully answer: about $240,000 vanished from the district-wide alternative-education line between the 18 and 20 December drafts. Three self-contained classrooms; one eliminated, one moved to a high-school line. Then: “All behavior specialists have been zeroed out, for this next budget cycle.” Eight local posts at about $42,500 each, replaced by roughly five and a half paraprofessionals at $167,000. Disposition: partially explained; the director cannot account for the whole figure and Crawford says she will follow it up. See flag 4.
1:04:04	7. Claremont Middle School, position by position	Academic deans out, arc coordinator in, campus monitor merged with the assistant athletic director; mathematics 4.6 to 4, English 6 to 4, social studies 7 to 4 — “Everything’s going to four.” — guidance 3 to 2. Crawford challenges the summary memo’s claim to be adding a science teacher and the business administrator concedes the wording. Disposition: no change to the budget; a concession that the district’s public summary document is wrong. See flag 5.
1:19:35	8. What a paraprofessional is, and what the budget calls one	The superintendent: “The term regular ed paraprofessional is a complete misnomer. The only paraprofessionals we have are for special ed.” The chair proposes the term program assistant; the business administrator offers to create separate budget lines. Disposition: agreed for next year’s budget, not this one.
1:24:49	9. How to explain the budget to the public	The board chair on why the committee is being “nitpicky”: “historically the the community has seen those kind of, accounting practices as a way of shifting money around and deceiving the public”. Disposition: agreement that the committee must meet again before the deliberative session to prepare a joint account. See flag 14.
1:31:32	10. Reporting: a year-to-date column, and monthly financials	Crawford asks for a year-to-date column and at least quarterly updates; the business administrator answers that monthly updates are coming and have not been done. Disposition: promised, not scheduled. See flag 6.
1:32:14	11. The number: 4.11 per cent, or 3.75	The chair reads the increase off the summary page and asks what the board would accept. Crawford does the arithmetic aloud and puts the choice: “are you are you okay with the 36 million 318. Or do you want to see that reduced to 36188?” Disposition: deferred to the full board — “I think we need to have a conversation with the board about that.” / “I do too.” No motion, no vote. See flag 11.
1:40:04	12. Talking points, and the line between the budget and the warrant articles	The chair proposes selling the paraprofessional raises as an efficiency paid for by the eliminated behavioural specialists; Crawford stops it: the raises are in a separate warrant article. Disposition: accepted — “So don’t mix messages there.” See flag 15.
1:42:07	13. The presentation plan — and whether the next meeting is televised	Two presentations: one to the board on 17 January with a motion to approve, one to the deliberative session. Then the question, asked openly and answered in four sentences, of whether the working meeting in between should be broadcast. Disposition: it should not — classed as a work session on the ground that it introduces no new topics or information. See flag 2.
1:43:51	14. The whole budget, not just the local part	The board chair asks for every grant-funded position and the whole budget, “not just the budget by which what the local taxpayers are paying now” — the request the board had already made of this committee at the hearing. Crawford wants the two kept visibly separate. Disposition: not produced at this meeting; nothing on the record shows it was produced before the budget was adopted. See flag 10.
1:45:47	15. Direct certification for free and reduced-price meals	The chair raises an email from the mayor about certifying children for meals directly from Medicaid enrolment instead of paper applications. Disposition: information only; the business administrator dates any effect to the following July.
1:49:10	16. Scheduling, and close	The assistant superintendent asks for a percentage target at the start of the next budget cycle; the business administrator states whose budget it is; the three members find a slot — 9 a.m., Wednesday the 10th — and the chair closes with “Anybody else have anything else? For the good of the order.” Disposition: no adjournment is moved or taken.

Discussion timeline

Chronological, from the dialogue file. Times are the transcript’s own start seconds, rendered from the same number the link seeks to, so text and link cannot disagree. Timestamps link to the same moment in the Cablecast recording. Hover over (or Tab to) a clipped cell to read it in full. The transcript is quoted as it stands; see the method note in the footer.

