Participants
Everyone in the record. Attendance and the spelling of every board name come from the district’s approved minutes of 20 November 2024; roles come from the agenda masthead and from the subcommittee list on the agenda itself. Segment and word counts are from the dialogue file, which holds 346 rows and 8,738 words. Not one board member’s name is spoken aloud in this recording except in the chair’s recognitions, so every attribution below rests on a chair recognition, a third-party naming, or the finance meeting recorded the night before; where none of those exists, no name is printed.
| Name | Role | Participation |
|---|
| Chris Pratt | Superintendent of Schools, SAU 6 | 49 segments, 2,525 words, 28.9 per cent — the largest share of the evening. He reads the November superintendent’s report school by school from 0:02:03 to 0:09:22, gives the grant update from 0:34:34, and closes the meeting with an appeal for the strategic-plan roll-out the following night: “it’s really tough to know where you’re going and how you’re going to get there. And now we have that vehicle.” (0:54:58) He is titled Superintendent throughout; the word interim appears nowhere in this file. |
| Mike Koski | Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum, Instruction, Innovation and Assessment | 62 segments, 2,052 words, 23.5 per cent. He presents the instructional-coaching update alone from 0:13:33 to 0:34:08, naming all three coaches and their caseloads, and answers every question on it. He brings the keyboard disposal (0:37:21) — the only mention of ESSER anywhere on this recording. And he is the one person in the room who read the consent agenda closely enough to catch that it approved the wrong October minutes (0:50:24), fifty minutes after the board had approved it. His stated reason is worth keeping: “I’m only being nitpicky because I have to send this set of minutes to the state for a report.” |
| Heather Whitney | Chair, Claremont School Board — presiding; one of three named negotiators on the SREA agreement | 81 segments, 1,749 words, 20.0 per cent. She calls the meeting to order (0:00:05), asks the clerk for the attendance roll and for both nonpublic roll calls by name, runs the consent agenda, declares the citizens’ comment period closed with nobody in it, reorders the agenda around the absent attorney, and puts and declares the evening’s only recorded vote. She explains the SREA settlement herself from 0:45:09. No name is spoken for her anywhere in this recording; the dialogue file identifies her by elimination inside the file and by the finance meeting recorded the previous night, where the vice chair introduces her on camera. She also announces on the record why she will be looking at her phone (0:12:46). |
| Frank Sprague | Vice chair; chair, Finance Subcommittee; chair of the superintendent-evaluation subcommittee; SREA negotiator | 41 segments, 789 words, 9.0 per cent. He gives the only account anywhere of the Finance Subcommittee meeting of 19 November (0:39:14 onward) — who was in the room, what was asked for, and that “It’s televised. It was televised. So if anyone wants to watch it, they can.” He reports the superintendent-evaluation meeting held that same day (0:44:04), seconds the ratification motion (0:52:31), and adds the distinction between mentoring an experienced hire and a new one (0:47:12). He is the only member who says anything at all about a subcommittee other than Capital Improvement. |
| Candace Crawford | Member; chair, Capital Improvement Committee; chair, SRVRTC Visioning subcommittee; Finance Subcommittee | 34 segments, 599 words, 6.9 per cent. She reports that the Capital Improvement Committee is still “working on scheduling” (0:38:30) and that the superintendent gave her a spreadsheet of capital issues that same day (0:38:46). She asks the one contract question that reaches beyond the settlement itself — whether its language is flexible enough to survive a change of health-insurance carrier after a 15 per cent increase (0:48:13). She makes the motion to ratify (0:52:23, corrected to “Ratify the contract negotiated by the team.” at 0:52:27) and moves to adjourn (0:52:54). |
| Bonnie Miles | Member; SRVRTC Committee — her last full autumn on the board | 25 segments, 422 words, 4.8 per cent. Her veterans’-card account is the only citizen-facing item of the evening that came from a board member rather than the administration (0:09:46 onward), and she says in it “perhaps next year, even if I’m not here, I think I would like to see that happen again.” (0:10:34) She moves the board out of nonpublic session, and the recognizer renders her own surname at the end of it: “We come out of nonpublic smiles.” (0:12:29) She moves to adjourn (0:56:34) and says of the strategic-plan roll-out she will miss, “I have another community service spot. You can bet you I’m going to watch this.” (0:56:17) |
| Arlene Hawkins | Member; Curriculum Committee representative; chair of the SAU 6 joint board; the board’s bargaining representative for the administrators’ unit | 16 segments, 227 words, 2.6 per cent. She presses the coaching data hardest — whether the meetings are evenly distributed across grades (0:18:18), why the vacant coaching post sits at the elementary level (0:32:14), and what proportion of the elementary coach’s time is coaching rather than curriculum (0:33:50). She asks whether the State must pass the federal grant through if the federal government awards it (0:36:52). The approved minutes name her as the seconder of the motion into nonpublic session; the recording leaves that voice unidentified and this page reports both. |
| Michael Petrin | Member; chair, Ad Hoc Communications Committee; SRVRTC Committee | 8 segments, 162 words, 1.9 per cent — and he moves the nonpublic session (0:11:36) and seconds the motion out of it (0:12:32). His one line of questioning is the sharpest of the evening: that the teachers who do not seek coaching may be the ones who need it, and whether there will ever be a point at which coaching is assigned (0:22:38). He dates himself into the record — “I wasn’t here and this was put in place” (0:21:45) — which fits only a member who was off the board in the year the two coaching posts were created. |
| Mary Henry | Business Administrator, Claremont School District and SAU 6 | 7 segments, 92 words, 1.1 per cent — and every one of them is about a budget the board has not yet seen. Asked when a hard budget will arrive: “That’s my job for tomorrow.” (0:40:32), “Have it before your next meeting.” (0:40:36), “Hopefully we’ll get out over Thanksgiving. Okay. Is the plan. Okay.” (0:40:40) She answers the insurance questions as the plan administrator (0:49:16). There is no finance item on this agenda and no reference to the FY24 close, five weeks after the board voted to retain up to $350,000 of it. |
| Matt Upton | School district attorney, Drummond Woodsum — the agenda names him as the presenter of the item the board disposed of without him | 2 segments, 32 words, 0.4 per cent. He joins by Zoom at 0:53:24, nine minutes after the board ratified the agreement he negotiated, and says: “I think it’s a really fair contract. And I think it accomplished a lot that we wanted to, to achieve. And I hope it was approved by the board.” The chair answers “We’ve done it without you. We don’t need you anymore.” (0:53:16) The whole evening’s running order was rearranged around his arrival and then abandoned. |
| Noelle Kronberg | School Board Clerk — present | Zero attributed rows. She reads the attendance roll at the chair’s request (0:00:31) and both nonpublic roll calls (0:11:45, 0:12:36), and she signs the minutes. None of her spoken names is transcribed anywhere in this file, so no roll-call answer can be tied to a member and no tally is recoverable from the recording. She is the same clerk who read the roll, took both roll-call votes and signed the minutes at the unrecorded Claremont meeting of 14 November. |
| Whitney Skillen | Member; chair, Policy Subcommittee; named by the chair as one of three SREA negotiators — absent | Zero rows. The approved minutes list her as the only absentee. She is absent from the vote ratifying the agreement she helped negotiate — the chair names the team as “Mr. Sprague, myself and Miss Gillan” (0:45:09), the recognizer’s standing rendering of her surname. Her Policy Subcommittee is called in the minutes as a heading with nothing beneath it. Note the collision this file makes constantly: the surname Whitney is the chair; the given name Whitney is Skillen. |
| Miles Sheehan and Lilly Clark | Student Board Members, Stevens High School — both on the agenda and minutes masthead | Zero rows, and no roll entry either way. Both are named on the masthead of the agenda and of the minutes. The agenda carries no student report item — the item that existed on 2 October and 16 October is gone — and the minutes record neither student as present nor as absent. By-law 2.16 gives student members “all the rights of a regular school board member regarding school board business except the right to vote”, and RSA 194:23-f, IV(a) makes attending board meetings one of their duties (flag 13). |
| Unidentified | Six residue fragments, one seconder and three roll-call answers | 14 segments, 44 words, 0.5 per cent — the lowest unattributed share this project has recorded on any Claremont board page. The substantive one is the second on the motion into nonpublic session (0:11:43): “I’ll second.” The chair never names the seconder, the cluster carries more than one woman, and the recording therefore cannot supply the name. The approved minutes say Arlene Hawkins. The rest are two-word crumbs inside crosstalk, one voice supplying the word Teal while the superintendent gropes for it (0:06:23), and one voice prompting the mover to say “To ratify that.” (0:52:26) — a function that belongs to the chair or the clerk, not to the officer in whose cluster it landed. |
| Multiple | The room | 7 segments, 45 words, 0.5 per cent — the Pledge of Allegiance, the attendance roll, both nonpublic roll calls and the voice vote on ratification, each captured as one undivided segment. Every vote of the evening is therefore uncountable from the recording alone; the minutes supply “all present voting in favor” and no numbers. |
| Michael McCosker, Jeff Small, Patrick O’Hearn | Director of Student Services; Director of Technology; Human Resource Director | Zero rows each. All three are on the agenda masthead and all three appear in the November superintendent’s report — McCosker’s student-services section, O’Hearn’s human-resources section naming the new HR coordinator starting 2 December. None speaks on this recording. |
| The public | — | Nobody. The chair: “Our next item is citizens comment. Seeing no citizens to comment.” (0:01:48) The whole period occupies one clause of one sentence. No written comment is recorded, and no member of the public is named anywhere in the packet. |
Agenda
An official agenda was posted and is in the packet: CSB Agenda 11.20.24 (3) (1).pdf, last modified 18 November and posted to the district’s public share the same day — two days before the meeting, where by-law 2.09 asks for items and backup fourteen days ahead. Its file name carries two rounds of revision, and the chair confirms it on the record: “This agenda was, modified multiple times, so the number did not get there.” It names one exhibit, A, and the packet does not contain it. Times in the left column are the agenda’s own; the links go to the moment the item was actually reached. Timestamps link to the same moment in the Cablecast recording.
| Taken up | Item | Agenda text / disposition |
|---|
6:30 p.m.
0:00:05 | I. Call to Order and Pledge of Allegiance | Agenda: “I. 6:30 PM Call to Order and Pledge of Allegiance”. On tape: “I’d like to call to order the November 20th, 2024 meeting of the Claremont School Board. All in attendance. Please rise and join me in the pleasant Regency.” the pleasant Regency is the Pledge of Allegiance; the Pledge follows in one merged segment at 0:00:16 The minutes record no time for this. |
6:35 p.m.
0:00:31 | II. General Business — Secretary Roll Call of Attendance | Agenda: “Secretary Roll Call of Attendance of Board Members (Board Members who arrive after the meeting begins will be noted as ‘present’ at the point in the agenda at which they arrive)”. On tape: “This. Would you please call? Roll call for attendance. Here.” then the answers, merged: “Here, here and here. Right here.” By-law 2.05 asks the chair to commence at the hour appointed and the clerk to call the roll; both happened. Minutes: “Present: Candace Crawford, Arlene Hawkins, Bonnie Miles, Michael Petrin, Frank Sprague, Heather Whitney”; “Absent: Whitney Skillen”. Neither student board member appears in the roll either way. |
| 0:00:44 | II.a Consent Agenda (vote required) — 1. Amendments and Final Approval of board agenda; 2. Minutes Approval, 10.2.24 and 11.14.24 | Agenda, in full: “a. Consent Agenda (vote required) 1. Amendments and Final Approval of board agenda 2. Minutes Approval- 10.2.24 & 11.14.24”. On tape the chair reads it as “minutes approval from the meetings of 10 to 24 and 11, 1424”, flags the reordering, and asks “Do we have any objections to the consent agenda or the modification of the order of the items?” A member interrupts with “Still have a non public meeting?” (0:01:45) and the chair answers We do. Then: “Yes, ma’am. Thank you. Okay. Seeing no opposition. We’re going to accept the items on the consent agenda.” No motion, no seconder, no vote — and the item is headed vote required. By-law 2.10 authorises exactly this by consent; the agenda’s own heading has contradicted it all year. Elapsed: sixty-four seconds, disposing of two sets of minutes, one of them for a meeting that has no other public record at all (flag 1). |
| 0:01:48 | II.b Citizens Comments — reference CSB Policy BEDH | Agenda: “b. Citizens Comments-Please reference CSB Policy BEDH- Public Comment & Participation at Board Meetings.” On tape, in full: “Our next item is citizens comment. Seeing no citizens to comment. We will move forward to this superintendents report.” The minutes print the heading with nothing beneath it. Nobody was turned away and nobody asked to speak; on RSA 189:74’s thirty minutes this page follows the same reading as the rest of the corpus — the text does not settle whether the thirty minutes is a floor on the opportunity or on elapsed time, and no violation is asserted where nobody was refused. |
6:40 p.m.