Time	Topic	What was said	Flags
0:00:36	The meeting starts without the officer whose answers it exists to hear	Sprague: “So, with that, I think we’ll begin. So my questions that I have really to miss Henry was not here yet, so.” Whitney: “She is on her way.” The business administrator is in the room by 0:21:26 and her first recorded words are at 0:24:16. Twenty-one minutes of a two-hour budget meeting run without her.
0:00:49	The one thing the statutory hearing sent back to this committee	Whitney: “So at the at the meeting on Wednesday, we did a brief review with the board where we didn’t do an official presentation, but there was a question or we it was noticed that we were providing, teacher coaching at both CMS, Claremont Middle School and Stevens High School, but we did not build into the budget or it was not built into the budget, that the elementary schools would have the same services.” The district’s approved minutes of that hearing carry it as a board instruction: “Request to find a way to fund an elementary coach position”. that sentence is from the approved minutes of 3 January 2024	POSITIVE
0:02:26	Why the administration never asked for it	Koski: “Yeah. So first of all, the reason we didn’t ask for it is we were trying not to ask for too much. And and so we left out that piece with the idea that next year we would fold in the coach of the elementary school level. So if the board is willing, we’d be very happy to have that position.”
0:03:29	“I’ll find the money”	Crawford: “I agree wholeheartedly with that. I would love to. I mean, I’m willing the money I find I’ll find the money.” She adds that coaching at the elementary level is a different skill set from the middle and high schools.
0:04:53	The board chair reads the pandemic-funded establishment back to the administration, from her own list	Whitney: “So I’ve got here I’ve got we had two campus monitors that were Esser funded. We had two academic deans that were Esser funded. We had one English teacher, which was Esser funded, and we had three behavior support specialists that were Esser funded.” “Esser” here and throughout is ESSER, the federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief fund; the recognizer also produces “Esther”, “Vesper” and “Asher” for the same word in this file	OBSERVATION
0:10:53	The question under the whole budget	Whitney: “And, you know, what are actually new positions, because it feels to me as if we’re actually adding a lot of new positions in compared to pre-COVID. Now, it doesn’t mean that we don’t need them, but I think we have to be clear about what we’re actually how many positions we’re actually increasing from pre-COVID money.” She says why at 0:11:19: “I did send an email out requesting that kind of to be clarified, because we’re going to have to explain it to the to the public.” No such total is produced at this meeting or, on the public record, before the budget was adopted.	OBSERVATION
0:11:30	Two posts are confirmed as genuinely new	Whitney: “So I guess the question is, so what I’m hearing is that there is universal, administrative support for maintaining the Arc coordinator and the behavioral in house suspension room positions, which are additional positions from pre-COVID times. Is that correct?” Tempesta: “That’s correct.”
0:12:58	The superintendent proposes the trade	Tempesta: “And I also think, Whitney Skilling was kind of suggesting this as well. We are adding three social workers, you know, could we get by with two?” “Whitney Skilling” is the board member Whitney Skillen, who is not at this meeting; this is the corpus’s most persistent name garble At 0:14:17 he argues from what the district does not have: “Right now we have three. If we went by in the suggestion is of the new things we’re adding, how might we get the academic coach and that that would be my suggestion because, instead of cutting something else.”
0:13:37	The starting point is not zero	Crawford: “Well, we’re not going from none. We do have one. That’s a person at the high school that works about 30, you know, 65% of the time at the elementary school. So it’s not like we’re going from zero. We’ve got like a 6/10 position that serves the the elementary schools.” She sources the figure at 0:17:20: “they only spend, according to Chris, 35% of their time with that population.”
0:16:50	The decision, such as it is	Crawford: “So, so, so instead of three social workers, you’re going with two social workers and one coach.” Whitney at 0:16:33: “I would like to make that swap. I think that it would be a benefit to of the teachers and every student in the district to have higher functioning teachers at the elementary school level.” Koski gives the resulting caseload at 0:17:10 — “They’d be a case 350.” Agreed by consensus. No motion, no second, no vote, and no minute.	HIGH POSITIVE
0:21:55	What a member thinks she is voting on	Crawford: “Frank, I just I do know that we just adopt a bottom line number. However, by adopting a whole budget, we are endorsing various energies,” — and, continuing at 0:22:09: “in order for me to adopt a budget, I need to have some confidence in what the numbers represent.” “energies” is the recognizer’s; the speaker’s next words return to goals
0:22:28	The $688,426.17, and why the chair would not let it go	Sprague: “Okay. So it’s no secret that I’ve been kind of hung up on the, the 688, $688,000 that is in the budget that, at one point, nobody seemed to know what to do with it. And so we’ve been I’ve been spending some energy figuring out how what is that?” And at 0:27:04: “I’m just trying to figure out where is this 688,000, because I can’t. Stand to have that in the budget.”	MEDIUM POSITIVE
0:22:51	Current-year actuals, asked for again	Sprague: “And I think and maybe you can answer the questions without the, the current year actuals. But Candy had talked about how helpful current year actuals would be. And I’ve and I’ve arrived at that point as well”. Crawford at 0:23:18: “Particularly with the last year’s budget numbers having so many anomalies.”	MEDIUM
0:23:41	The pattern, in one line of the budget book	Sprague, working from page 8 of the 20 December version: “And so if you look at Maple Media Retirement, which is three quarters of the way down, there’s a consistent number there for actual 20, 20, 22, 23. It’s zeroed out this year and it’s back in the proposed.” At 0:24:19: “Is that really a zero or is that 8700 that should be in the budget. That’s part of that 688. So what is that?”	MEDIUM
0:25:44	It is a real obligation, and it was left out	Henry: “So I’m going to tell you it’s a real number because it was left out of last year’s. And it should have been in there because you have a teacher under media salaries that gets New Hampshire retirement.” Asked how the district will pay it, at 0:26:32: “Well, what’s going to happen is we’re going to hope that somewhere within our budget, we have $8,700 that we didn’t spend. Yeah, that’s really how it works.”	MEDIUM
0:26:47	The chair says whose fault it is not	Sprague: “So and I know this is not and I’m going to put it right out there. This is not your fault.” Henry: “Oh, yeah. I thank you for acknowledging that. You’re fine, I acknowledge that. Thank you for acknowledging that.” She had been in post about six months; the credit predates her.	POSITIVE
0:27:12	How she found it	Henry: “So here’s what I did to go back through I did first I looked at the budget, dumped everything to a spreadsheet like I normally do, sorted it all out under salaries and benefits to see where my, you know, my anomalies or whatever you want to call them were in the budget.” Then, at 0:27:29: “So then I went back to Richard’s spreadsheets and looked at what he had listed for people and compared it to what I have right now in the budget.”	POSITIVE
0:28:16	What was in it	Henry, at 0:27:47: “A lot of people are grant funded but were put into the budget.” And: “So through process of elimination, I took I mean, I’ve got names on all these, so I know who I moved out. But that’s really what it came down to, is there was over a half $1 million that was in Ida alone.” “Ida” and “I’d e” are the recognizer’s IDEA, the federal special-education grant; she declines to name it on air, saying only “It’s a special education grant. It’s a grant.”
0:29:17	Why it sat there as one number	Crawford: “But then why is the 688 in this year’s budget?” Henry: “Because he didn’t go back and push it back across the lines that the credit belonged on. If he had done that. And if you look at my new numbers, you’re going to see now that the variances are much smaller, because I moved these numbers out of that credit”. Restated at 0:31:41: “the 688,000 was a negative number to your budget, meaning that he knew there were $688,000 worth of monies sitting in the other lines that are grant funded. He accounted for the grant funding.” And at 0:32:06: “But he just didn’t allocate it to where it belonged.”	MEDIUM
0:29:42	The residual, named to the dollar	Henry: “So now you’re not going to see a 688,000. You’re going to see that it is where, in my opinion, based on the information that I had is where it belongs. So just so you know, I landed with roughly $16,000 that I couldn’t find.” At 0:30:04: “16,830. Hey, that I was happy with that. So what I did was I moved it off of the code of health insurance, because that one was way over budgeted for the year.” And: “But every other amount of money that I took was based on a person.”	POSITIVE
0:33:22	The account code, from memory	Henry: “It’s near the end under 40 and it’s 110113, I think unfortunately I have it memorized.” Whitney: “I was going to say that’s, that’s a little that’s a little sad.” Crawford locates it: “It’s on page 44.” The district’s own budget memo of 3 January prints the full code: 100.40.1100.113.5.00000 Board Voted Expense Reductions for FY24 ($688,426.17) decrease should have been allocated out to the salary and benefit lines that it belonged. that sentence is from the memo, not the recording	POSITIVE
0:33:47	A member reads the column heading and gets the opposite answer	Crawford: “So at the top of that column it says increase or decrease okay. And when it’s less it’s a print Prinz number. So now I see the 688 is not a Prinz number. So to me that indicates it’s an expense.” the recognizer’s “print Prinz” is her describing a figure shown in parentheses; the reading is not certain and the transcript is left as it stands Henry: “But here’s and you’re right. But here’s a cute. But you’re right. No, no, you’re right.”	MEDIUM
0:35:28	A worked example: Bluff special education	Henry: “it is bluff sped salaries. Yep. If you now look across on the old number under bluff sped, let me make sure I got this right and I’m in the right spot. Fiscal year 24 said 336,000. It now says 178.” Crawford, at 0:36:23: “We’re being -174. It’s -16,000.” Henry: “But the variance isn’t $174,000 like it was.” The point is not that the total moved — it did not — but that every line under it did.	MEDIUM
0:37:53	“So so here’s my problem” — the chair’s own audit begins	Sprague: “So so here’s my problem okay. So I still have what I found.” He had emailed it the night before (0:22:51: “I had emailed to last evening”). Henry: “Yeah but that’s okay. But those are questions you can ask me that. But I think some of the things you found, some of the things I corrected.”	MEDIUM
0:38:27	Claremont Middle School, water and sewer	Sprague, page 24: “So consistent. Actual 2223 17,000 something. Yeah. Then it drops current year to 75 and then it pops back up to 17. Yep. That looks like ten grand to me.” Henry: “It is. And I can tell you that I believe the 17 grand is more right. Yeah. And under budgeted so far for this year current year.”	MEDIUM
0:39:35	Stevens High School, substitutes	Sprague, page 25: “So if you walk across that you’re going to see again 10,000, ten. Thousand. Nothing zero and then 10,000 again. That’s another ten grand.” Henry: “Oh I see what you’re talking about because they didn’t put it in the budget last year. And it it should have been in because we’ve spent.”	MEDIUM
0:40:29	“a half $1 million of this kind of stuff”	Sprague: “So that’s, it’s situations like that where that’s where I bring up. It would be nice to know what the actual are. That way we know if that’s a real discrepancy or not. Okay. So in my efforts to find the 688, I actually I actually found a number like, like a half $1 million of this kind of stuff.” Restated at 0:44:26: “So that’s where I found the 680 or close to probably half a million.”	MEDIUM
0:40:51	And another $300,000, volunteered by the officer	Henry: “Well, and there’s another big one in here that’s retirement benefits. It’s 300,000 and nothing is against yet. And that’s a journal entry that usually happens to.” Sprague: “I didn’t I didn’t mark that one.”	MEDIUM
0:41:07	A full-time post carried at four tenths for years	Sprague: “And again the one that I’ve used as an example the the secretary. Yeah. That’s been the example I’ve used that’s been in the budget for a couple of years at four. And and you fixed it, it’s now full time and it’s budgeted. So it’s budgeted for I think it’s an increase of 18,000. So plus benefits. So there’s it’s well over.” Crawford: “What what you’re saying is it was a full time position but it was budgeted at 0.4.”	MEDIUM
0:42:10	The board chair adds it up	Whitney: “So what I’m hearing from you, Frank, is that we could possibly you believe we could possibly have close to with that 300,000 that Mary was identifying roughly another million dollars?” Sprague declines the total: “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Because some of some of the stuff I have to get.” Crawford: “They might be the same numbers.” Nobody ever settles it.	MEDIUM
0:44:02	A keying error, described	Sprague: “Where there were there’d be a number written in, entered in that was part of what the real number was, for example, something your previous year had been 82, 58,250, and it was written in as a 25 in the, in the budget. So, you know, you know, it’s an $8,000.” Crawford completes it: “Transfer variance.”	MEDIUM
0:45:35	The officer stands behind the new column, not the old one	Henry: “But I think it was entered wrong. That’s why if I’m going to say to you, Frank, and I’m willing to bank on this, that all of my numbers sitting in Social Security, Medicare, retirement, health insurance, dental and all that are related to employees. Yeah. So I feel my numbers are very accurate now”. Sprague: “because I’m taking your numbers as being the right numbers. Thank you. And I’m looking at whatever. It is. What is. What is in there isn’t the right number.”	MEDIUM
0:46:12	“Fiction.”	Crawford: “And that’s where the variance is immaterial because it’s based on. Yeah. Fiction.” Sprague says it again in his own voice at 1:12:32, of the middle-school guidance count: “It’s it’s fiction. Okay.” Two of the three members of the committee that built this budget describe its prior-year column, on live television, as fiction.	MEDIUM
0:46:21	The special-education director is telephoned into the meeting	Henry: “And I’m only interrupting because I message Ben Nestor he’s at a conference but he’s willing to be called in. I just have to let him know. So right now yeah, he’s available right now.” The connection takes a minute; asked “Can you see us?” he answers “No.” “Nestor” is the recognizer’s; the director is Ben Nester
0:47:55	The method that found everything else: diffing the drafts	Crawford: “So my questions are based on what I’ve been trying to do is every time we get a new copy, a new budget, I reference from the very last one where the differences are okay. So it kind of builds, you know, we had one, two, three, four. So when I got the 212, 20 budget, I compared it because that was the one that was down 300 and something thousand, not the 688.” She is the only person in the room doing this, and every substantive question in the next fifteen minutes comes out of it.	MEDIUM
0:48:32	Where the $350,000 went: an alternative-education line at zero	Crawford: “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.” And at 0:48:58: “And I wondered why that was.”	MEDIUM
0:49:25	About $240,000, between two drafts two days apart	Crawford: “Because I added up and it did come to about 240,000. And and this was and this was comparing the 1218 budget to the 1220 budget to see where the variations were.” The page: “So this is page 42 of the 1220 budget.” and, at 0:50:00, “And it’s the alternative support program. It’s all zeros for this next year.” The public document for that draft carries the same fact: the FY25 Proposed Budget Summary Page in the 3 January packet shows 2190-2192 Alternative Support Programs falling from $368,430.35 to $111,321.90 — a decrease of $257,108.45, or 69.78 per cent, the largest proportional reduction on the page.	MEDIUM
0:50:34	“We weren’t informed that some program got cut”	Crawford: “Why did all of those numbers get deleted? We weren’t informed that some program got cut. So you don’t cut out 240,000 without. I’m wondering where it went or why it went.” It had in fact been raised in public two days earlier — by the chair of this committee, at the statutory hearing she was absent from. Sprague at the 3 January hearing, from that meeting’s dialogue file: “Alternative support programs. I’m wondering what is that?” The answer given there trails off: “We did reduce. We had three rooms running and then we did.”	MEDIUM
0:50:51	Three self-contained classrooms, and where two of them went	Nester: “I can offer a potential explanation. Can’t exactly speak to how the budget lines were structured last year, but, there’s a location code 138. And that that was I think the descriptor was alternative program. And that would have accounted for three, three self-contained classrooms.” At 0:51:14: “One was at the high school and two were housed at Maple. In previous years. And the one at the high school remains intact. It’s possible that the the funding for that line would have shifted over to a high school line, which was appropriate. And then the other one, like I mentioned, was reduced.” He cannot account for the whole figure: at 0:49:16, “I don’t know if that accounts for the full 224. That sounds a little high to me as well.”	MEDIUM
0:52:50	A member insists the money must reappear somewhere	Crawford: “I’ve got the Stevens High School numbers, and I’m looking to see where I would find those numbers added. Because you can’t just cut out, you can shift it, but the negative shouldn’t be that amount.” They find a $105,000 increase in the high-school special-education salary line (0:53:57) — about half of it.	MEDIUM
0:54:26	“All behavior specialists have been zeroed out”	Nester: “Oh they were they was the road out. All behavior specialists have been zeroed out, for this next budget cycle.” Henry, immediately: “No more letters of agreement.” Crawford: “Okay. Oh, jeez. Okay. All right, I’ll follow that up.”	OBSERVATION
0:54:37	A $100,000 psychologist that turns out not to have gone	Crawford: “I also saw that about 100,000 $100,000 came out of district wide. That was for a, Oh. Come on. A psychologist. Psychologist. Are we eliminating a psychologist in the district one?” Nester: “We have two. We should have. We should continue to have two full time school sites.” Whitney answers from the document at 0:56:14: “The psych services went up, by 25,000 375,000 under the district wide.” and “It’s on page 4949 of the 49.” Crawford: “I will double check that.”
0:57:19	What was actually cut, named	Henry: “We had an autism program and a pride program, and we’re reducing the pride program by one room, which would be two pairs and a teacher and a teacher.” “pairs”, “Paris”, “pears” and “Perez” are all the recognizer’s paras — paraprofessionals — throughout this file	MEDIUM
0:59:07	The other side of the trade	Henry: “$167,000 in the pair lines were increases.” — salaries only. At 0:59:32: “So there’s another five and a half pairs is how it roughly if you did it at 30,000.” Crawford: “So, so we’ve added five and a half pairs.” Henry: “Right. But we’ve deleted far more behavioral support.”	OBSERVATION
0:59:53	The count, established on the record	Nester: “So 1111. Total minus three. I looked at that yesterday. So three at the element. There were three at CMS. S were funded of the 11.” Then, at 1:00:06: “No it would have been eight. Eight would have been in local fund eight.” Cost, at 1:00:36: “And I figured about 42, five for each one, give or take. So let’s see. 40. You know, 42,500 times eight.” Sprague: “400 grand.” Eleven posts in all, eight of them local, three federally funded — which is exactly what the district’s own 3 January budget memo lists, school by school.	OBSERVATION
1:01:02	The trade, stated as a saving	Sprague: “And we’re saving and we’re. And we’re eliminating 400 roughly in cost for behavioral specialists.” Henry at 1:01:40: “So eight were in our general budget. We removed eight of them and inserted 5 or 5 and a half, whatever paras into the budget because we needed them.” And at 1:02:29: “Pairs based on need for IEPs. Yes. So we’re required to have them.” Nobody at any point asks what the eleven eliminated posts were doing, or who does it now.	OBSERVATION
1:04:04	Claremont Middle School: what goes, what arrives, and what is only renamed	Crawford: “Okay, so now you remove the academic deans from the middle school. Yeah. Because they were as the fronted. Correct. And so there are none of those at the middle school.” “as the fronted” is the recognizer’s ESSER-funded Henry at 1:03:28 on the campus monitor: “But now it’s turned into two positions. It’s a campus monitor, and the assistant athletic director position combined is one.” Crawford at 1:05:43: “So that’s adding a position. If the academic deans were in s or before. And now you have this arc that would be adding a position I think.”
1:05:55	“How can you add a position that’s already in the budget”	Crawford: “So so in this seems changes. It has added one science position currently open. How can you add a position that’s already in the budget. You’re not adding a position because it’s already in the budget.” She puts it again at 1:07:13: “When it says add a science position currently open. If it’s currently open and in the budget, why is it an addition?” She is reading the district’s own memo, which lists under CMS Changes: Add 1 Science position currently open. (3 teachers currently) that line is from the district’s budget memo of 3 January 2024, not from the recording	MEDIUM
1:07:44	The officer concedes the wording of a document the public had	Henry: “Currently three currently now I apologize three. So we are we have one open in the budget current currently. So we have three. It should just say it’s an open position Candace. It’s what it should say.” Crawford: “So you’re not adding that.” and, at 1:08:03, Henry: “This is my document. So I apologize for that.” The superintendent had said the same thing more briefly: “Just a word. Right?” No corrected version of the memo appears in any district share.	MEDIUM
1:09:37	“Everything’s going to four.”	Crawford walks the reductions: mathematics from 4.6 (“So you’re reducing it by 6/10”), English “They’re currently six. So you’re cutting that to four.”, social studies “there are currently seven. So they’re going to be reduced by three.” Henry: “Everything’s going to four.” Four core-subject teachers each for three grades. Crawford, at 1:09:38: “I’m just thinking if there are three classes six seven and eight and there are four teachers, then they’re going to be teaching multi grades.” Koski: “Do either multi grades. So a teacher may have teach two different grade levels or a split team where they would teach two subject areas.”
1:10:24	The guidance count that nobody can state twice the same way	Crawford: “there are in our current budget, there were three guidance people at the middle school, one of which was funded with the money from the tech center. But then that was in staffed because that person became the the assistant principal. And so you’ve had two middle school guidance people.” Henry: “There are three guidance counselors.” Crawford: “There are three guidance. They’ve told me they were two.” Sprague, at 1:11:18: “Actually there were four because the one for the tech center.” Henry, at 1:12:19: “But it didn’t because it’s actually physically three funded in the middle school, which we don’t need.” Sprague: “It’s it’s fiction. Okay.” Disposition: two, by consensus.	MEDIUM
1:13:47	The board chair reconstructs both schools’ establishments aloud, from her own notes	Whitney: “I had two assistant principals. Is there just one?” Henry: “There’s just one. There was one. It looks like in the budget. Looks like we had another one budgeted this year.” She then lists the middle school (1:14:17) and the high school (1:14:56) post by post, correcting herself as she goes: “Five spread pears and five general editor pears written down from the presentation.” (1:18:50) turns out to be wrong — Henry: “I don’t have five.” and Whitney: “That’s what I wrote down for the presentation.” Nearly six minutes of a public meeting are spent establishing how many people work in one building at a time.	MEDIUM
1:19:35	What a paraprofessional is, according to the superintendent	Tempesta: “I just want to I want to clarify what the terminology those are. More akin to a campus monitor there. The term regular ed paraprofessional is a complete misnomer. The only paraprofessionals we have are for special ed. Right. So everything else should be on what is a letter of agreement, which those are the remaining letter agreements.” And at 1:20:01: “The term letter of agreement is it’s a general term used for people who are not in a contracted in a CBA covered by that. So you have psychologists OT, PT, the ones that we just refer to that we eliminated were just the behavioral specialists who are very close to a paraprofessional.”	OBSERVATION
1:20:26	The chair proposes a name for what the budget cannot describe	Sprague: “So Mike, it might be advisable for the positions like the the discipline monitors or whatever to characterize them as program assistants because they work independently with minimal supervision. And their work in no way resembles anything that a para does.” At 1:22:44 he gives his own history with the distinction: “We had to parse that out when I was working for the district because the, the, the Perry Union was did exactly that. They, they wanted a clear definition between a program assistant and a parent.” “the Perry Union” and “a parent” are the recognizer’s para union and para
1:23:24	A fix, offered for next year	Henry: “So what we could do is create another area for clarity, for clarity. So you’re not. So when you see regular instruction salaries, paras, we put these into a different line because they’re not that, you know what I mean.” And, at 1:24:40: “But we need to do that. And what I would like to do, even after the budgets passed, I will go through. And for next year, I will break people into where they need to go.” Crawford, at 1:24:11: “So I’m back to. Frank’s comments about these programs, specialists that in this budget they are called Paris.” Henry: “That’s the budget line that’s being used.”	OBSERVATION
1:24:49	Why the committee is doing this in public	Whitney: “historically the the community has seen those kind of, accounting practices as a way of shifting money around and deceiving the public, whether or not that is the case.” And at 1:25:15: “And so it seems as if we’re being nitpicky, but quite frankly, we’re being defensive of the budget, right? Meaning we’re looking as a committee to say we want the the community to see this budget as as legitimate and transparent and specific and and no funny money is being switched.”	POSITIVE
1:25:35	The officer’s own account of where she is	Henry: “But these conversations also help because remember it, it enables us when we’re going forward for next year. I mean, it’s a learning process. I’m new. It’s a learning process. Knowing what we do need to clarify within the budget to make it easier for people to understand. So, you know, this is good. This is all good.”	POSITIVE
1:26:28	“we definitely need to meet together before the deliberative session”	Whitney: “When moving forward, we as a group need to be thinking about that. And I don’t know I hate to say it, but we definitely need to meet together before the deliberative session. Yes. As a as a collective group.” And at 1:26:41: “Come up with a not a of how we’re going to communicate, summarize what we’ve experienced here as a group, how we’ve found resolution and what the plan is moving forward for even improved transparency.” The meeting that sentence sets up is the one this page cannot show you.	HIGH
1:27:10	The chair, satisfied — and the report last year’s budget had that this year’s does not	Sprague: “a lot of my questions have been answered. One of the things that I do want to talk about in the future, and I was just looking I had being the Frugal Yankee, I had printed off some information completely unrelated to this, but I had used blank pages from last year’s presentation, which actually break down very helpfully.” At 1:27:52: “Straight employees from last year and exactly what they do, what they get paid, what their hours are, and which I found to be really a hindrance to not have this this year. And we just spent so much time sorting stuff out, which I could have figured out by myself.” Henry, at 1:28:42: “the time to put into doing that, because I can’t get it all of one place. That’s the problem.”	MEDIUM
1:31:32	The reporting the board is not getting	Crawford: “Mary, I would love to have you add another column year to date calculation. I keep saying that and honest to Pete, and I hope as we go forward that we can have at least quarterly, year to date updates.” Henry: “We are going to have monthly year to date updates, which I have not done yet because of.” Crawford: “But that would be extremely beneficial.” Henry: “I am with you completely. You guys should be getting monthly updates, right?” The monthly financial report had been on the board’s 20 December agenda and its approved minutes record it “Removed for the sake of time”.	MEDIUM
1:32:14	The number, read off the last page	Sprague: “I think one of the things moving forward and I and I’m looking at the last page, page 55.” Crawford: “Of which copy.” Sprague: “Of of the latest copy. Good. And it’s showing an increase of of 4%.” The published summary page for that budget puts it at 4.11 per cent — $34,880,311.71 to $36,313,407.97, an increase of $1,433,096.26. He then reaches for a benchmark: “And I listened to Fill Scott this morning. He’s giving a preliminary of the state of the state in Vermont. Report. And he was talking about how Social Security just one of 3%. And he he was saying that he doesn’t want a state budget to exceed 3%.” “Fill Scott” is Phil Scott, then Governor of Vermont — a neighbouring state’s executive, not a New Hampshire standard	OBSERVATION
1:33:01	The question the committee decides it cannot answer alone	Sprague: “So I think one of the things that we need to talk to the rest of the board is, is what what do they see acceptable as a, as an increase is 4% okay? Or is it is it too much. Is it too little. What what is it.” Whitney at 1:33:35: “So this is an including this 4% increase. Hasn’t include our Warren articles either. Does it?” Henry: “Any new Warren articles. But remember, this also does include your teachers contract in the second year, your Claremont Admin Association and your paraprofessional contracts, which totaled almost, what, $700,000 and then the increase to health insurance.” “Warren articles” is the recognizer’s warrant articles throughout	OBSERVATION
1:34:01	A board member does the arithmetic on live television	Crawford: “So if I can take last year’s grand total, which you said, even though the categories varied, the grand total is solid.” Then: “So if I use the current one of 34, eight, 80.” (1:34:18) — “And then multiply it. I’m using 3.75 because that’s what the teachers are. That’s the increase for the teachers.” — “And I multiply the 34,000 times 1.0375. I get 36188. I’m rounding which is.” Her arithmetic is right: $34,880,311.71 × 1.0375 = $36,188,323, and the gap to the budget on the table is about $125,000. At 1:35:14: “So 130,000. So so my argument this is all concept. If we could cut 130,000 out of that, out of that current budget okay.”	OBSERVATION
1:35:33	The case she would make to the voters	Crawford: “if I cut 130 000, that would be a 3.75% increase. I, as a board member, could argue with the public that the increase is most. If 85% of a school district’s budget is personnel, and they have already agreed because last year they supported the two year contract for the teachers, they’ve already supported a 3.75% increase in this year’s budget.” And at 1:36:07: “I say, budget goes up 3.75 because most of it is teacher related, which the public has already approved. I could live with that number.”	OBSERVATION
1:36:21	What the increase actually buys	Whitney: “So we have like 700,000 is really it’s roughly 700,000 increase above and beyond the contracted obligations.” Crawford: “So what are we getting for that 700,000?” Whitney, at 1:37:00: “We’re increasing positions is what we’re doing.” Henry: “400,000 alone in social workers.” Crawford lists them at 1:37:12: “so the you’ve got social workers at the elementary school, you’ve got the curriculum coach at the elementary school, you’ve got the, the health position at the technical school.” The published summary page bears the $400,000 out: function 2113, Social Worker, rises from $72,500.47 to $500,554.27 — up 590 per cent, the largest proportional increase on the page.	OBSERVATION
1:37:52	The presentation, and who will build it	Whitney: “that’s what I want to have a conversation about.” and “At our maybe our next meeting is, is that we need to be able to collectively be able to say, this is.” Crawford: “This is well, you have to package how you’re going to sell it.” Henry: “We should put together a PowerPoint presentation is what we should do.”	HIGH
1:38:36	The three collective-bargaining warrant articles, from memory	Henry: “189 for the Paris? Is it 158 for the Secretary’s? I think. And it’s just almost a 160 for the for the maintenance, I think. Wasn’t it Frank? Right around 160 it was. They’re both right around the same.” The paraprofessional figure is exact: the district’s budget-priorities document for the 3 January hearing puts the re-opened paraprofessional contract at ESTIMATED ADDITIONAL IMPACT TO THE BUDGET: $189,209.00 FY 25. that line is from the district’s budget presentation, not the recording	POSITIVE
1:39:02	“That’s paying for itself.”	Sprague: “So so the paras. That’s an easy one. Well because of the fact that we are” — “Sunsetting the, the behavioral specialists that’s sort of paying for itself.” Whitney corrects him: “Well, it’s not because of behavioral specialists have been paid for by Esser.” Henry: “That’s not it. Of them were not.” Sprague, at 1:39:19: “You’re talking that’s 400 K in my mind. And so that’s fine. That’s paying for itself.” and “So that’s easy. That’s an easy sell.” On the numbers established twenty minutes earlier, the chair is right and the board chair is wrong: eight of the eleven posts were locally funded.	POSITIVE
1:39:28	The question is put, and deferred	Crawford: “Oh my bigger question to the two of you is are you are you okay with the 36 million 318. Or do you want to see that reduced to 36188?” Whitney: “I think we need to have a conversation with the board about that.” Sprague: “I do too.” That is the last thing said about the total in any televised meeting before the board adopted $36,117,406.87 on 17 January — a figure below both options put here.	HIGH OBSERVATION
1:39:46	The swap confirmed, for the record such as it is	Henry: “Can I just make sure I’m clear on something before you guys because you talked about the social worker. So you’re talking about removing a social worker from the elementary and adding a coach? Yes.” Crawford: “We’re just changing the name.” Henry: “So you’re going to move one of them into a coaching position, correct? Okay. Just making sure.” Two elementary social workers and one coach. The budget adopted twelve days later has one and one.	HIGH
1:40:17	“So don’t mix messages there.”	Sprague: “I think the assignment will be to, come up with with, with talking points. And I think one of the we certainly can sell the para raises as, as an efficiency.” Crawford stops it: “You’ve got to keep you’ve got to make sure you keep that separate because those are worn articles and you can’t mix and match because those increases in the pair are not in the regular budget right now because it’s a separate Warren article. So don’t mix messages there.” Whitney: “But well, we want to support the the Warren article too.”	POSITIVE
1:41:12	The SAU apportionment, and why Claremont’s share moved	Crawford: “would you I would like you to show me how you did the calculation for the s a portion that’s in our budget.” Henry: “It changed because of your property values. It shifted. Your property values went up and unities did not. So it’s shifted because your 50% property value of 50%.” And at 1:41:43: “Unity has not been reevaluated yet. But when they’re reevaluated, the shift will happen again.” the calculation is the one RSA 194-C:9 prescribes — half on average daily membership, half on equalized valuation; the SAU line rises from $2,176,249.00 to $2,295,585.99 on the published summary page
1:42:07	Two presentations, and a vote asked for in advance	Whitney: “I think we’re going to have to do two presentations quite frankly. One is going to be to the board, which hopefully the public will be engaged with the board. And we’re going to ask for an approval of the budget that night. The board. We have to because it has to be.” And at 1:42:25, Crawford: “Together so we can sell it to the.”
1:42:26	“do we want to have this the powwow meeting be televised as well”	Whitney: “We have to do at least one more meeting with the administrative team. And, I don’t know if we need since we’ve had this conversation, I’m going to ask you guys, since we’ve had all these conversations in public, do we want to have this the powwow meeting be televised as well, or is that something we can do at the essay at the.” “the essay” is the recognizer’s the SAU Sprague: “A work session? I think with.” Whitney: “Because we’re not we’re not talking about” Crawford: “Introducing new topics.” Whitney: “We’re not introducing okay.” Crawford: “Or introducing more information.” Henry: “Exactly. Pusher trying to put together a presentation which is different.” Whitney, at 1:43:01: “It is working. I just wanted to make sure that we clarified that, that we don’t want to think, we don’t want it coming across like we’re we’re just we’re trying”. The whole exchange takes thirty-five seconds and settles it.	HIGH
1:43:10	The plan, stated	Whitney: “but that’s the purpose of that meeting. And then we’re going to present as the finance committee assignments subcommittee to the whole board and on this and the community on the 17th, make a motion for approval of the budget to move, to be moved forward.” Henry, on her own deadline, at 1:43:33: “Yeah, I’ve done by the 24. Yes. I have to be able to get it in so that we can post the thing from the DRA and you know what I mean. That had to be the 24th.” DRA is the New Hampshire Department of Revenue Administration; the board’s approved minutes of 17 January put the last day to post the warrant and budget at 29 January	HIGH
1:43:51	The whole budget, not just the local part	Whitney: “I really do want to know all the positions that are being funded by grants and the whole budget, not just the budget by which what the local taxpayers are paying now.” And at 1:44:16: “I think it’s important for the community to know what our actual, what we’re paying per kid.” Crawford: “I do think that it’s important to keep the numbers separate.” and, at 1:44:30: “So the public understands what we’re paying for and what the administration, with their work in getting the grants, would they have to do moneys? We have to support this educational program.” This is the board’s own request from the hearing, restated: the approved minutes of 3 January record “Request from the board for an overview of all dollars going to support professional learning (including grants and other funding sources) as well as an overview of all the funds that are spent from all sources”. that sentence is from the approved minutes, not the recording	OBSERVATION
1:44:44	A fifth budget version, named on air and held by nobody	Sprague: “So do we have any positions in this one five document that maybe in this budget that should be in grants?” Henry: “I would say no, because I have gone through them. And the thing I really have, I went through line by line.” “this one five document” is the 1/5 budget, handed out at this meeting, in the same naming convention as “the 1218 budget” and “the 1220 budget” used earlier No document of that date exists in any district share.	MEDIUM
1:45:09	A reading specialist moves onto the tax base because a school is not poor enough	Sprague: “The literacy, the literacy person at Maple.” — “Because of of the statistics of free reduced lunch.” Henry: “We’re adding adding the literacy person is the reading specialist is coming into the budget because well that was something that he wanted in.” and “It’s not title one. It’s coming into the general budget because title one funds shifted from what I understand.” Sprague: “That school has doesn’t have the eligibility.” The district’s own memo prices it: Added a Reading Specialist position. Total cost with benefits $110,534 under Maple Changes. from the budget memo of 3 January 2024
1:45:47	The mayor’s email: certifying children for meals from Medicaid instead of paperwork	Sprague: “How many of you got the email from Dale.” — “And Dale Girard, the mayor,” — “Was asking about the the benefits of the.” Whitney: “Direct certification” and, at 1:46:15: “We need desperately. And it would avoid the whole free and reduced lunch fiasco trying to run around.” and “We wouldn’t have to collect the data. It would come directly from the state. And there’s been resistance to that because.” Henry: “Eligible in and be considered direct certified.” and, on timing, “They probably be July 1st. If they if they devoted on January, no, it wouldn’t be for this year. It would be for next year.” Sprague: “And it eliminates the struggles we have with getting people, people to fill.” A bill on exactly this had been described to the board on 20 December by a state representative; the approved minutes of that meeting record “HB601 medicaid direct certification for free and reduced meals”.
1:48:14	What restricted money is like to spend	Henry: “Title one is that and these these grants we get are great. But they’re very particular on what you can spend them on. So sometimes you can’t fit them in to spend the money. Right. It just you know, you can be given so much money and it’s you go, what am I supposed to do with it?” Sprague: “Stephanie Hurst told us, pretty much told us that.” the recognizer gives that surname at 0.61 confidence — the weakest of six renderings of it across this corpus; the person is a former SAU 6 curriculum director and literacy specialist, and the reference is recorded here only because the transcript carries it
1:49:10	The administration asks to be given a target first	Koski: “But if we could get targets at the beginning of the budget process. So if you say we want a 3% increase, we want a 4% increase. It’d be much nicer process to have that target.” Whitney: “We just didn’t know.” Henry, at 1:49:33: “And if we can’t meet it, we come in and say this is as far as we can get it.” Crawford: “And to be honest, you know, tell us, you know, to meet this, we’ve had to eliminate this, this and this, right. We can live with that.” Sprague, at 1:50:12: “I did. I suggested we give you a percentage number.”	POSITIVE
1:49:45	“it is your budget”	Henry: “And then it’s your decision on whether you want to do that, you know, and and that’s the big thing too is I’ve said all along it is your budget.” Whitney: “But honestly, I don’t think we even knew what the budget really like.” Koski: “We didn’t know, and I understand anything was.” Henry: “I feel better about it. How’s that.”	POSITIVE
1:50:49	The meeting nobody could watch is scheduled, in four exchanges	Sprague: “You could say 9:00 on Wednesday.” Whitney: “9:00 on Wednesday.” Crawford: “At the Dow building.” Whitney: “It’s not available Wednesday. We could. I got to be somewhere warm.” Henry, at 1:51:05: “We could meet and Mike’s officers. There’s small enough number of us.” Crawford, at 1:51:13: “So I’ll show up at the office at 9:00 on Wednesday? Yep.” Henry: “The 10th.” All three members of the committee, an agreed time, an agreed place. No notice, no recording and no minutes of it exist.	HIGH
1:51:22	Close	Sprague: “Okay. Anybody else have anything else? For the good of the order.” Crawford: “Thank you so much.” Whitney: “Oh. It’s Mike’s. Thank you. Thanks, Mike. Thanks, Steve.” No motion to adjourn, and none taken. The tape runs on for about forty-five seconds and stops.	HIGH