0:02:03 | III. Superintendent’s Report | Agenda: “III. 6:40 PM Superintendent’s Report” — no exhibit letter, though the report is in the packet this time, a forty-page document uploaded on 14 November. Pratt reads a school-by-school summary from 0:02:03 to 0:09:22, then Bonnie Miles’s veterans-cards item runs to 0:11:16. Minutes: “Superintendent Pratt shared happenings from each of the school sites … (all from the beginning of the month and available on the website)”. |
7:00 p.m.
0:11:16 | IV.1 Non-Public Meeting Session RSA 91-A: 3 (a) | Agenda: “1. Non-Public Meeting Session RSA 91-A: 3” followed by the full text of the exemption — “(a) The dismissal, promotion, or compensation of any public employee or the disciplining of such employee, or the investigation of any charges against him or her, unless the employee affected (1) has a right to a meeting and (2) requests that the meeting be open, in which case the request shall be granted.” The paragraph number is missing from the agenda heading and from both motions (flag 5). On tape the chair opens it as “a nonpublic session for RSA 91-8 colon three, item a” and Petrin moves “Make a motion to go into nonpublic prayer. RSA nine one. Dash a colon three.” 91-8 and nonpublic prayer are 91-A and nonpublic per Roll calls in and out; return at 0:12:26. Minutes: “No need to seal the minutes” (flag 2). |
| 0:12:46 | IV.3 Update on Utilization of Instructional Coaches in District (Discussion) — taken second, out of order | Agenda: “3. Update on Utilization of Instructional Coaches in District (Discussion) Chris Pratt, Superintendent” — no exhibit letter, and the presenter named is not the one who presents. The chair: “we’re just going to skip over item two to the update of utilization of instructional coaches within the district.” Assistant Superintendent Koski presents from 0:13:33 to 0:34:08 against a five-slide document, Instructional Coaching Impact Nov. 24.pdf, which reached the public share at about 2:17 that afternoon — four hours before the meeting, and unnamed on the agenda. Twenty-one minutes, the longest item of the evening. |
| 0:34:23 | IV.4 Grant Award to Improve Social Outreach and Services (Discussion) | Agenda: “4. Grant Award to Improve Social Outreach and Services (Discussion)”. Pratt: a four- or five-year federal award of “about at $115,000” a year, passing through the State, to fund a project coordinator, more social workers and paid community partners — and not yet released: “we’re still waiting to see if they’re going to if the feds are taken back that grant.” (0:34:59) Runs to 0:37:08. Minutes: “Due to political situations, they are still waiting to see if they will actually receive the grant or not”. |
| 0:37:08 | IV.4 (second half) Instrument Disposal (Discussion/Vote) — Maple Ave Elementary Clavinova | Agenda, run together under the same number 4: “Instrument Disposal (Discussion/Vote) Mike Koski, Assistant Superintendent Maple Ave Elementary Clavinova (electronic keyboard)Chistopher Pratt, Superintendent” — two presenters, a missing space, and a misspelt Chistopher. The chair on the record: “Item for a which is not there. This agenda was, modified multiple times, so the number did not get there.” Koski: the keyboard “no longer has replacement parts produced for it, and we’ve replaced it with Esser funds.” An item noticed as a vote was disposed of by absence of objection — “We can easily do this as consent” (0:37:53), then “Dispose away.” (0:38:04) Minutes: “Consent agreement” (flag 11). |
| 0:38:18 | IV.5 Sub-Committees (Discussion) — six listed, two report | Agenda: “5. Sub-Committees (Discussion) Reports by subcommittee chairs if available, consider topics board would like referred to committee for investigation or review”, listing (a) Capital Improvement, (b) Finance, (c) Policy, (d) Curriculum, (e) SRVRTC and (f) Ad Hoc Communications. (a) reports that it is still scheduling; (b) reports the 19 November budget meeting; (f) is taken by the vice chair, not by the member the agenda names as its chair. (c), (d) and (e) are never called — the chair says “Policy committee, you know, curriculum committee. Now, I think that’s essentially it.” (0:43:53) and the minutes print all three as headings with nothing beneath them (flag 8). |
| 0:44:52 | IV.2 SREA Contract Ratification (Discussion and Vote) (Exhibit A) — taken last | Agenda: “2. SREA Contract Ratification (Discussion and Vote) (Exhibit A) Matt Upton, Esq. SAU 6”. There is no Exhibit A in the packet (flag 3), and the attorney the agenda names as presenter arrives nine minutes after the vote. The chair opens it to fill time — “I think while we’re waiting for Mr. Upton. So I just don’t have a lot of dead air.” — and then explains the settlement herself from 0:45:09. Motion by Crawford, second by Sprague, voice vote at 0:52:35, no count announced. Chair: “The agreement between the SRE and Claremont School Board, documented October 30th, 2024, has been ratified.” |
| 8:20 p.m. | V. Other Business | Agenda: “V. 8:20 PM Other Business” with no bullet beneath it. Never reached aloud; the minutes print the heading with nothing under it. |
8:25 p.m.
0:52:56 | VI. Future Dates / Future Agenda Items | Agenda: “a) Claremont Board Meeting 12.4.24 b) Claremont Board meeting- 12.18.24 c) Finance Subcommittee Budget Meeting dates: 1-3 PM at SRVRTC John Goodrich Community Room. i) December 4, 2024 ii) December 18, 2024 d) Claremont School Board FY26 Proposed Budget Public Hearing- 1/2/2025 e) Claremont School Board Deliberative Session- Saturday, February 1, 2025. Snow Date: Saturday, February 8, 2025”. On tape the chair gives it as “December 4th, followed by December 8th. We’re having our finance meeting.” This project’s corpus holds finance recordings for 13 and 18 December, not 4 December (flag 15). The strategic-plan roll-out of 21 November, which occupies the last four minutes of the meeting, is not on the agenda at all and appears in the minutes as future date (a). |
8:30 p.m.
0:56:31 | VII. Adjournment | On tape, in full: “If there’s no objection, I’d like to adjourn.” then “Motion to adjourn.” from Bonnie Miles and “Being no objection. Oh.” from the chair — a motion and a disposal by absence of objection colliding in the same three seconds. Minutes: “Consent adjournment at 7:41pm”, forty-nine minutes before the noticed close. By-law 2.07 permits the chair to dispose of a matter on the absence of objection and lists to adjourn among the motions in order. |
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 the text and the link cannot disagree. Timestamps link to the same moment in the Cablecast recording. They are positions in the recording, not clock times: about fourteen and a half minutes of the meeting are not in the file, and everything after 0:12:24 sits that much later on the wall clock than its timestamp suggests (flag 9). Hover or focus a cell to expand it. Transcript quotations are reproduced exactly as the automatic transcription produced them; quotations from the agenda, the minutes, a packet document, the by-laws or a statute are labelled as such in the sentence that carries them.
| Time | Topic | What was said | Flags |
|---|
| 0:00:05 | The chair opens, and the recognizer garbles the Pledge | “I’d like to call to order the November 20th, 2024 meeting of the Claremont School Board. All in attendance. Please rise and join me in the pleasant Regency.” the pleasant Regency is the Pledge of Allegiance, which the room then recites in one merged segment Unlike the October meeting, the date is right. Neither the agenda nor the minutes record what time the gavel actually fell, which is what makes flag 9 necessary. | |
| 0:00:31 | The clerk reads the roll — and her names are not transcribed | “This. Would you please call? Roll call for attendance. Here.” and then, in one segment, “Here, here and here. Right here.” The clerk’s spoken names appear nowhere in the file, so no answer can be attached to a member and the recording alone cannot establish who was in the room. The minutes do it: six present, Whitney Skillen absent. Noelle Kronberg read the roll at the 16 October meeting, at the unrecorded Claremont meeting of 14 November, and here — three consecutive meetings of this board. | |
| 0:00:44 | The consent agenda, read aloud with the wrong October date in it | “Our first order of business is the consent agenda. It will be accepted or approved that discussion. Unless a motion is made to move a specific item to the regular agenda. The items on this evening’s consent agenda includes a final approval of the board agenda, and minutes approval from the meetings of 10 to 24 and 11, 1424. And just of note, our second item is the SRE contract ratification.” 10 to 24 is the agenda’s printed 10.2.24; 11, 1424 is 11.14.24; SRE is the SREA Two sets of minutes are named and neither is discussed. | HIGH |
| 0:01:18 | The evening is rearranged around an attorney who never arrives in time | “Mr. Upton is hoping to be able to zoom call in. He is unfortunately in a meeting. He could not leave. And he will text me when he is out. And at that time, I will have him zoom call in. So I’m not sure what order this will actually fall in. If that’s if everybody agrees, that’s okay. Do we have any objections to the consent agenda or the modification of the order of the items?” The reordering and the two sets of minutes are carried on the same absence of objection. | |
| 0:01:45 | A member interrupts the consent agenda to ask whether the nonpublic session is still on | “Still have a non public meeting?” — and the chair answers We do. (0:01:47) The dialogue file attributes this to Candace Crawford. It is the only question anyone asks about the consent agenda, and it is about something else. | |
| 0:01:48 | The consent agenda carries, and the citizens’ comment period opens and closes in one sentence | “Yes, ma’am. Thank you. Okay. Seeing no opposition. We’re going to accept the items on the consent agenda. Our next item is citizens comment. Seeing no citizens to comment. We will move forward to this superintendents report.” Sixty-four seconds have elapsed since the chair opened the consent agenda. In that time the board has approved its own agenda, the minutes of 16 October, and the minutes of a meeting that has no recording, no packet folder and no other public record of any kind. | HIGH |
| 0:03:35 | The superintendent’s report: a new HR coordinator, and a substitute pool still short | “Human resources, we welcome the an assistant for HR starting on December 2nd. Currently, the HR director is working on a a season requiring staff to update demographics and information. And we continue the substitute recruitment continues with a few on board this month.” a a season is ACA season, which is what the written report calls it The written report names the new appointee and her start date; this page does not reproduce a private individual’s employment history from it. | |
| 0:06:49 | Middle-school discipline — and a number that does not match the document | “And it’s under notable current attendance at the middle school is at 334. Discipline is a little on the high side. 26 out of school suspensions of OSS. 17 bullying. Harassment incidents investigated.” The written report in the packet says seven — “Bullying,Harassment, Physical- 7 investigated incidents”, of which “2 incidents found/5 unfounded incidents”. Enrolment 334 matches exactly. A single-digit transcription error is at least as likely as a misstatement; this page records the disagreement and asserts nothing about which is right He then adds the reading he wants the board to take: “this is just a higher level of accountability than in past years” (0:07:08). | OBSERVATION |
| 0:07:30 | Disnard becomes Does not, and the elementary numbers all check out against the report | “Does not 75% of students to achieve grade level reading? They reduced referrals for tidies and absences by 50%.” Does not is Disnard — the written report carries the school’s goal “By May 2025, 75% of all Disnard students will be at or above grade level in reading as measured by DIBELS” and its target of a 50 per cent reduction in tardies and unexcused absences. This is the most dangerous garble on the recording: it reads as a sentence about a failure The chair asks “Where is this CMS?” (0:07:54) and he answers with Disnard’s enrolment, 257 — the report’s figure exactly. Maple 263, Bluff 168, Unity 91 and Stevens 477 all match the report as well. | |
| 0:08:54 | The open counselling posts, read out and not taken up | “We still have mental health counselor elementary school counselors for Bluff and Maple.” (0:09:22) The written report is blunter: the mental-health counsellor post “remains open as our candidate rescinded their application”, the elementary counsellor post “remains open for Bluff and Maple”, and a self-contained classroom post “opened up due to a resignation”. No board member asks a question about any of them. Twenty-eight minutes later the chair reports that the budget meeting heard “a repeated echo of more social workers at the elementary school” (0:42:57). | |
| 0:09:46 | Veterans’ cards — the only item that came from a board member | “I do have something to mention. I spoke with Mr. Blue last week and asked him if I was going to go to all, all the elementary schools, but I said, could we have some veterans children make veterans cards and we can handsome out to the veterans.” Mr. Blue is Mark Blount, the Maple Avenue principal named in the superintendent’s report; handsome out is hand them out The cards went to a church veterans’ breakfast and to a veterans’ post. She then says “perhaps next year, even if I’m not here, I think I would like to see that happen again.” (0:10:34) The superintendent offers to make it district-wide (0:10:50). The minutes carry one line of it. | |