Items flagged for review

Flags are a reviewer’s aid, produced by reading the recording against the New Hampshire and federal law in force on 5 January 2024. They are not findings of violation and no court or agency has ruled on any of them. Each says which limb of this project’s severity rule it rests on, what would resolve it, and what is expressly not asserted. Statutes are quoted in the text that applied on the day; where the text served today differs, both are given.

HIGH A quorum of a public body sat for an hour and fifty-two minutes on a $36 million budget, decided to change it, and produced no agenda, no packet and no minutes — sixteen days after the district told the public in approved minutes that this committee’s 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. That is the case here. Nobody in the room is taking a record; the word minutes is never spoken; nobody says minutes exist or are coming; the clerk who writes the board’s minutes is neither present nor mentioned. The MEDIUM limb — someone on tape says minutes exist elsewhere, or the body lacked a quorum and transacted nothing — is not available. All three members were present throughout, and the committee transacted something: it agreed to convert an elementary social-worker post into a district instructional coach, and that change is in the budget the board adopted twelve days later.

The legal frame, in the text in force on the day. RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d) defines “public body” to include “[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 reaches a three-member subcommittee of a school board. RSA 91-A:2, II as codified in 2023 then requires minutes recording the members present, the persons appearing, a brief description of the subject matter, decisions made, and the names of the members who made or seconded each motion, open to public inspection not more than 5 business days after the meeting. Five business days from Friday 5 January 2024 expired on Friday 12 January 2024. The mover/seconder requirement dates from 2018, 244:1, eff. 1 January 2019 and binds every meeting in this corpus; the 2025, 112:1 additions — start time, end time, who produced the minutes — do not apply before 22 August 2025 and are not relied on here.

The district’s own statement to the contrary, sixteen days earlier. The approved board minutes of 20 December 2023 record, under the Finance Subcommittee item at which this committee moved the budget to public hearing: “Subcommittee meetings and minutes are available online for people to review.” The first half is true — the meetings were televised. The second half was not true when it was written and is not true now. The district repeated the substance of it twice more: at the 3 January hearing the board chair “noted that the finance subcommittee meeting will have another public meeting this week; all finance subcommittee meetings have been recorded live”, and on 17 January, as the budget was moved, the approved minutes record that a member “noted for the public that all meetings are viewable on CCTV”. all three sentences are from the approved minutes, not from any recording

Video is not minutes, and here the difference bites. A recording carries no list of members present, no list of persons appearing, no statement of subject matter, no record of decisions and no mover or seconder. This meeting has no motions at all, so a reader of a minute would have learned what a viewer cannot easily extract: that the committee agreed, by consensus, to fund an instructional coach out of a social-worker post. It is also the only place the $688,426.17 explanation exists. Delete the video and the meeting vanishes.

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 and holds no files. Its four sibling subcommittee folders, created the same day, are likewise empty. The committee’s own practice changed later: by 2026 its chair writes and circulates the subcommittee’s minutes herself. No minutes exist for any Finance Committee session of the FY2025 budget season — six televised meetings between 30 November 2023 and 5 January 2024.

In fairness. This committee did the opposite of hiding: it broadcast every session of the season live, said on camera why, and conducted a genuinely adversarial examination of the administration in front of the cameras. Nothing in this flag suggests concealment. The defect is documentary, and it is the one the statute actually addresses.

What would resolve this: dated minutes for 5 January 2024, or a working public link to wherever this committee’s minutes are in fact kept. What is not asserted: that any decision taken here was improper, that the meeting was closed, or that any member acted in bad faith.

Sources: RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d); RSA 91-A:2, II as codified in 2023; RSA 91-A:1 — statement of purpose; the district’s approved board minutes of 20 December 2023, 3 January 2024 and 17 January 2024; this recording throughout.

HIGH The committee decided on camera that its next working session would not be televised, met five days later, and the district’s own packet titles the budget the board then adopted “Updated 1-10-24 Finance Committee” — a $196,001.10 reduction with no public record of where it was decided

What the record shows was decided, and in whose words. At 1:42:26 the board chair puts the question herself: “since we’ve had all these conversations in public, do we want to have this the powwow meeting be televised as well, or is that something we can do at the essay at the.” The committee chair supplies the classification — “A work session? I think with.” — and the two grounds are given by the third member: “Introducing new topics.” and “Or introducing more information.” The business administrator agrees: “Exactly. Pusher trying to put together a presentation which is different.” The whole exchange runs thirty-five seconds. Eight minutes later the meeting is fixed: “You could say 9:00 on Wednesday.” — “At the Dow building.” — “We could meet and Mike’s officers. There’s small enough number of us.” — “So I’ll show up at the office at 9:00 on Wednesday? Yep.” — “The 10th.”

That is a meeting of a public body under the statute in force that day. RSA 91-A:2, I defines “meeting” as the convening of a quorum of the membership of a public body for the purpose of discussing or acting upon a matter over which the body has supervision, control, jurisdiction or advisory power. All three members were to attend; the subject was the district budget, which is this committee’s entire remit. New Hampshire’s Right-to-Know Law contains no “work session” exception, and none of paragraph I’s four exclusions fits: this is not collective-bargaining strategy (I(a)), not consultation with legal counsel (I(b)), not the circulation of draft documents formalising decisions already made in a meeting (I(d)) — the decision the session produced had not been made in a meeting — and not a political-party caucus (I(c)). The caucus exclusion is foreclosed for any New Hampshire school board: RSA 671:30 requires every school district without a special statute to use the non-partisan ballot system for the election of district officers, and has been unamended since 1979, 321:1, eff. 21 August 1979. A body elected on a non-partisan ballot has no party caucus to hold.

The district’s own documents say the meeting happened and say what it produced. The board’s packet for 17 January 2024 contains two exhibits, both uploaded to the district share on 16 January:

The date in those titles is the Wednesday this committee agreed on, and the attribution in the first is to this committee. Exhibit E is the budget the board adopted: total general fund $36,117,406.87, up 3.55 per cent — against the $36,313,407.97 and 4.11 per cent in the summary page the public was given at the statutory hearing seven days earlier. The difference is $196,001.10.

What changed, and why it matters that no one can see how. Comparing the two published summary pages line by line, the whole net reduction and more is taken out of one function and put partly into another: 2113 Social Worker falls from $500,554.27 to $302,466.20, a cut of $198,088.07, while 2210 PD Support rises from $208,388.83 to $309,131.85, an increase of $100,743.02 — the instructional coach this meeting agreed to. Regular instruction falls $131,719.36; psychological services rise $108,998.69; COTA services fall $92,217.11; guidance, health services and transportation move by smaller amounts. The eight movements sum exactly to $196,001.10. On 5 January this committee agreed, on camera, to two elementary social workers and one coach. The budget dated 10 January has one and one, and the member who presented it to the board on 17 January said so: the approved minutes of that night record the change as “added positions (elementary social worker and instructional coach)”, singular. Nothing in any public record shows where, when or on what reasoning the second post came out.

Why HIGH. Unmitigated limb again, and on the more serious facts: for the 10 January session there is no agenda, no notice located, no recording, no minutes and no member of the public who could have attended, and the decision it produced is the largest single change to the FY2025 budget after the statutory hearing. RSA 91-A:2, II required 24 hours’ notice, an open door and minutes within five business days.

What is not asserted, carefully. No document says in terms that a meeting was held on 10 January 2024; the exhibits say the budget was “Updated 1-10-24 Finance Committee”. It is possible the business office simply produced a file that day. But the committee had agreed on camera to convene at 9 a.m. that Wednesday, the file bears that date and this committee’s name, and its contents implement decisions this committee was in the middle of making. If the session did not take place, the question does not go away — it becomes: at what meeting, then, was a $196,001.10 reduction and the deletion of an elementary social-worker post decided? On the public record there is no answer either way. Nor is it asserted that the reduction was wrong; on the contrary, see flag 13 — RSA 32:5, I expressly contemplates the body finalising its budget after the hearing. The objection is to the absence of any record of the doing.

In fairness, and it is not nothing. The board chair asked the televising question openly, on camera, when nobody had raised it; the reason given was narrow and specific; and the district did document the next work session — the approved minutes of 17 January record “January 24th at 6:00 at Dow (working session)”. The committee’s instinct was disclosure, and its practice fell short of its instinct.

What would resolve this: minutes or a notice for 10 January 2024, or a district statement that no meeting occurred that day together with an account of how the 1-10-24 budget was produced.

Sources: RSA 91-A:2, I and II as codified in 2023; RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d); RSA 671:30; RSA 32:5, I as codified in 2023; Exhibit E — Claremont Summary Page 1-10-24; Budget Summary FY25 in the 3 January packet; approved board minutes, 17 January 2024; this recording at the times cited.

MEDIUM The prior-year comparative column that RSA 32:5, IV(a) requires was, on the officers’ own account, unreliable line by line — and it was silently rewritten between the public hearing and the adoption

What the statute requires. RSA 32:5, IV, in the text in force on this date and unchanged since: “Budget forms for the annual meeting shall include, in the section showing recommended appropriations, comparative columns indicating at least the following information: (a) Appropriations voted by the previous annual meeting. (b) Actual expenditures made pursuant to those appropriations, or in those towns and districts which hold annual meetings prior to the close of the current fiscal year, actual expenditures for the most recently completed fiscal year…” Earlier pages in this archive cited gross basis as ¶IV and the comparative columns as ¶V. That is wrong by one paragraph: gross basis is ¶III and the columns are ¶IV. Corrected here. Claremont votes by official ballot under RSA 40:13 in March, before its 30 June fiscal-year end, so the required expenditure column is the most recently completed year — FY23. The district’s form carries FY22 actual, FY23 actual, FY24 appropriated and FY25 proposed, which is more than the statute asks for. This flag is about whether the FY24 appropriated column means anything.

What the meeting establishes about it. Four worked examples from the committee chair, each a line that carried money in two prior years, nothing in FY24, and money again in the proposal: Maple media retirement at about $8,700 (0:23:41), CMS water and sewer at about $10,000 (0:38:27), Stevens substitutes at about $10,000 (0:39:35), and a secretary carried at four tenths of a post for years who is in fact full time (0:41:07). His total, at 0:40:29: “in my efforts to find the 688, I actually I actually found a number like, like a half $1 million of this kind of stuff.” The business administrator adds one he had missed — “there’s another big one in here that’s retirement benefits. It’s 300,000 and nothing is against yet” — and does not contest any of them: “I don’t disagree with you, Frank. I don’t at all.” The board chair asks whether that adds to “roughly another million dollars?” and gets no answer. A member’s summary, at 0:46:12: “And that’s where the variance is immaterial because it’s based on. Yeah. Fiction.” The chair repeats the word in his own voice at 1:12:32.

And the column then changed, between the hearing and the vote. The FY24 appropriated column in the summary page given to the public on 3 January is not the FY24 appropriated column in the summary page the board adopted on 17 January. Regular instruction moves from $11,119,833.77 to $11,768,341.94; special education from $8,305,293.13 to $7,702,816.82; media, guidance, COTA services and vocational education move by smaller amounts. The bottom line moves by one cent — $34,880,311.71 to $34,880,311.72. That is exactly what the business administrator described doing at this meeting: redistributing the $688,426.17 credit across the lines it belonged to. Neither document carries any note saying the prior-year figures had been restated. A member of the public who compared the budget they were consulted on with the budget that was adopted would find the previous year’s appropriations different and no explanation on the page.

Why MEDIUM, not HIGH. This is the control-weakness limb. The statute requires the columns and they are there; it does not prescribe how a district must correct a mis-posted prior year, and correcting one is better practice than leaving it. Nothing was concealed at this meeting — the officer volunteered the whole account on live television. The grade rests on the fact that the column a statute makes the public’s comparison tool was, by the account of the three people who built the budget, not usable for that purpose, and changed without notation.

What is not asserted: that any figure was falsified, that the bottom line was wrong, or that any statutory column was omitted. What would resolve this: the FY24 general-ledger detail behind both versions of the appropriated column, and the journal entry the business administrator describes at 0:34:08.

Sources: RSA 32:5, III and IV as codified in 2023; RSA 40:13 unamended since 2019, 192:2; RSA 21-J:19 — audits of political subdivisions by independent public accountants cited for the holding only; the section imposes no deadline of its own; the two published FY25 summary pages linked above; this recording at the times cited.

MEDIUM The largest proportional reduction in the FY2025 budget — alternative support programmes, down 69.78 per cent — is described in no district document, and two days after the statutory hearing neither the special-education director nor the business administrator could fully account for it

The figure. The FY25 Proposed Budget Summary Page given to the public at the 3 January hearing shows 2190-2192 Alternative Support Programs falling from $368,430.35 to $111,321.90 — a decrease of $257,108.45, or 69.78 per cent. No other line on the page falls further in proportion. The district’s narrative document for the same hearing, the budget memo of 3 January 2024, lists the changes school by school and district-wide across four pages and does not mention it at all.

How it surfaced. Not from the administration. A member who had been comparing successive drafts against one another found it (0:48:32): “And so I was trying to determine where the 350,000. These are all big round numbers. Where it came from. And what I concluded is, on district wide special ed, it looks like, the alt ed was zeroed out.” She sizes it at about $240,000, names the two drafts and the page, and asks the question at 0:50:34: “Why did all of those numbers get deleted? We weren’t informed that some program got cut. So you don’t cut out 240,000 without. I’m wondering where it went or why it went.”

The answer, incomplete on both occasions it was given. It had in fact been raised in public two days earlier — by the chair of this committee, at the statutory hearing. His question there, from that meeting’s dialogue file: “Alternative support programs. I’m wondering what is that?” The reply identified the autism and PRIDE rooms and trailed off: “We did reduce. We had three rooms running and then we did.” those two quotations are from the recording of 3 January 2024, not from this one Here, sixteen days after the board voted the budget to hearing and two days after the hearing itself, the special-education director gives the structure — location code 138, three self-contained classrooms, one at the high school and two at Maple, one eliminated and one possibly moved to a high-school line — and then says, at 0:49:16: “I don’t know if that accounts for the full 224. That sounds a little high to me as well.” The business administrator supplies what was actually cut at 0:57:19: “we’re reducing the pride program by one room, which would be two pairs and a teacher and a teacher.” The committee finds about $105,000 of the money in a high-school line and stops looking. The member closes it with “All right, I’ll follow that up.”; no follow-up appears in any later public record.

Why this is a disclosure question and not a violation. RSA 32:5, II requires that “[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”, and bars the body from inserting afterwards an amount or purpose not disclosed there. The reduction was raised at the final hearing, so the paragraph’s requirement was met in form, and a reduction is not an insertion. The finding is narrower and is about the quality of the disclosure: the largest proportional change in a $36 million budget reached the public only because a committee member asked what a line meant, and the answer he got was incomplete when he asked it and still incomplete two days later.

Why MEDIUM. Control-weakness limb. No provision requires a narrative memo to be exhaustive; the change appears correctly in the published summary page; and the officers answered every question put to them as far as they could. What is not asserted: that a special-education programme was cut unlawfully, that any child lost a service, or that the figure was hidden. This page reproduces no student name, count or characteristic from any record. What would resolve this: the FY24 and FY25 detail for location code 138 and function 2190-2192, and whatever the member’s follow-up produced.

Sources: RSA 32:5, II and IV as codified in 2023; Budget Summary FY25; Claremont School Board Budget Memo, 3 January 2024; the 3 January 2024 dialogue file; 34 CFR 300.101 context only: FAPE must be available to all children residing in the State between the ages of 3 and 21, inclusive; no federal finding is made; this recording at the times cited.

MEDIUM The district’s public budget memo told the board and the public it was adding a teaching position it was not adding; the business administrator conceded it on camera and no corrected version was published

The document. The Claremont School Board Budget Memo dated 3 January 2024, addressed to the board over the business administrator’s name and filed in the hearing packet, lists under CMS Changes: Add 1 Science position currently open. (3 teachers currently), alongside four reductions. that line is quoted from the memo, not from the recording The same list appears in the district’s slide document for the hearing.

The exchange. Crawford, at 1:05:55: “It has added one science position currently open. How can you add a position that’s already in the budget. You’re not adding a position because it’s already in the budget.” And again at 1:07:13: “When it says add a science position currently open. If it’s currently open and in the budget, why is it an addition?” The business administrator concedes at 1:07:44: “It should just say it’s an open position Candace. It’s what it should say.” and at 1:08:03: “This is my document. So I apologize for that.” The superintendent had already said the same thing more briefly: “Just a word. Right?”

Why it matters beyond a wording quibble. The list is the only school-by-school account of the FY2025 staffing changes that the public was given, and it was given at the hearing that RSA 32:5, I makes the one statutory opportunity for the public to be told what it is being asked to pay for. Read as written, the memo says the middle school gains a science teacher while losing two English, three social studies and six tenths of a mathematics post. On the officers’ own account it gains nothing: the science post already existed and was vacant. The corrected reading makes the middle-school reduction larger than the document says, not smaller. No revised memo appears in the 17 January packet or in any district share.