| 0:11:16 | Into nonpublic session, on a motion that names no paragraph | Chair: “Moving forward to our first discussion and action item. Our first item this evening as a nonpublic session for RSA 91-8 colon three, item a, a motion to.” Petrin: “Make a motion to go into nonpublic prayer. RSA nine one. Dash a colon three.” (0:11:36) An unidentified voice: “I’ll second.” (0:11:43) The chair asks the clerk for the roll call (0:11:45) and the answers come back in two merged segments. Neither the chair’s framing nor the motion states paragraph II, which is where every exemption in the section lives. The approved minutes reproduce the defect: “a motion to move into non-public under RSA 91-A:3(a)”. | MEDIUM |
| 0:12:24 | The seam — twenty-five seconds of recording holding about fifteen minutes of meeting | The segment at this timestamp runs twenty-five seconds and contains two words: “Yes yes.” The next voice is the assistant superintendent’s “I was going to say it’s hard.” and then the chair’s “To come out of nonpublic. Please.” (0:12:26) The largest gap between any two consecutive rows in this entire 346-row file is 0.84 seconds, so the audio is continuous across this point — and continuous audio plus a quarter of an hour of missing wall clock is a spliced broadcast, not a fifteen-minute closed session that finished in twenty-five seconds. Flag 9 shows the arithmetic that fixes the seam here. | OBSERVATION |
| 0:12:29 | Out of nonpublic, and the recognizer prints the mover’s own surname wrong | “I’ll make a motion. We come out of nonpublic smiles.” smiles is Miles — Bonnie Miles naming herself as she moves Petrin seconds: “Well, second.” (0:12:32) Chair: “Noel, would you please call? Roll call.” (0:12:36) Nothing is said on returning to public session about what happened in the closed one, and no motion to seal is put. The minutes supply five words: “No need to seal the minutes”. No minutes of the session itself exist anywhere. | HIGH |
| 0:12:46 | The chair tells the camera why she will be looking at her phone | “Just so people know, I’m just gonna be checking my phone to make sure that map. So I’m not being distracted or watching Netflix. Or shopping. Christmas shopping or Christmas shopping.” make sure that map is unrecoverable; the sense is that she is watching for the attorney’s text It is a small thing and it is the right instinct: a presiding officer explaining an otherwise unexplained behaviour to a broadcast audience. She then reorders the agenda on the record rather than silently. | POSITIVE |
| 0:13:33 | Instructional coaching: three coaches, one of them part-time, and 612 children assessed | “So we have an elementary coach, Katlyn McLaughlin, who is also our curriculum instructor and curriculum instruction and assessment. Director, curriculum director. She is working part time in K to five as a coach.” The packet document prints Catlin McLaughlin, the minutes print Cat McLaughlin, and this project’s records also carry Kat and Catlin — six renderings of one curriculum director in a year. This page prints none of them as settled The assessment: “it takes only about five minutes, but five, five minutes through 612 students adds up to a good amount of time.” (0:14:33) The packet document agrees: “Assessed 612 K-2 students with Title teachers on Math Concepts”. | |
| 0:23:12 | Asked whether coaching will ever be assigned, the assistant superintendent commits to publishing the data | Petrin asks whether “the people that don’t seek it out are the ones that need it” (0:22:38). The answer: “We won’t have us coaches assigned to people. There will be, I think, just a greater felt need for a coach. It will be as we collect data, it will become more and more obvious who’s performing well and who’s not. And and we will make that data public and and transparent.” The transcript reads We won’t have us coaches assigned; the minutes render the same answer as “it is more effective to work with teachers who are willing”. This page quotes the transcript as it stands and does not repair it A commitment to make individual-teacher performance data “public and transparent” is a significant statement and neither the minutes nor any later record in this corpus returns to it. | |
| 0:31:04 | The chair’s own objection: the part-timer carries the most children | “So my only concern or my, my, my Debbie Downer observation is that, our part time coach is servicing 612 kids, and our full time coaches are serving small, far fewer, kids or classrooms and teachers.” and “my fear is, is that our elementary school teachers tend to be the younger teachers and the newer teachers.” (0:31:31) Koski: “So it would be interesting to get that data. I’m not sure if that’s the case.” (0:31:42) The elementary post is still unfilled — “We also were not able to hire for that this year. We didn’t have any qualified applicants.” (0:22:22) — and the curriculum director covers it at a stated 0.6 / 0.4 split (0:33:57). | |
| 0:34:34 | A four-year federal grant, awarded by the State and not yet released | “I think we were one out of the 6 or 8 districts to get the federal grant that filters through the state in regards to, improving the social outreach and services for Sussex.” Sussex is SAU 6, the standing garble on this recording along with saw six, Siu six and C six Then the catch: “just recently we found out that with everything going on in the world of of politics, we’re still waiting to see if they’re going to if the feds are taken back that grant.” (0:34:59) Hawkins: “if the feds do award the grant, the state has to provide that money to us.” (0:36:52) — “The state’s already done their work. They’ve already identified who would get it and stuff. They’re just waiting for it to release.” (0:36:58) No award document, application or notice is in the packet and the granting agency is not identified: Crawford guesses “Department of Education?” (0:36:19) and Koski corrects it to “Have been health and human services.” (0:36:25) | |
| 0:37:21 | The only time ESSER is spoken all evening, and it is about a keyboard | “So we have a an old electronic keyboard at Maple that, no longer has replacement parts produced for it, and we’ve replaced it with Esser funds. So the new instrument is there. And we just need permission to dispose of it.” Five weeks earlier, on the 16 October recording, the Finance chair asked for the “final disposition of SR” — the recognizer’s rendering of ESSER — and was told the office was still assembling the numbers. He is in the room tonight, gives a subcommittee report, and does not ask again. Nobody does, at this meeting or at any later meeting in this corpus. The federal obligation deadline had passed on 30 September. | OBSERVATION |
| 0:37:53 | An item noticed as a vote is disposed of as a consent | “We can easily do this as consent if there is no one that would object to us disposing that, we will consider it okay to dispose. Is there any objections?” Hawkins: “No agreement. Agree.” (0:38:02) Chair: “Dispose away.” The agenda heads the item “(Discussion/Vote)”; the minutes record “Consent agreement”. Bonnie Miles asks the practical question afterwards — “do you need to get done the one to take its place?” (0:38:05) — and learns the replacement is already bought. | OBSERVATION |
| 0:39:14 | The Finance Subcommittee’s budget meeting of the night before, reported to the board and minuted nowhere | “We had our first meeting yesterday. And, so my teammates jump in if I miss anything, but we had a, we met right here and we had, all three elementary principals, the high school principal, the CTE director, high school principal, special ed and HR here. I miss anybody.” and then “It’s televised. It was televised. So if anyone wants to watch it, they can.” (0:39:36) That is true and it is not what the by-laws require. By-law 1.05(d): “Minutes must be recorded and available for public inspection on the SAU 6 website within 5 days of the meeting.” No minutes of the 19 November session exist in any district share (flag 8). | MEDIUM |
| 0:40:05 | The board has still not seen a budget, five weeks before the public hearing | Sprague: “We have not we’re hoping that we’ll be getting an actual hard budget soon.” Chair: “Yes, soon.” Business administrator: “That’s my job for tomorrow.” (0:40:32), “Have it before your next meeting.” (0:40:36), “Hopefully we’ll get out over Thanksgiving. Okay. Is the plan. Okay.” (0:40:40) The FY26 proposed-budget public hearing was noticed on this same agenda for 2 January 2025, and the deliberative session for 1 February. Sprague: “so we haven’t actually seen any,” (0:40:43) | |
| 0:41:04 | What the budget meeting actually produced: social workers, full-time substitutes, and line-item scrutiny | Crawford: “I thought it was really helpful for all the administrators to be at the room and, and just have a just a shared conversation about the budget.” and the detail that they stayed after presenting. The chair: “There was a repeated echo of more social workers at the elementary school.” (0:42:57), “Full time substitutes, which may be a budget neutral move, but just codifying it in a full time position because we’re already paying for substitute teachers as it is.” (0:43:07) and, on line items, “the principles are really scrutinizing those line items and deciding whether or not they need the 500 here and the 600 here. Because pennies turn into dollars.” (0:43:31) This four-minute account is the only public record of that meeting’s substance in any district document. | MEDIUM |
| 0:43:53 | Three subcommittees are named and none is called | “Yes. So, it was very productive. So thank you for that. Policy committee, you know, curriculum committee. Now, I think that’s essentially it.” Policy, Curriculum and SRVRTC are on the agenda and none of the three is asked for a report. The minutes print all three as lettered headings with nothing beneath them. By-law 1.05(2) requires the Policy Committee to “hold at least one regular monthly meeting” and to “report to the full Board monthly”; its chair was absent tonight and nobody stood in. | MEDIUM |
| 0:44:04 | The vice chair reports a superintendent-evaluation meeting held that day | “Well, I’ll jump in on the ad hoc communication. Okay. Yeah, I’ve I’m going to be finishing that up. I as, some of you know, we met with Superintendent Pratt today to do his, Rocco and Roger from unity, and I met with Superintendent Pratt to go over his progress on his goals.” Rocco and Roger from unity is Rocco Ruggeri, the SAU 6 board’s vice chair from Unity; the minutes name him and no second Unity member The agenda names Mike Petrin as the chair of the Ad Hoc Communications Committee and the vice chair gives its report, as he did on 16 October. The evaluation meeting itself is a different body’s business reported into this one, and it has no notice or minutes in any share. | |
| 0:44:52 | The contract item is opened to fill time, with the attorney still absent and the document unpublished | “I think while we’re waiting for Mr. Upton. So I just don’t have a lot of dead air. Maybe we could do a little chatting about what changes were made in the contract or what we have to.” The agenda names this item’s presenter, its exhibit and its vote. The presenter is in another meeting, and the exhibit is not in the packet. The chair then gives the settlement herself. | HIGH |
| 0:45:09 | The settlement, as the chair describes it: duty pay, a 2.5 per cent COLA in each of two years, and paraprofessionals | “Yes, it’s been. Mr. Sprague, myself and Miss Gillan has been in concert with the administrative team negotiating with the Sri. There was some language cleanup within the contract just to make clarity. We’ve increased some additional duty pay, which was extremely outdated. Increasing extra day for about 20 to 40, an hour. Yeah.” Miss Gillan is Whitney Skillen, absent tonight; the Sri is the SREA; extra day is extra duty Then: “And the cola this year is going to be for this for 25 and 26 and 26 to 27. It’s two and a half. Two and a half.” (0:45:45) And the board’s stated priority: the paraprofessionals “have been, in the board’s opinion, have not been compensated well” and recruitment has suffered (0:45:57). Every figure here is spoken and none is published. | HIGH |
| 0:47:12 | A distinction the district had never drawn before: mentoring an experienced hire versus a new teacher | “There’s there’s an experienced teacher that’s coming here and there’s an inexperienced teacher that’s coming. So one of the things that’s different is that, a an experienced person coming in will get a half of your half a year of mentoring, really to help them acclimate to, to the new building” and “So we did that. We never made that distinction before.” (0:47:51) This is a substantive change to the terms of employment of every new hire, described once, on camera, in a document the public cannot read. | |
| 0:48:13 | Health insurance is up 15 per cent and the contract names the carrier | Crawford: “I know that, a recent meeting, it was that the costs for health care has gone up 15%. And that. The administrative team is looking to see other options might be available. My question is, is the language in the current in this contract flexible enough to address any of the changes that we might consider?” The business administrator: “that’s that’s a hurdle. We might we’ll have to see what we can do. It’s up to them to not, you know, the union to see if they’re willing to do anything.” (0:48:54) The minutes are more precise than the recording: “Mary Henry noted that it does specifically say SchoolCare”. The board ratified a two-year agreement naming a specific carrier, minutes after being told the carrier may have to change. | HIGH |
| 0:50:24 | The assistant superintendent catches the wrong date on the consent agenda — fifty minutes after it carried | “If I can bring something up. There’s an error in the date of minutes that are being approved tonight. And I’m only being nitpicky because I have to send this set of minutes to the state for a report. So it says 10 to 2024, and it needs to think to be 1016. Is the packet that’s in the folder.” Asked where, he answers: “Right in the consent agenda.” (0:50:51), “First page.” (0:50:54) Sprague: “Good catch.” (0:50:55) And: “And again only making it over so closely because we have to submit it as evidence.” (0:51:01) The correction is recorded, no motion is made to reconsider, and the minutes carry the corrected date with a note. Nobody looks at the other half of the same line. | HIGH |
| 0:51:14 | The chair gives the clock — the sentence that locates the missing quarter of an hour | “I asked him if he’s available soon. At 719. He said in 15 minutes.” Seventeen recording-minutes earlier, at 0:34:15, she had said “Mr. Upton will be available in roughly 15 minutes.” If the recording ran unbroken from the noticed 6:30 start, that earlier remark falls just after seven o’clock, not at 7:19. If about fourteen and a half minutes are missing, it falls at 7:19 exactly — and the adjournment falls at 7:41, which is the time the minutes print. Flag 9 works it through. | OBSERVATION |
| 0:51:27 | The board decides it does not need its lawyer, and says so on the record | Chair: “I don’t I’m not 100% sure if we think it’s necessary unless, unless other unless people of the board would like to wait. Which, please don’t feel shy with saying yes. I don’t want to talk to Mr. Upton about this.” Crawford: “I think the two of you have done a good job explaining it to us.” (0:51:38) Sprague: “We can’t make changes.” (0:51:42), “Would that be a. Violation of the rules.” (0:51:45) Chair: “There’s not a lot of wiggle.” / “Room here.” (0:51:53) Petrin: “I do not have any questions. Further for that.” (0:52:15) Miles: “Yes, I read it this afternoon and I have no questions.” (0:52:18) Each member is asked individually and each declines to wait. That is the right procedure; the document they read that afternoon is still not public. | POSITIVE |
| 0:52:23 | The motion, corrected by a voice from the table, and carried without a count | Crawford: “So I’ll make the motion to accept the.” A voice supplies “To ratify that.” (0:52:26) and she restates it: “Ratify the contract negotiated by the team.” (0:52:27) Sprague: “I’ll second.” (0:52:31) Chair: “Any discussion.” / “All in favor, say aye.” (0:52:35) The ayes are one merged segment. “Any opposed? Seeing no opposition. The agreement between the SRE and Claremont School Board, documented October 30th, 2024, has been ratified.” (0:52:38) The minutes name mover and seconder, as RSA 91-A:2, II requires, and record “voice vote taken all present voting in favor” with no numbers. | |
| 0:53:24 | The attorney arrives nine minutes late for a vote already taken | “I think it’s a really fair contract. And I think it accomplished a lot that we wanted to, to achieve. And I hope it was approved by the board.” Miles: “It was. It was.” (0:53:31) The chair, before he speaks: “We’ve done it without you. We don’t need you anymore.” (0:53:16) The whole running order of the evening was rearranged around his arrival, and the item was taken without him anyway. | |
| 0:53:39 | The budget hearing, the deliberative session, and a plan to explain one with the other | “We’re having our budget proposed budget hearing on the 2nd of January. And just kind of keep in mind, I am hoping to somehow incorporate our strategic plan into some presentation before, we actually have our deliberative session, and I don’t know if we need to do it separately or if we can do it at the public hearing” and “to let the public know that what they’ve invested in is paying off.” (0:54:10) The superintendent follows with an appeal to watch the roll-out the next night (0:54:36 onward). Neither the strategic plan nor its roll-out is on this agenda, and the last four minutes of the meeting are given to it. | |
| 0:56:31 | Adjournment, by objection and by motion at the same time | Chair: “If there’s no objection, I’d like to adjourn.” Miles: “Motion to adjourn.” (0:56:34) Chair: “Being no objection. Oh.” Recording ends four seconds later. Minutes: “Consent adjournment at 7:41pm”. Candace Crawford had already offered a motion to adjourn thirty-six recording-seconds after the ratification vote (0:52:54) and the chair set it aside to give the future dates. | |
Items flagged for review
Flags are a reviewer’s aid, produced by reading the recording and the district’s six-document packet against the New Hampshire and federal law in force on 20 November 2024 and against the board’s own by-laws. Every statute was re-fetched in the codification that governed that date, and where a provision has since been amended the page says so and names the session law it is not applying. HIGH marks an unmitigated failure of a duty owed to the public; MEDIUM marks a defect the record itself mitigates or a rule breach with a lesser consequence; OBSERVATION records something a reader needs and no rule reaches; POSITIVE records something done well. A flag is not a legal conclusion, and nothing here is a finding of fact against any person.
HIGH The consent agenda approved, in sixty-four seconds and without discussion, the minutes of a meeting that has no recording, no packet folder, no notice and no minutes of its own closed session
What was approved. The agenda’s item II.a.2 reads “Minutes Approval- 10.2.24 & 11.14.24”. The chair read it aloud as “minutes approval from the meetings of 10 to 24 and 11, 1424” (0:00:44), asked for objections, heard none, and declared “We’re going to accept the items on the consent agenda” (0:01:48). The approved minutes record the disposal as “Consent approval”.
What the 14 November half of that line is. A Claremont School Board meeting held at 8:16 p.m. on Thursday 14 November 2024 at the Sugar River Valley Regional Technical Center. Its only surviving record is draft CSB Meeting Minutes 11.14.24.pdf, two pages, filed in this meeting’s packet folder. In full, its business was: call to order 8:16 p.m.; roll — Heather Whitney, Frank Sprague, Arlene Hawkins, Candace Crawford and Michael Petrin present, Bonnie Miles and Whitney Skillen absent; agenda approved by consent; a motion into nonpublic session by Whitney seconded by Sprague, roll call by the clerk, “Move into non-public at 8:19pm”; a motion out by the same pair, “Return to public meeting at 8:59pm”; and “Consent adjournment”. Forty minutes of a public body’s business, all of it behind a closed door.
What does not exist for it. No Cablecast recording — shows 16143 through 16154, the whole run between the SAU 6 meeting of that afternoon and the finance meeting of 19 November, were retrieved individually and are other programming, one of them carrying an event date of 14 November itself, so this was not an outage. No packet folder: the district’s 2024 packets share runs 7. CSB 11.6.24 straight to 8. CSB 11.20.24. No notice, and 14 November 2024 was a Thursday — not a first or third Wednesday, so this was a special meeting, and by-law 2.02 provides that special meetings may be held “whenever called by the chair, vice-hair, or the written request of three members of the CSB” and that “Except by 2/3rds vote of all members, only matters contained in the notice shall be considered”. No call and no notice appears anywhere. And no minutes of the nonpublic session, which is flag 2.
Two defects the approved document carries on its face. First, it misletters its own exemption. The motion is minuted as “under RSA 91-A: 3, II (a & d)”, and beneath it the document prints two texts lettered (a) and (b). The second reads “Consideration of the acquisition, sale, or lease of real or personal property” — which is subparagraph (d). Subparagraph (b) is “The hiring of any person as a public employee.” Second, the (a) text is paraphrased away from the statute: it reads “The dismissal, promotion,compensation, disciplining or investigation or changes of a public employee” where RSA 91-A:3, II(a) reads “the investigation of any charges”.
Why the consent agenda is the moment that matters. A draft set of minutes is a clerk’s document. Approval by the body is what makes it the district’s official account of a meeting under RSA 91-A:2, II and under by-law 4.03(a), which makes the clerk responsible to “Keep a complete, accurate record of all CSB proceedings”. On 20 November this board adopted, as its own permanent record, a document that misletters a statutory exemption and describes a closed session whose minutes had already been overdue for three days. Nobody read it aloud, nobody asked a question about it, and the one administrator who did read the consent agenda closely enough to find an error found the error in the other half of the same line (0:50:24).
Which limb of the severity rule. The unmitigated one, and expressly. A public body met and transacted business; the record of that business does not exist; nothing anywhere explains its absence; and the body itself put the incomplete record into permanent form without discussion. This is not the mitigated case of a body that lacked a quorum and transacted nothing — five members were present, two roll-call votes were taken, and forty minutes of business were done. It is graded the same way the 14 November SAU 6 page grades the underlying meeting, and deliberately so; that page finds the meeting, this one finds the act that made its record official.
The honest limit. This project cannot inspect the SAU 6 website as it stood in November 2024, and by-law 1.05(c) makes that site the destination for meeting notices. The correct statement is therefore no notice has been located and none is recoverable from here, not no notice was ever posted. The packet-folder negative rests on this project’s own browser enumeration recorded in Input/SupportingDocuments/MAP.md, not on a Drive search — a search of that share silently omits three folders the map records.
Sources: CSB Agenda 11.20.24, item II.a.2; approved minutes 11.20.24, item II.a; draft CSB Meeting Minutes 11.14.24; RSA 91-A:3, II(a), II(b), II(d); RSA 91-A:2, II; by-laws 2.02, 2.10, 4.03(a); the companion page SAU 6 Board — November 14, 2024, which establishes the meeting itself and the Cablecast enumeration.
HIGH Two nonpublic sessions in seven days, neither sealed, and no minutes of either exist anywhere — a duty the board’s own by-laws set out in a checklist
The rule. RSA 91-A:3, III: “Minutes of meetings in nonpublic session shall be kept and the record of all actions shall be promptly made available for public inspection”, and “Minutes and decisions reached in nonpublic session shall be publicly disclosed within 72 hours of the meeting” unless, “by recorded vote of 2/3 of the members present taken in public session”, the body determines that disclosure would harm a reputation, render a proposed action ineffective, or touch terrorism or emergency functions. Sealing is the exception; keeping minutes is not optional either way. Source note ends 2023, 189:1, eff. 3 October 2023, so the current text governs.
The two sessions. On 14 November the board sat in nonpublic session from 8:19 to 8:59 p.m. under “RSA 91-A: 3, II (a & d)”; its minutes record no motion to seal. On 20 November it went in on Petrin’s motion (0:11:36), came out on Miles’s (0:12:29), and the approved minutes record the disposal in five words: “No need to seal the minutes”. Neither session was sealed. The 72-hour clock therefore ran without qualification on both: from about 9 p.m. on Thursday 14 November, and from the return to public session on Wednesday 20 November.
What was searched, and how. The Claremont Meeting Minutes share was enumerated at its root on 2026-08-29: six children, the year folders 2023 through 2027 Meeting Minutes and one folder named Unsealed Minutes. That folder is precisely the destination these minutes belong in, and it holds three year folders — 2025 Non-Public, 2026 Non-Public and 2027 Non-Public. There is no 2024 folder, and the Unsealed Minutes folder itself was not created until 13 January 2025, seven weeks after this meeting. From 7 January 2025 onward this district does publish its unsealed nonpublic minutes there, file by file, dated by meeting. Nothing from 2024 is in it. The 2024 packets share and this meeting’s own packet folder were also read; neither holds a nonpublic minute of any kind.
The board’s own by-laws state the duty in terms it cannot have misunderstood. Appendix D, the appendix by-law 2.14 points members to, says: “The CSB are required, per policy BEDG, to record minutes of all non-public sessions. The law requires minutes of non-public sessions be made publicly available within 72 hours of the meeting, unless the CSB votes to seal the minutes of the non-public session.” It then sets out nine minimum contents, including “a brief description of all final decisions reached by the board” and “the manner in which each member voted with respect to each action”. Its compliance checklist repeats it at item (j): “Minutes of non-public sessions are made publicly available within 72 hours (unless the Board of School Committee votes to seal such records.)” The board declined to seal and produced nothing to disclose.
And the statute’s fallback does not help either. Where minutes are withheld, RSA 91-A:3, III requires that “a list of such minutes or decisions shall be kept and this list shall be made available as soon as practicable for public disclosure”. No such list exists in any Claremont share this project can reach. So on the board’s own account the minutes were not withheld and therefore had to be published; and if they were in fact withheld, the list that would record the withholding does not exist. There is no reading of the record on which the public gets anything.