Why MEDIUM. Control-weakness limb. The error was self-reported within two days, by its author, on live television, in answer to a question — which is how such things are supposed to come out. Nothing turns on it financially: the summary page’s dollar figures were not affected. What is not asserted: that the memo was intended to mislead. What would resolve this: a corrected memo in the district’s public share, or a note in the 17 January packet recording the correction.

Sources: Claremont School Board Budget Memo, 3 January 2024; Claremont School District Budget Presentation UPDATE 1.3.24; RSA 32:5, I and II as codified in 2023; this recording at the times cited.

MEDIUM The committee finalised a $36 million budget with no current-year expenditure data, no year-to-date column and no monthly financial reports — and spent a sixth of the meeting establishing how many people work in two buildings

What was missing, in the committee’s own words. The chair, at 0:22:51: “maybe you can answer the questions without the, the current year actuals. But Candy had talked about how helpful current year actuals would be. And I’ve and I’ve arrived at that point as well”. Why it matters, at 0:40:29: “It would be nice to know what the actual are. That way we know if that’s a real discrepancy or not.” And the report that existed last year and not this one, at 1:27:52: “Straight employees from last year and exactly what they do, what they get paid, what their hours are, and which I found to be really a hindrance to not have this this year. And we just spent so much time sorting stuff out, which I could have figured out by myself.” The business administrator’s answer, at 1:28:42: “the time to put into doing that, because I can’t get it all of one place. That’s the problem.”

The reporting that was owed. Crawford, at 1:31:32: “Mary, I would love to have you add another column year to date calculation. I keep saying that and honest to Pete, and I hope as we go forward that we can have at least quarterly, year to date updates.” The reply: “We are going to have monthly year to date updates, which I have not done yet because of.” and “I am with you completely. You guys should be getting monthly updates, right?” The board’s own agenda had carried a monthly financial report on 20 December 2023, and its approved minutes record it “Removed for the sake of time” — on the night the budget was voted to public hearing. that phrase is from the approved minutes of 20 December 2023

The cost, visible in the tape. Roughly nineteen minutes of this meeting — from 1:04:04 to 1:22:44 — is three elected members and three administrators trying to establish, out loud and from memory and handwritten notes, how many guidance counsellors, assistant principals, paraprofessionals and monitors two schools have. The count is stated as two, three and four within ninety seconds (1:10:24). The board chair’s own note of the administration’s presentation turns out to be wrong (“Five spread pears and five general editor pears written down from the presentation.” — “I don’t have five.”). The chair calls the budgeted count “It’s it’s fiction. Okay.”

Why MEDIUM. Control-weakness limb. No statute requires a district to give its board current-year actuals or monthly financials, and none is asserted to have been breached; RSA 32:5, IV’s comparative columns are the statutory minimum and the district met them. The grade rests on the gap between what a governing body needs to appropriate responsibly and what it had. In fairness: the officer had been in post about six months, inherited a general ledger she was still reconciling, and undertook the monthly reporting on the record.

What would resolve this: the FY24 year-to-date expenditure report as at 5 January 2024, and the position-by-position staffing schedule the chair says accompanied the previous year’s budget.

Sources: RSA 32:5, IV as codified in 2023; RSA 197:23-a — the district treasurer’s custody of district money and independent books of account context only; no treasurer conduct is in question; 2 CFR 200.303 — effective internal control over federal awards cited only because grant-funded posts are among the lines at issue; no federal finding is made; approved board minutes, 20 December 2023; this recording at the times cited.

MEDIUM At least five successive budget documents were put to this committee during the FY2025 season and the public shares hold two of them — including neither of the two the committee is reading from at this meeting

The versions are named on the record. Crawford describes her method at 0:47:55: “every time we get a new copy, a new budget, I reference from the very last one where the differences are okay. So it kind of builds, you know, we had one, two, three, four.” The two she compares are named repeatedly: “this was comparing the 1218 budget to the 1220 budget”. A third is on the table here — the chair, at 1:44:44: “do we have any positions in this one five document” — and members switch between it and the 20 December version throughout (“Of which copy.” / “Of of the latest copy.”).

What the public has. Two. Updated Claremont School District Budget 12.20.23, 55 pages of account detail in the 20 December board packet and again in the 3 January hearing packet; and Exhibit D- Claremont FY25 Proposed Budget Updated 1-10-24 Finance Committee in the 17 January packet. The 18 December version does not exist in any share; nor does the 5 January version the committee is holding at this meeting.

Why that is more than a filing complaint. A viewer watching this meeting live hears page numbers for the better part of two hours — page 8, page 24, page 25, page 42, page 44, page 49, page 55 — and cannot follow one of them, because the members are switching between two documents of which the viewer has one. The finding at the centre of the meeting is itself a difference between two drafts: the $240,000 alternative-education reduction exists as a fact because the 18 December version differs from the 20 December version, and the public cannot see the comparison. RSA 91-A:1 states the chapter’s purpose as ensuring “the greatest possible public access to the actions, discussions and records of all public bodies”; RSA 91-A:4, I gives any person the right to inspect governmental records. No request is recorded as having been made or refused, so no denial is alleged — this is about what was published, not about what was withheld.

Why MEDIUM. Process-gap limb, and it is mitigated: producing a revised budget between working sessions is good practice, the two versions that were published bracket the season, and the district posted its packets promptly. What would resolve this: the 18 December 2023 and 5 January 2024 budget documents in the district’s public share.

Sources: RSA 91-A:1; RSA 91-A:4, I as codified in 2023 the section was amended by 2024, 49:1–2, eff. 13 August 2024, after this meeting; paragraph I’s inspection right long predates it; the two published budget documents linked above; this recording at the times cited.

OBSERVATION Eleven behavioural-support posts were eliminated and about five and a half paraprofessional posts added; the committee established the arithmetic in public and nobody asked what the eleven posts had been doing

The arithmetic, established on camera in about seven minutes. The special-education director, at 0:54:26: “All behavior specialists have been zeroed out, for this next budget cycle.” The counts, at 0:59:53 and 1:00:06: eleven posts in all, of which “Eight would have been in local fund eight” and three federally funded. The unit cost, at 1:00:36: “about 42, five for each one, give or take. So let’s see. 40. You know, 42,500 times eight.” The chair: “400 grand.” The replacement, from the business administrator at 0:59:07: “$167,000 in the pair lines were increases” — salaries only — and “So there’s another five and a half pairs is how it roughly if you did it at 30,000.” And the reason, at 0:57:59: “We’re attempting to go to an all para two, matrix… so there’s no more letters of agreement.” The district’s own budget memo bears out the count exactly — one removal at Disnard, three at Maple, three at Bluff, three at CMS and one at Stevens, at $42,500 apiece. from the budget memo of 3 January 2024

Why it is recorded as an observation and not a flag with a rule behind it. The change is a labour-relations and classification decision, and the committee has a coherent reason for it: the superintendent explains at 1:19:35 that “The term regular ed paraprofessional is a complete misnomer” and that everyone outside a collective bargaining agreement was on a letter of agreement, and the district’s stated FY25 priority was “a comprehensive paraprofessional contract that negates the need for additional Letters of Agreement”. from the district’s budget presentation of 3 January 2024 No provision requires a district to employ behavioural specialists, and none is asserted to have been breached. Paraprofessional support written into an individualised education programme is a service the district must provide; the business administrator says as much — “Pairs based on need for IEPs. Yes. So we’re required to have them.”

What is worth noting all the same. Eleven posts leave and about five and a half arrive, at roughly $12,500 less per post, and in an hour and fifty-two minutes nobody asks what the eleven were doing, who does it instead, or what happens to the children they supported. The one member who raises the training question does so at the 3 January hearing, not here: the approved minutes of that night record a request “to ensure support and PD for paraprofessionals, particularly those who are acting as behavioral supports”. That request is not mentioned at this meeting. that sentence is from the approved minutes of 3 January 2024

Sources: this recording at the times cited; Claremont School Board Budget Memo, 3 January 2024; Claremont School District Budget Presentation UPDATE 1.3.24; approved minutes, 3 January 2024; 34 CFR 300.101 and RSA 186-C:1 context only; no finding is made under either; RSA 273-A:3 — obligation to negotiate in good faith noted because the change moves staff between bargaining units; no conduct is in question.

OBSERVATION This is the last recording in this archive at which the Superintendent of Schools speaks; six days later his contract was terminated, and nothing on this tape anticipates it

The fact. Michael Tempesta speaks 43 times here, from 0:07:13 to 1:19:35 — explaining the middle school’s academic and discipline rooms, proposing the social-worker-to-coach trade that is this meeting’s one decision, and giving its clearest account of what the district’s job titles mean. There is no recording in this archive between this meeting and the SAU 6 board meeting of 11 January 2024, at which his contract was terminated with six months’ severance effective 12 January. He is neither present nor audible on that recording. This meeting is therefore the last time the public heard him do his job.

What is on this tape, and what is not. Nothing. There is no reference to his contract, his evaluation, his employment or the SAU 6 board; the room treats him as it treats any other administrator, and he answers technical questions about staffing structures. The board chair jokes about names with him at 0:07:14. The absence of any sign is itself the observation, and it is offered without inference: this page draws no conclusion about the reasons for the termination, which were never stated publicly, and takes no view on whether they were sound.

Why this is recorded here. Because a reader coming to this archive to understand January 2024 will otherwise not know that the superintendent visible throughout this recording had six days left, and because the finance work he is doing here — the budget presentation planned for 17 January, the deliberative session on 3 February — was carried out by other people.

Sources: this recording; companion page SAU 6 Board, 11 January 2024 and its dialogue file the meeting at which the motion, the second and the roll are on the recording and the superintendent is not; approved Claremont board minutes, 17 January 2024 whose masthead prints “Chris Pratt, Interim Superintendent”.

OBSERVATION The board asked twice for the whole budget — every fund, every grant, the real cost per pupil — and never got it before adopting the local one

The request, made at the statutory hearing. The approved minutes of 3 January 2024 record, among the things the board asked its finance subcommittee to bring back: “Request from the board for an overview of all dollars going to support professional learning (including grants and other funding sources) as well as an overview of all the funds that are spent from all sources”. from the approved minutes, not the recording

The request, restated here with ten minutes left. Whitney, at 1:43:51: “I really do want to know all the positions that are being funded by grants and the whole budget, not just the budget by which what the local taxpayers are paying now.” And at 1:44:16: “I think it’s important for the community to know what our actual, what we’re paying per kid.” Crawford wants the two kept visibly apart: “I do think that it’s important to keep the numbers separate.” The chair narrows it to one question — “do we have any positions in this one five document that maybe in this budget that should be in grants?” — and gets an answer to that question only.

Why the statute is worth naming here even though nothing is alleged under it. RSA 32:5, III is the paragraph the board chair is unknowingly describing: “All appropriations recommended shall be stipulated on a ‘gross’ basis, showing anticipated revenues from all sources, including grants, gifts, bequests, and bond issues, which shall be shown as offsetting revenues to appropriations affected.” Earlier pages in this archive cited gross basis as ¶IV; it is ¶III. Corrected here. No finding of non-compliance is made, and none could be on this record: the gross-basis requirement bites on the budget form filed with the annual meeting warrant — the DRA form the business administrator refers to at 1:43:33 when she says “I have to be able to get it in so that we can post the thing from the DRA” — and that form is not in this archive. The published summary page is a general-fund page: it carries an “Other Funds” row at zero and shows no grant revenue at all. What can be said is that the elected body that adopted the budget asked twice for the gross picture and, on the public record, did not have it when it voted.

What would resolve this: the district’s FY2025 MS-27 as filed with the Department of Revenue Administration, and the grant-funded position schedule the board asked for on 3 January.

Sources: RSA 32:5, III as codified in 2023; approved minutes, 3 January 2024; Budget Summary FY25; 20 U.S.C. §1225(b) — Tydings Amendment context only: the federal funds whose exhaustion drives this budget year remained available for obligation one additional fiscal year; ARP ESSER obligations closed 30 September 2024; this recording at the times cited.

OBSERVATION The whole budget debate is one member’s arithmetic done aloud, and the figure the board finally adopted is below both options she put on the table

The chain, in order. The committee chair reads the increase off the last page at 1:32:14: “And it’s showing an increase of of 4%.” The published summary page puts it at 4.11 per cent — $34,880,311.71 to $36,313,407.97. He reaches for a benchmark from a neighbouring state’s governor and Social Security’s cost-of-living increase, and hands the question to the board: “what what do they see acceptable as a, as an increase is 4% okay? Or is it is it too much.”

Crawford then constructs an alternative on air, at 1:34:01: take last year’s grand total — “even though the categories varied, the grand total is solid” — and index it to the teachers’ contracted rise. “I’m using 3.75 because that’s what the teachers are.” “And I multiply the 34,000 times 1.0375. I get 36188.” The arithmetic is right: $34,880,311.71 × 1.0375 = $36,188,323. The gap she must close is about $125,000, which she rounds to “130,000”. And the case she would make with it, at 1:35:33: “If 85% of a school district’s budget is personnel, and they have already agreed because last year they supported the two year contract for the teachers, they’ve already supported a 3.75% increase in this year’s budget.”

The question, and the answer that never came in public. At 1:39:28: “are you are you okay with the 36 million 318. Or do you want to see that reduced to 36188?” Whitney: “I think we need to have a conversation with the board about that.” Sprague: “I do too.” The board adopted $36,117,406.87 — 3.55 per cent — on 17 January. That is $196,001.10 below the first option and about $71,000 below the second. The conversation with the board that both members said was needed is not on any recording; the 17 January meeting takes the figure as presented and adopts it unanimously. See flag 2.

Recorded as an observation because no rule is engaged. Nothing requires a budget to hit a particular percentage, and a committee is entitled to change its mind. What is worth preserving is that the reasoning the public can inspect ends here, at two named options, and the number that appeared on the ballot is neither of them.

Sources: this recording at the times cited; Budget Summary FY25; Exhibit E — Claremont Summary Page 1-10-24; approved board minutes, 17 January 2024.

POSITIVE The $688,426.17 was chased down and explained on live television, in detail, by the officer who inherited it — with the account code, the method and the unreconciled remainder all on the record

What was resolved. A credit of $688,426.17 sat in the FY24 column of the Claremont budget under the caption Board Voted Expense Reductions for FY24 at account 100.40.1100.113.5.00000. The committee had been asking what it was since 18 December. Here it gets a complete answer. The business administrator’s account, at 0:31:41: “the 688,000 was a negative number to your budget, meaning that he knew there were $688,000 worth of monies sitting in the other lines that are grant funded. He accounted for the grant funding.” and, at 0:32:06, “But he just didn’t allocate it to where it belonged.” Her method, at 0:27:12 and 0:27:29: dump the budget to a spreadsheet, sort by salaries and benefits, compare against actual expenditure and against the predecessor’s own schedules, and move each amount to the line the named employee belongs on. What she found, at 0:28:16: “there was over a half $1 million that was in Ida alone” — the federal special-education grant.

The part that makes it a positive rather than a defence. She names the residual and does not round it away, at 0:29:42: “I landed with roughly $16,000 that I couldn’t find.” and, immediately: “16,830. Hey, that I was happy with that. So what I did was I moved it off of the code of health insurance…” and “But every other amount of money that I took was based on a person.” She offers the working papers with names redacted — Crawford: “you can redact names and just.”; Henry: “That’s what I’m going to do. Yeah.” She volunteers a further anomaly the committee had not found: “there’s another big one in here that’s retirement benefits. It’s 300,000 and nothing is against yet.” And she accepts the chair’s figures against her own document without argument: “I don’t disagree with you, Frank. I don’t at all.”

The chair, for his part, put the responsibility where it belonged before she began, at 0:26:47: “So and I know this is not and I’m going to put it right out there. This is not your fault.” The officer had been in post about six months and the credit predates her.

It is checkable, which is the point. The district’s own budget memo for the 3 January hearing states the same thing in writing — Board Voted Expense Reductions for FY24 ($688,426.17) decrease should have been allocated out to the salary and benefit lines that it belonged from the memo, not the recording — and the effect is visible to anyone who compares the two published summary pages: six FY24 lines move, the largest by $648,508.17 and $602,476.31, and the FY24 total changes by one cent. An explanation given on camera that can be verified line by line against a document the district published days later is the strongest form this record takes. The related documentary question — that the restatement carries no note — is flag 3.

Sources: this recording at the times cited; Claremont School Board Budget Memo, 3 January 2024; Budget Summary FY25 and Exhibit E — Claremont Summary Page 1-10-24; companion page Finance Committee, 18 December 2023, where the same line is opened and not resolved.

POSITIVE The one budget change this meeting made came straight out of the statutory public hearing — which is exactly what RSA 32:5, I tells a governing body to do after public testimony closes

The chain is complete and every link is documented. At the 3 January hearing the assistant superintendent said, of an elementary instructional coach, “if if I could have my wish, it would be nice to have an additional coach to work the elementary level. But you know, there’s limits”, and a board member asked for it: “My other pieces about the coaches for the elementary level, if there’s any way, shape or form we can have that happen…” both quotations are from the recording of 3 January 2024, not this one The approved minutes of that hearing reduce it to an instruction: “Request to find a way to fund an elementary coach position”. Two days later this committee opens with it (0:00:49), finds the money by converting one of three proposed elementary social-worker posts (0:16:50), and confirms the mechanics before it closes (1:39:46). On 17 January the board adopted a budget containing an instructional coach, and the district’s own summary page shows the money in 2210 PD Support.

Why this is the statute working and not a violation of it. RSA 32:5, I requires at least one public hearing not later than 25 days before the annual meeting, on 7 days’ notice, “and after the conclusion of public testimony shall finalize the budget to be submitted to the legislative body.” The paragraph expressly contemplates the body settling the budget after the hearing. Claremont’s hearing was on 3 January and its deliberative session on 3 February — thirty-one days, comfortably inside the twenty-five-day floor. Paragraph II then bars inserting afterwards “an additional amount or purpose of appropriation which was not disclosed or discussed at that hearing”. This change was both. It was raised at the hearing by an administrator and by a board member; it added no money, converting one post into another; and the total moved down, not up. This corrects a reading earlier pages in this run were at risk of taking. A post-hearing budget change is not, by itself, a breach of RSA 32:5 — paragraph I directs it.

The reasoning is on the record too, which is what makes it inspectable: the assistant superintendent explains what an instructional coach does (0:19:04: “our coaches are basically involved in two major roles. One is instructional practice… And then secondly implementing curriculum”), the board chair gives her reason (0:20:17: “we have a bunch of well-educated teachers who are experts at doing it a wrong, a different way. And so we’re struggling with reading proficiency at our elementary schools”), and the caseload consequence of the social-worker reduction is stated aloud — “They’d be a case 350.”

The one thing that is not to the district’s credit is that the decision exists only as speech: no motion, no vote, no minute. See flag 1. And the further reduction from two elementary social workers to one, which happened after this meeting, has no public record at all. See flag 2.

Sources: RSA 32:5, I and II as codified in 2023 the section was later amended by 2025, 144:1, eff. 30 August 2025; the paragraphs relied on here are identical in the 2023 codification and today; RSA 40:13; approved minutes, 3 January 2024; the 3 January 2024 dialogue file; this recording at the times cited.

POSITIVE The committee said on camera why it was working in public, and the officer it was cross-examining said on camera that the questioning was making the budget better

The statement of purpose, from the board chair, at 1:24:49: “historically the the community has seen those kind of, accounting practices as a way of shifting money around and deceiving the public, whether or not that is the case.” And at 1:25:15: “And so it seems as if we’re being nitpicky, but quite frankly, we’re being defensive of the budget, right? Meaning we’re looking as a committee to say we want the the community to see this budget as as legitimate and transparent and specific and and no funny money is being switched.” That is an elected body explaining, unprompted and on live television, why the tedium is the point.

The reply from the person being questioned, at 1:25:35: “But these conversations also help because remember it, it enables us when we’re going forward for next year. I mean, it’s a learning process. I’m new. It’s a learning process. Knowing what we do need to clarify within the budget to make it easier for people to understand. So, you know, this is good. This is all good.” And, on where responsibility sits, at 1:49:45: “that’s the big thing too is I’ve said all along it is your budget.”

And a process improvement proposed by the administration, not imposed on it, at 1:49:10. The assistant superintendent: “But if we could get targets at the beginning of the budget process. So if you say we want a 3% increase, we want a 4% increase. It’d be much nicer process to have that target.” The business administrator: “And if we can’t meet it, we come in and say this is as far as we can get it.” Crawford: “And to be honest, you know, tell us, you know, to meet this, we’ve had to eliminate this, this and this, right. We can live with that.” The board chair’s own summary of the year, at 1:49:54: “But honestly, I don’t think we even knew what the budget really like.”

One qualification, and it belongs here. The same commitment to working in public produced, eighteen minutes later, the decision that the next working session would not be broadcast. Both things are on the same tape. See flag 2.

Sources: this recording at the times cited; RSA 91-A:1 — “the greatest possible public access to the actions, discussions and records of all public bodies”; companion pages 30 November, 1 December, 6 December, 13 December and 18 December 2023 — every working session of this budget season was televised.

POSITIVE A member stopped the committee from selling a special warrant article as part of the operating budget — the distinction RSA 32:5, V exists to preserve

What was proposed. The chair, planning the public case for the budget at 1:40:04: “I think the assignment will be to, come up with with, with talking points. And I think one of the we certainly can sell the para raises as, as an efficiency.” He had just argued, at 1:39:19, that eliminating the behavioural specialists made the paraprofessional increase self-funding: “You’re talking that’s 400 K in my mind. And so that’s fine. That’s paying for itself.”

What stopped it. Crawford, immediately, at 1:40:17: “You’ve got to keep you’ve got to make sure you keep that separate because those are worn articles and you can’t mix and match because those increases in the pair are not in the regular budget right now because it’s a separate Warren article. So don’t mix messages there.” “worn” and “Warren” are the recognizer’s warrant The board chair does not concede the political point — “But well, we want to support the the Warren article too.” — but the accounting point stands unchallenged.

Why she is right, on the law and on the arithmetic. RSA 32:5, V governs a purpose of appropriation that “appears in the warrant as part of a special warrant article”, and requires the article to carry the governing body’s recommendation and the amount. The paraprofessional, secretaries’ and maintenance settlements went to the voters as separate articles, at roughly $189,000, $158,000 and $160,000 as the business administrator recalls them at 1:38:36; the district’s own budget-priorities document puts the paraprofessional figure at $189,209.00 FY 25. from the district’s budget presentation for the 3 January hearing Money the voters may approve or reject in a separate article cannot be netted against savings inside the operating budget without misdescribing both. The whole exchange takes under half a minute and is the clearest piece of budget-law discipline anywhere in this season’s recordings.

One point recorded without criticism. The chair’s underlying arithmetic was sound and the board chair’s objection to it was not: she said the behavioural specialists “have been paid for by Esser”, and the committee had established twenty minutes earlier that eight of the eleven were locally funded. Neither correction is pursued.

Sources: RSA 32:5, V as codified in 2023; RSA 40:13; Claremont School District Budget Presentation UPDATE 1.3.24; approved board minutes, 20 December 2023 recording the ratification of the three agreements and the tax impact stated for one of them; this recording at the times cited.