Which limb of the severity rule. The unmitigated one. Two public bodies’ worth of closed business — forty minutes on 14 November and about fifteen on 20 November — produced no record available to anyone. Nobody on either recording says minutes exist elsewhere or are coming. The absence is not explained by a seal, because the board expressly declined to seal. The comparison that sharpens it: seven weeks later this same board began filing its unsealed nonpublic minutes in a folder built for the purpose, so the practice was available and was adopted — just not in time for these two.
The honest limit. Drive’s search interface under-reports on these shares badly enough that this project treats every negative drawn from it as provisional; a parentId query returns nothing at all for both the 2024 minutes year folder and this meeting’s own packet folder, whose six files are readable individually. The negatives above rest on folder-by-folder enumeration and on individual file reads, and are written as not found rather than does not exist.
Sources: RSA 91-A:3, I(b), II and III (2023, 189:1, eff. 3 Oct. 2023); approved minutes 11.20.24, item IV.1; draft minutes 11.14.24, item III; by-laws 2.14 and Appendix D; the Claremont Meeting Minutes share and its Unsealed Minutes subtree, both enumerated 2026-08-29; the companion pages SAU 6 — 14 November 2024 and 1 November 2023, which sets out the same list duty.
HIGH The board ratified a two-year collective bargaining agreement whose text is Exhibit A on its own agenda and is not in the public packet
What the agenda promised. Item IV.2 reads, in full: “2. SREA Contract Ratification (Discussion and Vote) (Exhibit A) Matt Upton, Esq. SAU 6”. The approved minutes repeat the label. The packet folder 8. CSB 11.20.24 holds six documents and none of them is an Exhibit A: the agenda, the November superintendent’s report, the instructional-coaching slides, and three sets of draft minutes. All six were read in full for this page.
What was in the document. Everything the public knows about it, it knows because the chair filled dead air with it while waiting for the attorney. A 2.5 per cent cost-of-living adjustment in each of two years, 2025–26 and 2026–27 (0:45:45); additional-duty pay raised from “about 20 to 40, an hour” (0:45:09); a raised mentor stipend, now split between experienced and inexperienced new hires (0:47:12); “some language cleanup”; and a named health-insurance carrier, which the minutes identify as SchoolCare where the recording does not. The agreement is dated: “The agreement between the SRE and Claremont School Board, documented October 30th, 2024, has been ratified.” (0:52:38)
The board’s own rules are explicit, and there are two of them. By-law 2.09 — the second rule of that number — provides: “Any and all presentations by the administration to the board or any committee shall be contained in the agenda and made available to the public in its original format online so the public may download or access the information prior to or during board meetings.” By-law 4.03(d) makes it a duty of the clerk, delegated to the executive assistant, to “Post online any and all agenda materials not-exempt from public dissemination by RSA 91-A in conjunction with the posting of any board or committee agendas.” A ratified collective bargaining agreement is not exempt from disclosure under RSA 91-A; it is the district’s binding contract, and members of the board had it — “Yes, I read it this afternoon and I have no questions.” (0:52:18)
Why it matters more here than it would elsewhere. This is a multi-year commitment of public money whose per-year cost nobody states aloud and no document discloses. The board was told during the same item that health-insurance costs had risen 15 per cent and that the agreement “does specifically say SchoolCare”; a reader cannot test either statement, cannot see the salary schedule the 2.5 per cent applies to, and cannot see the reopener language Crawford was asking about. RSA 91-A:4, I gives every citizen the right to inspect governmental records — a right that runs against a document, and a document nobody has published is a right nobody can exercise without asking. The section was amended by 2024, 49:1, 2, effective 13 August 2024, so the current text is the text in force here.
This is the second consecutive Claremont meeting at which the exhibit behind the only vote of the evening was missing from the packet. On 16 October the missing document was Exhibit B, the three sheets on which the board voted to retain up to $350,000 of the FY24 surplus. Five weeks later it is Exhibit A, the teachers’ agreement. In both cases the lettering on the agenda is the proof that the document was meant to be there.
Which limb of the severity rule. The unmitigated one. A document was noticed to the public as an exhibit, was the sole subject of the meeting’s only recorded vote, and is not in the district’s public share; nothing on the record explains its absence and no member asks for it to be published. The mitigation that would apply — somebody saying it is coming, or pointing to where it already sits — is absent.
The honest limit. A Drive title search for SREA and for Sugar River Education returns nothing, and that interface’s negatives are not safe. What this page can say is that the agreement is not in the packet folder the agenda points to, whose six files were each read; if it is published somewhere else in the district’s shares, this page has not found it.
Sources: CSB Agenda 11.20.24, item IV.2; approved minutes 11.20.24, item IV.2; packet folder 8. CSB 11.20.24; by-laws 2.09 (agenda itemisation) and 4.03(d); RSA 91-A:4; the companion page Claremont School Board — October 16, 2024.
MEDIUM The regular meeting the by-laws put on the first Wednesday of November did not happen, a packet folder was made for it, and no minutes of it were ever brought to this board — which settles a question the October page had to leave open
What was scheduled. By-law 2.01: “The regular meetings of the CSB shall be held on the first and third Wednesdays of the month.” The first Wednesday of November 2024 was 6 November, the day after the general election. The 16 October agenda’s future dates open “a) Claremont Board Meeting 11/6/2024”, and the Finance chair, on the 16 October recording, deferred the ESSER accounting to “hopefully next board meeting”. A packet folder named 7. CSB 11.6.24 exists in the district’s 2024 share and is recorded in this project’s map, so material was assembled for it.
What settles it, and it is this meeting. The October page could establish only that no recording existed and had to leave open whether the meeting was cancelled, moved to 14 November, or simply not held. The 14 November minutes close that question: they record a separate special meeting of the Claremont board, at 8:16 p.m. on a Thursday, whose entire business was a nonpublic session. It is not a rescheduled 6 November regular meeting — it has no superintendent’s report, no citizens’ comment, no subcommittee reports and no consent approval of any minutes. And this meeting’s consent agenda approves “10.16.24 & 11.14.24” and nothing else. No minutes of a 6 November meeting were ever created, never mind brought to the board. The sequence of approved Claremont minutes for the autumn runs 2 October, 16 October, 14 November, 20 November, with nothing between.
What does not exist. No recording — Cablecast 16140 and 16141 both carry an event date of 3 November 2024 and 16142 is the SAU 6 board of 14 November, with other programming on 1, 3 and 4 November, so the service was operating. No cancellation notice in any share. No mention of the meeting, its cancellation or its absence anywhere on this recording or in these minutes. Six people who would have been at it sat in this room fourteen days later and not one of them referred to it.
Which limb of the severity rule, and why this is MEDIUM where flag 1 is HIGH. The mitigated one. A gathering that did not convene is not a meeting under RSA 91-A:2, I, which defines one as the convening of a quorum, so no minutes were owed for 6 November and the missing-minutes duty in ¶II is not engaged. What is missing is a cancellation the public could see, and a line anywhere saying the board did not hold the regular meeting its own by-law requires. That is the same reasoning the 21 August page applied to the summer meeting that failed for want of a quorum, and it is graded the same way. The difference from flag 1 is exact: there, a body met, transacted forty minutes of business and produced no record of it; here, a body appears not to have met at all.
What would settle the remainder. The contents of the 7. CSB 11.6.24 folder, which the Drive interface will not return and which this project has only ever seen by name. If it holds an agenda, the meeting was noticed and then abandoned without a public cancellation; if it holds only a set of draft minutes for 16 October, it was a filing convenience. This is now the ninth 2024 Claremont-side session the public record cannot account for, after 29 January, 3 April, 1 May, 11 May, 22 May, the summer quorum failure, 7 August and 14 November.
Sources: by-law 2.01; CSB Agenda 10.16.24, future dates; approved minutes 11.20.24, item II.a; draft minutes 11.14.24; RSA 91-A:2, I and II; Input/SupportingDocuments/MAP.md; the companion pages 16 October 2024 and 21 August 2024.
MEDIUM Neither the agenda heading nor either motion into nonpublic session names the paragraph the exemption lives in — and paragraph I contains no exemptions at all
The rule. RSA 91-A:3, I(b): “Any motion to enter nonpublic session shall state on its face the specific exemption under paragraph II which is relied upon.” ¶I(a) provides that bodies “shall not meet in nonpublic session, except for one of the purposes set out in paragraph II”. Every exemption in the section is in ¶II. Paragraph I contains none.
What was said and what was written. The agenda heads the item “1. Non-Public Meeting Session RSA 91-A: 3” and then, under the letter (a) alone, prints the text of II(a) in full and correctly. The chair opened it as “a nonpublic session for RSA 91-8 colon three, item a” (0:11:16). The motion, in full: “Make a motion to go into nonpublic prayer. RSA nine one. Dash a colon three.” (0:11:36) — no paragraph and no subparagraph at all. The approved minutes render it as “a motion to move into non-public under RSA 91-A:3(a)”. Read literally, that citation points at a subparagraph of a paragraph that has none.
Why this is MEDIUM and not HIGH. The record mitigates it, and specifically. The agenda published, before the meeting, the whole operative text of the exemption relied on, quoted accurately from the statute; a reader of the packet knows exactly which ground was used. Both roll-call votes were taken in public session as ¶I(b) requires, and the minutes name the mover and the seconder of each, as RSA 91-A:2, II requires. What is defective is the citation, not the substance. Compare the 14 November minutes approved at this same meeting, which do give the paragraph — “RSA 91-A: 3, II (a & d)” — and then misletter one of the two subparagraphs beneath it.
It is a standing defect of this district’s paperwork, not a one-off. This project has tracked defective right-to-know citations in Claremont and SAU 6 documents since December 2023: a chapter 92-A that does not exist, cited on three SAU 6 agendas and repeated in two sets of SAU 6 minutes; the 7 August 2024 Claremont minutes citing “RSA 91-A:3, I & II (1)”; and the by-laws’ own Appendix D, which is flag 10.
Sources: RSA 91-A:3, I(a), I(b) and II; CSB Agenda 11.20.24, item IV.1; approved minutes 11.20.24, item IV.1; the dialogue file at the timestamps given.
MEDIUM The consent agenda made permanent a retention ceiling $2,335.57 above the one the business administrator gave the board, and left the FY24 close unreconciled in the official record
What the approved document says. The 16 October minutes carried tonight state, under item IV.3: “She shared that there is a surplus of $497,000, plus an additional $114,000 in additional revenue for a total of $611,000” and “The maximum that can be retained is $469,000”. Later in the same item: “Mary Henry explained that if the board retains the full $469,000 that it would result in a tax rate increase of about $120,000”.
What the business administrator actually gave the board. $466,664.43. The 16 October page establishes it from the recording. The published figure is $2,335.57 higher, and it is not a rounding: the same document twice contemplates the board taking “the full $469,000”, so the rounded number is the one the board was reasoning from. The figure is a statutory ceiling, not an estimate. RSA 198:4-b, II caps retained year-end unassigned general funds at 5 per cent of the current fiscal year’s net assessment under RSA 198:5. A published ceiling above the true one is a number a future board can act on.
What this page does not say. It does not say the board broke RSA 198:4-b. The board voted to retain up to $350,000, well inside either figure, and paragraph II states no purpose limitation. The public hearing that paragraph requires runs against expending retained funds, not against retaining them — “Prior to expending retained general funds, the school board shall hold a prior public hearing” — so no hearing was owed on 16 October and none is owed here. The cap was 2.5 per cent before 2020, 38:25, effective 27 September 2020, which raised it to 5; the current text governs.
Why the consent agenda is the point. On 16 October the wrong figure was a number in a draft. On 20 November it became the district’s official record of what the board was told, carried without discussion, on the same line as the date error the assistant superintendent caught fifty minutes later. He was reading the consent agenda closely because he had to send the minutes to the State as evidence. He found the wrong meeting date and not the wrong ceiling.
And the larger arithmetic is now fixed in the record unreconciled. On 18 September this board was told the FY24 balance was $544,145.29; the September packet gives a total encumbrance of $648,931.76 and the two roofs voted on 20 June come to $583,931.76. On 16 October it worked from $497,000. None of $544,145.29, $648,931.76 or $583,931.76 is spoken on 16 October or on 20 November, and the worksheet that would bridge them — Exhibit B — is in no packet. There is no finance item on tonight’s agenda, the business administrator’s seven segments are all about a budget not yet written, and the board approves the minutes and moves on.