Appendix — source files

Official and public sources

Recording: Claremont Community Television, Cablecast show 15510 — “School Board Finance Meeting 1/5/23”. Title, eventDate (a bare 5 January 2024 with no start time, quoted in full in the facts block above), totalRunTime (6,737 s) and the null Agenda custom field confirmed against the Cablecast API on 2026-08-29. The year in the archive’s own title is wrong; the same archive titles the 3 January hearing “School Board Meeting 1/3/23”. Every timestamp on this page is a seekto deep link into this show.
No agenda and no packet exists for this meeting in any district share, and 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 folders on either side of it — the 2024 Meeting Documents archive, the previous meeting’s packet folder 1. CSB FY25 Budget Public Hearing 1.3.24 (7 documents) and the next board meeting’s packet folder 2. CSB 1.17.24 (14 documents), both enumerated in MAP.md §§36 and 39 and neither containing a Finance Committee agenda or minute; (2) every later folder by filename date, plus both candidate year folders in the district’s Meeting Minutes share, every entry in which is a full-board, deliberative-session or public-hearing document. Recorded in MAP.md §37 as verified 2026-08-28. Drive title searches for 1.5.24, 1.10.24 and Finance Committee, re-run independently for this page on 2026-08-29, return no district-share document of either date; the only Finance Committee minutes the index holds at all are two 2026 files owned by this project’s maintainer, not by the district. Method caution: this project has established that the Drive search API under-reports on these shared folders — a folder-contents query for the Claremont Finance Sub Committee folder returns empty, and so do queries for folders known to hold documents. The negatives above therefore rest on the folder-by-folder enumeration recorded in MAP.md, not on API searches alone.
Claremont Finance Sub Committee — a Drive folder owned by sau6webmaster@sau6.org, created 27 October 2022, containing no files. It is where this committee’s material would go if it were ever posted. The district’s four sibling subcommittee folders, created the same day, are likewise all empty.
Budget Summary FY25 district document, uploaded to the 3 January 2024 hearing packet at 3:57 p.m. that afternoon — the one-page FY22 actual / FY23 actual / FY24 appropriated / FY25 proposed comparative summary. Source of $34,880,311.71, $36,313,407.97, $1,433,096.26 and 4.11 per cent; of the 2190-2192 Alternative Support Programs fall of $257,108.45 (−69.78 per cent); of the 2113 Social Worker rise of $428,053.80 (+590.42 per cent); and of the FY24 column as it stood before the $688,426.17 restatement. This is the “page 55” the chair reads from at 1:32:14.
Claremont School Board Budget Memo, 3 January 2024 district document; four pages over the business administrator’s name. Its file name reads Claremont School Board Budget Memo Final MCT MH 1-4-23.docx — a year out and a day after the memo’s own date; reported, not repaired — the school-by-school narrative of the FY25 changes. Source of the account code 100.40.1100.113.5.00000, of Add 1 Science position currently open. (3 teachers currently), of the eleven behavioural-support removals at $42,500 each, of the three $91,696 social-worker posts and the $110,534 reading specialist. Used for flags 4, 5, 8 and 12.
Claremont School District Budget Presentation UPDATE 1.3.24 district document. Its first line reads “Claremont School Board Finance Sub-Committee Meeting January 3, 2024”, although 3 January was the board’s statutory budget hearing, not a Finance Committee meeting; reported, not repaired — the four FY25 budget priorities with their rationales and estimated impacts, including ESTIMATED ADDITIONAL IMPACT TO THE BUDGET: $189,209.00 FY 25 for the re-opened paraprofessional contract, and the CMS schedule-change slides.
Updated Claremont School District Budget 12.20.23 district document; 55 pages of account detail, filed in the 20 December board packet and again in the 3 January hearing packet — “the 1220” the committee reads from throughout, and the only line-level budget document of this season in any public share.
Exhibit E — Claremont Summary Page 1-10-24 and Exhibit D — Claremont FY25 Proposed Budget Updated 1-10-24 Finance Committee district documents, uploaded to the 17 January 2024 board packet on 16 January — the budget the board adopted, dated five days after this meeting and attributed in its own file name to this committee. Source of $36,117,406.87, 3.55 per cent, the restated FY24 column, and the eight line movements that sum to $196,001.10. The load-bearing evidence for flag 2 and flag 3.
Approved Claremont School Board minutes: 20 December 2023 (source of “Subcommittee meetings and minutes are available online for people to review” and of the monthly financial report “Removed for the sake of time”), 3 January 2024 (source of Crawford’s absence, of the five requests the board made of this committee, and of “Mary Henry will amend and reallocate the ‘board voted expense reductions for FY24’ item for Friday”), and 17 January 2024 (source of the adopted figure, of “added positions (elementary social worker and instructional coach)”, of “all meetings are viewable on CCTV”, and of the 24 January working session at Dow). All three are district documents. Sentences quoted from them are attributed to them in the text and are not speech from any recording.
Companion recordings in the same FY2025 budget sequence: Finance Committee, 30 November 2023; 1 December; 6 December; 13 December; 18 December; the board meeting of 20 December; the budget hearing of 3 January 2024; and the board meeting of 17 January 2024. There is no recording of any kind between this meeting and 11 January 2024.
Companion pages in this archive: Finance Committee, 18 December 2023 — where the $688,426.17 and the “1218 budget” are opened and left unresolved; Claremont School Board, 20 December 2023 — where the budget was moved to hearing; FY25 Budget Public Hearing, 3 January 2024 — the statutory hearing two days before this meeting; SAU 6 Board, 11 January 2024; and Claremont School Board, 17 January 2024 — where the budget was adopted.

Project files

Relative links work when this page is opened from Output/HTML/.

Output/Dialogue/15510 SchoolBoardFinance010524.mp4.CSV — speaker-attributed dialogue, 1,131 rows and 16,834 words. Every quotation and every timestamp on this page comes from it unless the sentence says otherwise.
Input/Transcripts/15510 SchoolBoardFinance010524.mp4.json — diarized transcript with per-word confidences.
Input/Videos/15510 SchoolBoardFinance010524.mp4 — local copy of the recording.
Input/SupportingDocuments/MAP.md — meeting-to-documents map, section 37, which records the negative findings above and the date they were verified.
Output/Dialogue/15505 SchoolBoard010324.mp4.CSV — the 3 January 2024 budget hearing, 544 rows: source of the alternative-support-programme question, of the elementary-coach request, and of the behavioural-specialist removals as they were put to the public.
Output/Dialogue/15451 SchoolBoardFinance121823.mp4.CSV — the 18 December 2023 session, 1,466 rows: where the $688,426.17 and the “1218 budget” originate.
Output/Dialogue/15483 SchoolBoard122023.mp4.CSV — the 20 December 2023 board meeting, 334 rows: source of the $36,313,407.97 motion.
Output/Dialogue/15531 SchoolBoard011724.mp4.CSV — the 17 January 2024 board meeting, 787 rows: source of the $36,117,406.87 motion and of the finance subcommittee’s report to the board.
Output/Dialogue/15523 SAU6011124.mp4.CSV — the SAU 6 meeting of 11 January 2024, 78 rows: the record of the superintendent’s termination, at which he is not present.

Laws and rules cited on this page

New Hampshire statutes and rules, cited in the text in force on 5 January 2024. 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 32:5 as codified in 2023 — budget preparation and public hearing. ¶I: at least one public hearing not later than 25 days before the annual meeting, 7 days’ notice, “and after the conclusion of public testimony shall finalize the budget to be submitted to the legislative body”. ¶II: “All purposes and amounts of appropriations to be included in the budget or special warrant articles shall be disclosed or discussed at the final hearing”, and no later insertion of an undisclosed amount or purpose without a supplemental hearing. ¶III: appropriations stipulated on a “gross” basis showing anticipated revenues from all sources. ¶IV: comparative columns — prior-year appropriations, and actual expenditures for the most recently completed fiscal year where the annual meeting precedes the fiscal-year close. ¶V: purposes of appropriation appearing as special warrant articles. Amended by 2025, 144:1, eff. 30 August 2025; the paragraphs relied on here are identical in the 2023 codification and in the text served today. Correction carried forward: pages built earlier in this run cite gross basis as ¶IV and the comparative columns as ¶V. Both are off by one; the correct citations are ¶III and ¶IV.
RSA 91-A:2 as codified in 2023 — ¶I, the definition of “meeting” (a quorum convened to discuss or act upon a matter within the body’s jurisdiction) and its four exclusions: (a) collective-bargaining strategy or negotiations, (b) consultation with legal counsel, (c) a caucus of elected members of the same political party, (d) circulation of draft documents formalising decisions previously made in a meeting; ¶II, meetings open to the public, 24 hours’ notice, minutes recording members present, persons appearing, subject matter, decisions and the movers and seconders of motions, open to inspection within 5 business days. This is the post-2023, 188:1 text, effective 3 October 2023 — the right vintage for a January 2024 meeting. The mover/seconder clause is older, from 2018, 244:1, eff. 1 January 2019. The 2025, 112:1 additions (start time, end time, minutes-producer) apply only from 22 August 2025 and are not relied on.
RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d) — “public body” includes any committee, subcommittee or subordinate body of a school district or school administrative unit unamended since 2008, 354:1. The section runs paragraphs I–VI only and contains no definition of “meeting”; that definition is at RSA 91-A:2, I.
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:4, I as codified in 2023 — right of any person to inspect governmental records later amended by 2024, 49:1–2, eff. 13 August 2024, after this meeting; paragraph I’s inspection right long predates it. Cited only to note that no request is recorded as made or refused.
RSA 671:30 — every school district without a special statute “shall use the non-partisan ballot system for the election of district officers” 1979, 321:1, eff. 21 August 1979; never amended. This is what forecloses the RSA 91-A:2, I(c) party-caucus exclusion for a New Hampshire school board and its subcommittees.
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 194-C:9 as codified in 2023 — the SAU budget and its apportionment, half on average daily membership and half on equalized valuation cited only to explain the SAU-services line the committee asks about at 1:41:12. The 2023 codification runs to ¶III; ¶IV (alternative apportionment) was added by 2024, 329:1, eff. 1 October 2024 and does not apply here.
RSA 21-J:19 — audits of political subdivisions by independent public accountants cited for the holding only; the section imposes no deadline of its own, so a reconciliation still in progress is a control question, not a missed statutory date
RSA 197:23-a — the district treasurer’s custody of district money and independent books of account context only; no treasurer conduct is in question
RSA 273-A:3 — obligation to negotiate in good faith; RSA ch. 273-A — public employee labor relations context for the letter-of-agreement and paraprofessional-contract discussion; no conduct is in question
RSA 186-C:1 — state policy on the education of children with disabilities context only

Federal:

34 CFR 300.101 — FAPE must be available to all children residing in the State between the ages of 3 and 21, inclusive quoted in the regulation’s own words, not the paraphrase that circulates; context only, no federal finding is made
20 U.S.C. §1225(b) — Tydings Amendment: federal education formula funds remain available for obligation one additional fiscal year the mechanism behind the ESSER sunset that shapes this budget year; ARP ESSER obligations closed 30 September 2024
2 CFR 200.303 — non-federal entities must maintain effective internal control over federal awards cited because the misallocated $688,426.17 consisted largely of grant-funded salaries. Vintage caution: the 2024 Uniform Guidance revision reworded 2 CFR 200.302(b) and moved the 120-day liquidation rule from 200.344(b) to (c); for a January 2024 meeting the 2023 annual edition is the governing text.

Provisions deliberately not cited, 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”, whether it reaches a subcommittee is unsettled, and no member of the public attended or was turned away. RSA 91-A:3 (nonpublic sessions) is not cited because no nonpublic session was held, moved or mentioned. RSA 91-A:2, III (remote participation) is not applied to the special-education director, who is staff and not a member of this body. RSA 32:10 (transfers between appropriations) is not cited because no transfer of an adopted appropriation is in question — every figure here is a proposal for a year not yet begun. RSA 198:40-a and the adequacy formula are not cited because no adequacy figure is discussed. No Ed 306 minimum-standard rule is cited: the staffing ratios the committee discusses are the district’s own service levels, and the rule numbering in force on this date (Ed 306.15, “Provision of Staff and Staff Qualifications”) was renumbered in the readoption effective 13 December 2024, so any citation would need the pre-readoption text.