Which limb of the severity rule. The mitigated one, expressly. The minutes exist, are complete on their face, were available to the public and to every member for four business days before approval, and the underlying vote was lawful. The defect is a wrong figure in an approved record and an unreconciled account — serious for a reader, but not the unmitigated absence of a record that flags 1 and 2 describe.
Sources: 10.16.24 DRAFT CSB meeting minutes, item IV.3, read in full; RSA 198:4-b, II and II(a) (2023 codification); RSA 198:5; the companion pages 16 October 2024 and 18 September 2024.
MEDIUM These minutes reached the public on the eighth business day, where the statute allows five — and the October minutes approved tonight took nineteen
The rule. RSA 91-A:2, II requires minutes recording the members present, the persons appearing, a brief description of the subject matter, decisions, and the names of members who made or seconded each motion, and provides that they “shall be open to public inspection not more than 5 business days after the public meeting”. The source note ends 2023, 188:1, effective 3 October 2023, so the current text governs. Not applied: the start-time, end-time and minutes-producer clauses added by 2025, 112:1, effective 22 August 2025.
The arithmetic. Under RSA 288:1, November 2024 carried three legal holidays: 5 November (biennial election day), 11 November and 28 November (Thanksgiving). Five business days from Wednesday 20 November is therefore Wednesday 27 November 2024. The draft, 11.20.24 DRAFT CSB meeting minutes.pdf, reached the district’s public share on 3 December 2024 — the eighth business day, three past the deadline. The approved copy reached the minutes share on 7 January 2025.
And the October minutes this board approved tonight were far later. Five business days from 16 October is 23 October. The draft carried in tonight’s packet reached the public share on 14 November 2024 — the nineteenth business day — and the approved copy on 22 November, the twenty-fifth. The 30 September joint minutes, also sitting in tonight’s packet, reached it on the thirtieth business day and were still unapproved on this date; they were approved after 4 December.
What this rests on, and its limit. These dates are Drive createdTime values, which measure when a document became visible in the district’s public share. That is not identical to the statute’s “open to public inspection”, which a district could in principle satisfy at the SAU office on request. This page reports the visibility date and says so. Two further checks were made: modifiedTime rescues nothing here — the 20 November draft’s modification time is two seconds before the moment it appeared, an upload artefact rather than evidence of authorship — and the two files are otherwise identical, so nothing was withheld pending revision.
A point in the district’s favour, recorded because it is unexpected. The one meeting in this stretch whose minutes were filed on time is the one with no recording: the 14 November draft reached the public share on 20 November, the fourth business day, at about 1:26 in the afternoon — five hours before the meeting that approved it.
Which limb of the severity rule. The mitigated one. The minutes exist, they are complete against the ¶II checklist — members present, subject matter, decisions, and mover and seconder for every motion — and they were published. The defect is timing. Contrast flag 2, where the record does not exist at all.
Sources: RSA 91-A:2, II; RSA 288:1; Drive metadata for 11.20.24 DRAFT CSB meeting minutes, 9. Approved CSB meeting minutes 11.20.24, 10.16.24 DRAFT, the 9.30.24 joint draft and the 11.14.24 draft, all read 2026-08-29.
MEDIUM The Finance Subcommittee held the meeting that will produce the FY26 budget and left no minutes; three other subcommittees are printed in the record as headings with nothing beneath them
What the statute reaches. RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d) defines a “public body” as any board or committee of a school district “or any committee, subcommittee, or subordinate body thereof, or advisory committee thereto”. A Claremont School Board subcommittee is a public body, and RSA 91-A:2, II’s minutes duty applies to it.
What the board’s own rules add. By-law 1.05(c): “Notice of the meeting including place and time must be posted at least 24 hours in advance on the SAU 6 website.” By-law 1.05(d): “Minutes must be recorded and available for public inspection on the SAU 6 website within 5 days of the meeting. Minutes should include the names of board members present and a brief description of the subject matter discussed”. By-law 1.11 makes the subcommittee chair responsible for “creating agendas, assigning a minutes recorder” and for ensuring both are posted, and requires each chair to keep a digital folder holding “meeting agendas/minutes”.
The meeting that happened. The Finance Subcommittee met on Tuesday 19 November 2024, the day before this meeting, with every building and district administrator in the room. Its chair reports it here from 0:39:14: who attended, what they asked for, and that “It’s televised. It was televised. So if anyone wants to watch it, they can.” Two other members add to it. No minutes of that meeting exist in any district share — the 2024 packets archive has never carried a Finance Committee folder, both candidate year folders in the Meeting Minutes share hold only board, deliberative and public-hearing documents, and the district’s own Claremont Finance Sub Committee Drive folder is empty. It is the meeting at which the FY26 budget the board would adopt in January began to take shape.
And four subcommittees that produced nothing. Capital Improvement is “working on scheduling” (0:38:30), which is what it reported on 16 October too, though by-law 1.05(3) requires it to report monthly. Policy, Curriculum and SRVRTC are never called (0:43:53) and the minutes print all three as lettered headings with no text under them — the same shape as the 16 October minutes. By-law 1.05(2) requires the Policy Committee to hold at least one regular monthly meeting and to report monthly; its chair was absent and nobody stood in. Ad Hoc Communications is reported by the vice chair rather than by the member the agenda names as its chair.
Which limb of the severity rule, and why this diverges from the October page. The 16 October page graded the equivalent finding HIGH, and this page grades it MEDIUM. The divergence is deliberate and rests on one fact. On 16 October, none of the three subcommittee meetings that produced that evening’s business had been noticed anywhere this project could find, and the public had no way of knowing they had occurred. The 19 November meeting was different: it was noticed by date, hour and room on the 16 October agenda — “Finance Subcommittee Meeting dates: 1-3 PM at SRVRTC John Goodrich Community Room”, 19 November among them — and CCTV recorded it, so the public could and did see it. That is §5’s mitigated limb almost word for word: the meeting was noticed, and only the minutes are missing. It does not make the minutes optional — RSA 91-A:2, II requires a specific list of contents that a two-hour video does not supply, and a citizen cannot search a recording for a decision — but it is a materially better position than an unannounced meeting, and the grading follows the facts.
The honest limit. By-laws 1.05(c) and (d) send these notices and minutes to the SAU 6 website. That site’s Claremont board page links five subcommittee Drive folders; four were created in February 2026 and one in April 2026, four are empty, and the fifth holds a purpose statement of June 2025. Nothing from 2024 is reachable from any of them, and there is no folder at all for Ad Hoc Communications. This project cannot inspect the site as it stood in November 2024, so the correct statement is not published where the by-laws require and not recoverable from here, not never existed. The board itself conceded the destination was not operating: its approved minutes of 21 August 2024 record that “once the website is up and running, those will be available.”
Sources: RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d); RSA 91-A:2, II; by-laws 1.05(b)–(d), 1.05(1)–(3) and 1.11; CSB Agenda 10.16.24, future dates; Cablecast show 16155, the finance meeting of 19 November 2024; SAU 6, Claremont School Board subcommittee pages, read 2026-08-29; Input/SupportingDocuments/MAP.md §58; the companion page 16 October 2024.
OBSERVATION About fourteen and a half minutes of this meeting are not in the recording, the district’s own words locate them inside the nonpublic session, and the minutes record no time for it
The discrepancy. The recording runs 3,441 seconds, and its last spoken word ends at 0:56:34. The agenda notices a 6:30 p.m. start; the minutes record “Consent adjournment at 7:41pm” and no start time at all. A meeting that began at 6:30 and adjourned at 7:41 lasted seventy-one minutes. The recording is fifty-seven. Something is missing.
Why the tape cannot simply be short. The largest gap between any two consecutive rows in this 346-row file is 0.84 seconds. There is no silence anywhere, including across the nonpublic session, where a single 25-second segment carries the two words “Yes yes.” between the roll call in and the motion out (0:12:24). Continuous audio and a quarter of an hour of missing clock is the signature of an edited broadcast, not of a continuous feed — the same pattern this project has documented on the 7 December 2023 SAU 6 recording, where the chair announced a ten-minute recess and the board returned forty-five recording-seconds later.
What settles it here, and it comes from the district, not from the pixels. Twice the chair states a clock time on camera. At 0:34:15 she says “Mr. Upton will be available in roughly 15 minutes.” At 0:51:14, seventeen recording-minutes later, she says “I asked him if he’s available soon. At 719. He said in 15 minutes.” Those two sentences are about the same text message, and the second dates the first to 7:19 p.m. Run the arithmetic both ways:
- If the recording is continuous from a 6:30 start, the earlier remark falls at about 7:04 p.m. and the adjournment at about 7:26 p.m. Neither matches: the chair would be recalling a 7:19 text about something she said fifteen minutes before 7:19, and the minutes’ 7:41 would be fifteen minutes wrong.
- If about fourteen and a half minutes are missing before 0:34:15, the earlier remark falls at 7:19 p.m. and the adjournment at 7:41 p.m. Both match, and they match independently — the gap computed from the 7:19 anchor is 14 minutes 50 seconds and the gap computed from the 7:41 anchor is 14 minutes 31 seconds, nineteen seconds apart.
A third check. The stretch between the two remarks is 22 minutes 19 seconds of recording and 22 minutes of clock — so nothing is missing between them, which puts the whole gap earlier, and the only interruption in the meeting before 0:34:15 is the nonpublic session. On this reading the board left the room at about 6:42 p.m. and returned at about 6:57, a closed session of roughly fifteen minutes.
What follows, and what does not. What CCTV did is correct practice: a broadcaster should stop recording when a public body lawfully closes its doors, and the join is not a defect. What is reportable is on the district’s side. The minutes give no start time, no time in and no time out, so the length of the closed session is unrecoverable from the district’s own record and had to be reconstructed here from two offhand remarks about a text message. The board’s own by-laws ask for better: Appendix D lists among the minimum contents of nonpublic minutes “(2) time and place of the non- public session”. And there is a comparison in this very packet — the 14 November minutes, approved on this night, do give the times: in at 8:19, out at 8:59.
What this page does not assert. It does not assert where in the file the join sits to the frame. This project has established that frame-differencing cannot distinguish a splice from a multi-camera cut on these recordings, and no attempt was made to do so. It also does not assert that the meeting began at exactly 6:30; if it began late, the missing interval shrinks accordingly, and the 7:19 anchor is then the stronger of the two. What would settle it completely is the raw CCTV log for show 16157, or any district document giving a call-to-order time. The timestamps everywhere on this page are recording positions and are labelled as such.
Sources: the dialogue file at the timestamps given, and its inter-row gap distribution; Cablecast show 16157 total run time, read from the archive’s API 2026-08-29; approved minutes 11.20.24; draft minutes 11.14.24; by-laws Appendix D; the companion page SAU 6 — 7 December 2023.
OBSERVATION The appendix the by-laws send members to for nonpublic sessions counts the statutory grounds four different ways, and none of them is right
By-law 2.14 provides that the board “may go into a non-public session at any time to discuss matters allowed in such sessions under RSA 91-A (Right-to-Know Law), as described in the Appendix D.” So Appendix D is the operative description for this board’s members. In four pages it gives four different counts:
- “eight grounds” in the opening sentence: “RSA 91 -A:3 sets forth eight grounds upon which Board of School Committees may enter nonpublic session”.
- Nine, enumerated, immediately after that sentence — the list runs (1) to (9).
- “nine statutory bases” two paragraphs later: “the motion must state one or more of the nine statutory bases cited above.”
- Six, lettered (a) to (f), in the compliance checklist at the end — where item (d) fuses three separate statutory grounds into one lettered item: acquisition or sale of property, pending legal claims, and emergency-function preparation.
The statute has twelve live grounds, lettered (a) through (m) with (f) repealed, subparagraph (m) having arrived with 2023, 189:1 effective 3 October 2023. So the appendix understates by four on its best count and by six on its worst. Its checklist also loses its own numbering: items 1 and 2 are steps, (a) to (f) are grounds, and (g) to (o) are steps again, lettered as though they were grounds — so “the motion must state one of these reasons” and “Recorded roll call vote is taken during the open meeting” sit in the same lettered series.
Why it is worth recording rather than shrugging at. These by-laws were adopted on 5 June 2024 with four of seven members present, and this appendix is where a member checks what a nonpublic session may be for. Flag 5 is the predictable consequence: a motion that names no paragraph, from a board whose own reference document never names paragraph II either. The by-laws contain a second, unrelated numbering defect — two different rules numbered 2.09, one on amendments to motions and one on agenda itemisation — so any citation to by-law 2.09 is ambiguous on its face. This page therefore quotes the text of every by-law it relies on rather than only its number.
What Appendix D gets right, and it matters. Its statement of the disclosure duty is accurate and unambiguous, and it is the reason flag 2 is not a technicality: “The law requires minutes of non-public sessions be made publicly available within 72 hours of the meeting, unless the CSB votes to seal the minutes of the non-public session.”
Sources: Claremont School Board By-Laws, rule 2.14 and Appendix D, adopted 5 June 2024, read in full; RSA 91-A:3, II(a)–(m); the companion page 5 June 2024, at which the by-laws were adopted.
OBSERVATION The agenda lost its own numbering, and the one item on it noticed as a vote was taken as a consent
The numbering. The agenda runs items IV.1 to IV.5, and item 4 carries two subjects: “4. Grant Award to Improve Social Outreach and Services (Discussion)” and, on the next line with no number of its own, “Instrument Disposal (Discussion/Vote)”. Two presenters are named for it, one of them misspelt “Chistopher”. The chair says so on the record: “Item for a which is not there. This agenda was, modified multiple times, so the number did not get there.” (0:37:08) The approved minutes silently repair it, renumbering to six items and giving Instrument Disposal its own number 5. The document the public saw and the document the district kept do not have the same items in them.
The vote that was not taken. Instrument Disposal is the only item on the agenda headed “(Discussion/Vote)”. The chair disposed of it by absence of objection: “We can easily do this as consent if there is no one that would object to us disposing that, we will consider it okay to dispose. Is there any objections?” (0:37:53), then “Dispose away.” (0:38:04) The minutes record “Consent agreement”. By-law 2.07 does permit the chair to save time by asking for objections; by-law 2.10 confines the consent-agenda device to “routine, non-controversial items” collected into a group and placed on the consent agenda, which this item was not. Nothing here was controversial and no public money moved, and the practical question — whether a replacement had been bought — was asked and answered (0:38:05). The point is only that this board’s agendas keep saying vote where its practice is consent, a mismatch this project has now recorded at every Claremont meeting this autumn.
And the agenda arrived two days before the meeting. By-law 2.09 asks that items requiring board discussion or action be submitted “no later than noon fourteen days prior to the meeting, with all backup information”. The agenda file was last modified on 18 November and reached the public share the same day; its file name, CSB Agenda 11.20.24 (3) (1).pdf, carries the marks of two rounds of revision. The instructional-coaching slides arrived at about 2:17 p.m. on the day of the meeting and the 14 November minutes at about 1:26 p.m. the same afternoon.
Sources: CSB Agenda 11.20.24; approved minutes 11.20.24, items IV.4 and IV.5; by-laws 2.07, 2.09 (agenda itemisation) and 2.10; Drive metadata for the packet folder and its six files, read 2026-08-29.
OBSERVATION Ratification is not the last step, and nobody says what the next one is
The board ratified a successor agreement carrying a 2.5 per cent cost-of-living adjustment in each of two fiscal years, higher additional-duty pay and a higher mentor stipend. Under RSA 273-A:1, IV a “cost item” is “any benefit acquired through collective bargaining whose implementation requires an appropriation”, and RSA 273-A:3, II(b) provides that “Only cost items shall be submitted to the legislative body … for approval at the next annual meeting”. Every dollar figure in this agreement is a cost item, and the legislative body of this district is the voters at the annual meeting — the deliberative session noticed on this same agenda for 1 February 2025 and the ballot of 11 March.
Nothing on the recording or in the minutes says so. The chair explains the settlement, the board asks four questions, the vote is taken, and the item closes. No member asks what the agreement costs in FY26, what warrant article carries it, or when the voters see it. The business administrator, sitting at the table and three sentences from saying she would write the budget the next day, is not asked. This page asserts no violation: RSA 273-A:3, II(b) governs what happens next, not what happened here, and the corpus records the FY26 budget going to a public hearing on 2 January 2025 and a deliberative session on 1 February. The observation is that a two-year wage commitment was ratified without the sentence that connects it to the money.
A second thing the record does not carry. The chair names the negotiating team as “Mr. Sprague, myself and Miss Gillan” (0:45:09) — herself, the vice chair and Whitney Skillen. A three-member board negotiating team is a subcommittee under by-law 1.05(a), which caps subcommittees at three members, and therefore a public body under RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d) whose sessions are excepted from the open-meeting rule by RSA 91-A:2, I(a) — “strategy or negotiations with respect to collective bargaining” — but not from the duty to exist on paper. No membership vote, notice, agenda or set of minutes for that team appears in any share. On 16 October this board separately named Arlene Hawkins its representative for the administrators’ unit, and she accepted on tape; the two appointments are for different units and do not conflict.
Sources: RSA 273-A:1, IV and XI (2014, 13:1, 2, eff. 13 July 2014); RSA 273-A:3, II(b) (2013, 244:1, eff. 22 Sept. 2013) — URL note: chapter 273-A is under Title XXIII; RSA 91-A:2, I(a); by-law 1.05(a); the companion page 16 October 2024.
OBSERVATION Both student board members are on the masthead, neither is in the roll, and the report item they gave five weeks earlier is gone from the agenda
The agenda and the minutes both print “Student Board Members- Miles Sheehan & Lilly Clark”. Neither student is recorded present or absent, neither speaks, and the agenda carries no Student Board Member Report — an item that existed as II.c on both the 2 October and 16 October agendas, at the first of which the seats were filled after three months of an empty masthead.
Why it is not obviously a defect, and why it is worth recording anyway. RSA 189:1-c requires “at least one nonvoting student member from each public high school”, “in addition to the school board members authorized in RSA 671:4”, with powers per RSA 194:23-f, whose ¶IV(a) makes “Attending school board meetings” a duty of the office. Whether a nonvoting student member is a member of the public body whose presence RSA 91-A:2, II requires the minutes to record is not settled by the text, and this page does not assert that it is. The board’s own by-law 2.16 pushes hard in one direction: “student members of the CSB shall have all the rights of a regular school board member regarding school board business except the right to vote.” A member with all the rights of a member, whose attendance the statute makes a duty, leaves no trace in the record of whether she was there.
A related gap this project has carried since October. Nothing anywhere records the board fixing the date at which the student members’ terms begin, which RSA 194:23-f, III requires of it: “The school board shall decide the date at which the term shall begin.” The section was amended by 2024, 69:1, effective 13 August 2024, so the current text governs; the 2022, 195:2 text does not.
Sources: CSB Agenda 11.20.24, masthead; approved minutes 11.20.24, item II; RSA 189:1-c; RSA 194:23-f, III and IV(a); by-law 2.16; the companion page 16 October 2024.
OBSERVATION The superintendent’s report published in the district’s public folder names twelve middle-school children by full name and grade — lawful if one notice was given, and this page reproduces none of them
What the document does. November Superintendent’s Report, a forty-page illustrated report filed in the district’s public Drive folder and, on the superintendent’s own account, “pushed out to family members in the community” (0:02:03), prints under “Student of the Month” a list of twelve Claremont Middle School children by full name and grade, plus separate named awards for unified arts, library media and athletics. This page reproduces no name, grade or award from it.
Why this is an observation and not a finding. Unlike two earlier exposures this project has recorded in Claremont packets — the donor cheques of 17 April and 4 September, whose bank and account numbers were legible, and the technical centre’s student slideshow linked from the 16 October packet, which carried stated career intentions — an honour roll is squarely within what a district may lawfully publish. 34 CFR 99.3 lists among the categories that may be designated as directory information the student’s name, grade level, participation in officially recognised activities and sports, and “honors and awards received”. All three headings here fall inside that list.
The condition, which is the only live question. Directory information may be disclosed without consent only after the notice 34 CFR 99.37(a) requires: public notice of the types of information the district has designated, of the parent’s or eligible student’s right to refuse designation, and of the period within which a refusal must be filed. Whether Claremont gave that notice for 2024–25, and whether any refusal was on file for any child on this list, is not something this project can establish, and no packet document addresses it. That is what would settle the point, and it is a question only the district can answer.
What else is in the document, and why it does not raise the same question. Every other figure is an aggregate: enrolments, absence and tardy counts, suspension counts, bullying and harassment investigation counts, IEP and 504 totals, counselling-service session counts, and a note that nine children at one school have missed ten per cent of the year and that the truancy officer will follow up. None names anyone, and this page uses only whole-school totals from it. The smallest population any total is drawn from is a 91-pupil school, and the totals used here are enrolment figures.
Why record it at all. Because it is the fourth consecutive Claremont packet in seven months to publish identifiable material about named individuals, and the pattern is the reportable part even where this instance is lawful. A district that publishes a legible bank routing line in April and a career-intention slideshow in October should be able to say, when asked, exactly which categories it has designated under 34 CFR 99.37(a) and when it last gave the notice.
Sources: November Superintendent’s Report, read in full; 34 CFR 99.3; 34 CFR 99.30(a); 34 CFR 99.37(a); 20 U.S.C. §1232g(b)(1); the companion pages 17 April 2024, 4 September 2024 and 16 October 2024.
OBSERVATION Six smaller things a reader tracing this record will want, none of which breaks a rule on its own
- The finance dates announced here are not the finance meetings that happened. The agenda, the minutes and the superintendent’s report all notice Finance Subcommittee budget meetings for 4 and 18 December, 1–3 p.m. at the SRVRTC John Goodrich Community Room; the chair says aloud “December 4th, followed by December 8th” (0:52:56). This project’s corpus holds finance recordings for 13 and 18 December and none for 4 December. A re-noticed date is entirely ordinary; the point is that no notice of the 13 December session has been located in any share, and this project cannot inspect the SAU 6 website as it stood.
- The superintendent’s spoken figures and his own written report disagree once. He reads “17 bullying. Harassment incidents investigated” for the middle school (0:06:49); the report in the packet says seven investigated, two found and five unfounded. Every other number he reads — 477, 334, 257, 263, 168, 91, 1,031 skills, 26 out-of-school suspensions, ten Stevens suspensions — matches the report exactly. A transcription error on a single digit is at least as likely as a misstatement.
- ESSER appears once, and it is a keyboard. “we’ve replaced it with Esser funds” (0:37:21). Five weeks earlier, on the 16 October recording, the Finance chair asked for the “final disposition of SR” — the recognizer’s rendering of ESSER — and was told the office was still assembling it. He is in this room, gives a subcommittee report, and does not ask again — and no later recording in this corpus contains the accounting. The federal obligation deadline had passed on 30 September 2024; liquidation was due by 28 January 2025.
- The federal grant has no paper at all. A four- or five-year award of “about at $115,000” a year, said to be one of six or eight in the State, with a project coordinator and paid community partners attached, and the granting agency corrected from the Department of Education to health and human services in the room. No application, award letter, budget or notice is in the packet, and the minutes carry four bullets.
- Cablecast’s own reel record misspells the file. The archive stores this show against the user file name 16157 SchoolBaord112024.mp4; this project’s local copy is 16157 SchoolBoard112024.mp4. Recorded because show-to-file matching in this corpus is done on those names.
- The draft and the approved minutes are identical. Byte for byte, apart from the word DRAFT in the running head of each page. The board changed nothing between 3 December, when the draft appeared, and approval. That is a fact about accuracy or about scrutiny, and the record does not say which.
Sources: CSB Agenda 11.20.24; approved minutes 11.20.24; November Superintendent’s Report; 11.20.24 DRAFT CSB meeting minutes; U.S. Department of Education, ARP ESSER obligation-deadline memorandum, 12 June 2024; Cablecast show 16157 reel metadata, read 2026-08-29; Input/SupportingDocuments/MAP.md §§58, 62, 64 and 65.
POSITIVE Five things this board’s own record shows it did properly, including the one that produced the evening’s only correction
- An administrator read the consent agenda closely enough to find an error in it, and said so on camera. “There’s an error in the date of minutes that are being approved tonight. And I’m only being nitpicky because I have to send this set of minutes to the state for a report.” (0:50:24) The minutes record the correction in full, naming him. It came fifty minutes after the item carried, which is flag 1’s point — but the correction itself is exactly the behaviour a public record depends on, and the vice chair says so: “Good catch.” (0:50:55)
- Every member was asked individually whether to wait for counsel, and each answered. “please don’t feel shy with saying yes” (0:51:27); then Crawford, Petrin and Miles each on the record (0:51:38, 0:52:15, 0:52:18). A board that decides to proceed without its lawyer should make that decision visibly, and this one did.
- The clerk was present, read the attendance roll and took both nonpublic roll calls. By-law 2.05 asks the chair to commence at the hour appointed and the clerk to call the roll; both happened. Noelle Kronberg was absent on 21 August, 18 September and at the SAU 6 meeting of the afternoon of 14 November, and present on 4 September, 12 September, 16 October, at the Claremont meeting later that same night, and here.
- The minutes name the mover and the seconder of every motion. RSA 91-A:2, II has required that since 2018, 244:1, effective 1 January 2019, and this district has not always complied. Here all four motions carry both names, including the second on the nonpublic motion that the recording cannot supply.
- The chair announced, unprompted, why she would be looking at her phone on a televised broadcast. (0:12:46) Small, and the right instinct: a presiding officer explaining to an audience that cannot see the room what it would otherwise be entitled to wonder about.
Sources: the dialogue file at the timestamps given; approved minutes 11.20.24; by-law 2.05; RSA 91-A:2, II.
Appendix — source files
Official and public sources
- Recording: Claremont Community Television, Cablecast show 16157 — “School Board Meeting 11/20/24”. Event date 20 November 2024; total run time 3,441 seconds per the Cablecast API, read 2026-08-29; reel user file name 16157 SchoolBaord112024.mp4. The recording is about fourteen and a half minutes shorter than the meeting (flag 9).
- Minutes of this meeting: 9. Approved CSB meeting minutes 11.20.24 — six pages, read in full, signed “Respectfully submitted by Noelle Kronberg, school board clerk”. The draft reached the district’s public share on 3 December 2024, filed with the 4 December packet; the approved copy reached the minutes share on 7 January 2025. Both were read in full and compared line by line; they are identical apart from the running head.
- Packet: 8. CSB 11.20.24 — 6 documents, all six read in full for this page. Folder created 14 November 2024; three files uploaded within a minute of it, the agenda on 18 November, and two on the afternoon of the meeting itself.
- CSB Agenda 11.20.24 (3) (1).pdf — the official agenda, two pages plus masthead; one exhibit letter, A, and no Exhibit A in the folder. Prints the wrong date for the October minutes and runs two subjects under item 4.
- draft CSB Meeting Minutes 11.14.24.pdf — two pages, and the only public record anywhere of a Claremont School Board meeting (flags 1 and 2). Reached this folder at about 1:26 p.m. on 20 November.
- 10.16.24 DRAFT CSB meeting minutes (1).pdf — ten pages, approved by consent at this meeting with the date corrected; the source of the $469,000 ceiling at flag 6.
- draft minutes for Joint CSB_City Council meeting 9.30.24 (1).pdf — eight pages, in the packet and not on the agenda; still unapproved on this date, and approved after 4 December 2024.
- Instructional Coaching Impact Nov. 24.pdf — five slides, naming the three coaches and their first-quarter counts. Not given an exhibit letter on the agenda; reached the share at about 2:17 p.m. on the day of the meeting.
- November Superintendent’s Report .pdf — forty pages, 24.5 MB, school by school. The source of every enrolment and discipline figure checked against the recording, and of flag 14.
- The by-laws in force at this meeting, adopted 5 June 2024: Exhibit E- Claremont School Board By-Laws .pdf — twenty-two pages, read in full. Rules relied on here: 1.05(a)–(d) and 1.05(1)–(3) (subcommittees, notice, minutes, reporting frequency), 1.11 (subcommittee chairs’ duties), 2.01 (meeting dates and quorum), 2.02 (special meetings), 2.04 (public comment), 2.05 (opening and roll), 2.07 (motions, and disposal by absence of objection), 2.09 — the second rule of that number, on agenda itemisation and publication of administration presentations, 2.10 (consent agenda), 2.11 (quorum and the vote needed to modify salaries), 2.14 (nonpublic sessions, routing to Appendix D), 2.16 (student members), 4.03(a) and (d) (the clerk’s record and the posting of agenda materials), and Appendix D in full (flag 10).
- Neighbouring district documents this page relies on: CSB Agenda 10.16.24, whose future dates carry the 6 November meeting and the November and December Finance Subcommittee dates; and the approved minutes of 21 August 2024, for the board’s own account of the subcommittee-folder position.
- The Claremont Meeting Minutes share and its Unsealed Minutes subtree. Meeting Minutes was enumerated at its root on 2026-08-29: six children, the year folders 2023 to 2027 Meeting Minutes plus Unsealed Minutes, created 13 January 2025 and holding exactly three folders — 2025 Non-Public, 2026 Non-Public and 2027 Non-Public. There is no 2024 folder. This is the destination the district itself built for unsealed nonpublic minutes, and it begins seven weeks after this meeting.
- The SAU 6 website. SAU 6, Claremont School Board — the destination by-law 1.05 names for every subcommittee notice and every set of subcommittee minutes. Its five linked subcommittee folders were read for this project on 2026-08-29: four created February 2026 and one April 2026, four empty, one holding a purpose statement of June 2025. Nothing from 2024 is reachable from any of them. The site as it stood in November 2024 cannot be inspected from here.
- Federal source. U.S. Department of Education, grantee memorandum on ARP ESSER and EANS obligation deadlines and extensions, 12 June 2024 — obligation by 30 September 2024, liquidation by 28 January 2025.
- Explicit negatives, from reading all six packet documents in full rather than from a search: the packet contains no Exhibit A and no collective bargaining agreement of any kind; no minutes of either nonpublic session; no notice, agenda or minutes for any subcommittee; no grant application or award letter; no financial document of any kind; and no notice or cancellation for a 6 November meeting. The words ESSER, seal and SREA appear in no packet document other than the agenda and the minutes.
- Negatives that rest on the Drive interface and are therefore weaker, flagged as such: that no Exhibit A exists elsewhere in the district’s shares, and that no 2024 nonpublic minutes exist anywhere. That interface returns nothing at all for this packet folder and for the 2024 minutes year folder while returning their files individually by identifier; it returns eighteen folders for the 2024 packets share and silently omits three the project’s map records, including 7. CSB 11.6.24; and title searches for SREA, Sugar River Education and 11.6.24 all return nothing while the material they name is readable by identifier. Every such negative on this page is written as not found, never as does not exist.
Project files
Relative links; they work when this page is opened from Output/HTML/.
- Dialogue: ../Dialogue/16157 SchoolBoard112024.mp4.CSV — 346 rows, 8,738 words; ten speakers named, fourteen rows left unattributed and seven filed as overlapping speech.
- Video: ../../Input/Videos/16157 SchoolBoard112024.mp4
- Diarized transcript: ../../Input/Transcripts/16157 SchoolBoard112024.mp4.json
- Map: ../../Input/SupportingDocuments/MAP.md §59.
- Companion pages: SAU 6 — 14 November 2024, which establishes the unrecorded Claremont meeting of that night and the Cablecast enumeration behind it; 16 October 2024, the minutes approved here, the missing Exhibit B and the $466,664.43; 18 September 2024, for the $544,145.29 balance and the encumbrance figures; 21 August 2024, whose quorum-failure flag sets the severity reasoning followed at flag 4; 5 June 2024, at which the by-laws were adopted; 1 November 2023, which sets out the RSA 91-A:3, III list duty; and SAU 6 — 7 December 2023, the corpus’s first documented spliced broadcast.
Laws and rules cited on this page
- New Hampshire statutes, in the text in force on 20 November 2024. RSA 91-A:2, II — notice, and minutes including members present, persons appearing, a brief description of the subject matter, decisions, and “the names of members who made or seconded each motion”, open to public inspection within 5 business days. Source note ends 2023, 188:1, eff. Oct. 3, 2023, so the current text governs. Not applied: the start-time, end-time and minutes-producer clauses added by 2025, 112:1, eff. 22 August 2025. ¶I’s definition of a meeting as the convening of a quorum is used at flag 4; ¶I(a)’s collective-bargaining-strategy exception at flag 12.
- RSA 91-A:3 — ¶I(a) nonpublic session only for a purpose set out in ¶II; ¶I(b) the motion “shall state on its face the specific exemption under paragraph II which is relied upon”, by roll-call vote; ¶II(a), (b) and (d), the three subparagraphs the two sets of minutes engage; ¶III minutes kept, actions promptly available, disclosure within 72 hours unless sealed “by recorded vote of 2/3 of the members present taken in public session”, and the list of withheld minutes. Source note ends 2023, 189:1, eff. Oct. 3, 2023 — the amendment that also added ¶IV and II(m), both in force here.
- RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d) — “public body” reaches any board or committee of a school district “or any committee, subcommittee, or subordinate body thereof, or advisory committee thereto”.
- RSA 91-A:4, I — the right of any citizen to inspect governmental records, used at flag 3. Vintage note: amended by 2024, 49:1, 2, effective 13 August 2024, so the current text is the text in force here.
- RSA 198:4-b, II and II(a) — retention of year-end unassigned general funds capped at “5 percent of the current fiscal year’s net assessment under RSA 198:5”, with a noticed public hearing required “Prior to expending retained general funds”, not prior to retaining them. Paragraph II states no purpose limitation, and ¶I’s “unanticipated expenses” constraint does not reach ¶II money. Source note ends 2020, 38:25, eff. 27 September 2020, which raised the ceiling from 2.5 to 5 per cent; the pre-2020 figure is not applied. RSA 198:5 is the net assessment the ceiling is drawn on, and that base is not in this record.
- RSA 273-A:1, IV and XI and RSA 273-A:3, II(b) — “cost item”, “terms and conditions of employment”, and the submission of cost items to the legislative body at the next annual meeting, used at flag 12. 2014, 13:1, 2 and 2013, 244:1 respectively. URL trap: chapter 273-A is under Title XXIII, not Title LXIII.
- RSA 189:1-c (2022, 195:1, eff. 1 January 2023) and RSA 194:23-f — the student board member; ¶III, “The school board shall decide the date at which the term shall begin”, and ¶IV(a), attendance as a duty. 194:23-f was amended by 2024, 69:1, effective 13 August 2024, so the current text governs and the 2022, 195:2 text does not.
- RSA 189:74 — the school board public comment period of no less than 30 minutes, excepting only emergency meetings and meetings held solely for nonpublic session. 2022, 333:1, eff. 6 September 2022; never amended. Cited to say what this page does not conclude: the text does not settle whether the thirty minutes binds the opportunity or the elapsed time, nobody was turned away here, and no violation is asserted. The exception in ¶III is also why no public-comment finding is made against the 14 November meeting, whose only business was a nonpublic session.
- RSA 288:1 — the legal holidays, used for the business-day arithmetic at flag 7. November 2024 carried three: biennial election day (5 November), 11 November and Thanksgiving (28 November). URL trap: chapter 288 is under Title XXV.
- RSA 189:29-a — “Members of the school board shall establish a records retention and disposition schedule for all official records of the school district.” 1983, 94:1, eff. 23 July 1983; never amended. The board adopted its records-retention regulation five weeks before this meeting.
- Federal. 34 CFR 99.3, 99.30(a) and 99.37(a), with 20 U.S.C. §1232g(b)(1) — FERPA, education records, consent, and the notice condition on the directory-information exception, used at flag 14. 2 CFR 200.344(b), the 2023 annual edition — liquidation within 120 calendar days, the paragraph the Department of Education’s ESSER memorandum cites. Dated, not applied: the 2024 revision at 89 FR 30046, effective 1 October 2024, which moved that rule to paragraph (c) and applies to awards issued on or after that date.
- Board rules. The Claremont School Board By-Laws adopted 5 June 2024, and board policies BEDH (public comment) and BEDG (meeting minutes), the latter cited by the by-laws’ own Appendix D. These are the district’s own rules, not law, and a breach of one is a governance finding rather than a legal one — except where the rule restates a statutory duty, as by-laws 1.05(c) and (d) and Appendix D’s 72-hour paragraph do.
- Deliberately not cited. RSA 32:5 is not cited, because this meeting held no budget hearing and adopted no budget; the FY26 hearing was noticed here for 2 January 2025. RSA 91-A:3, IV is not applied, because nothing was sealed and so nothing came up for review. RSA 194-C:9 is not cited, because the SAU budget is the SAU board’s business and not this board’s. And RSA 91-A:2, IV is not cited for the attorney’s Zoom appearance: by its own terms that paragraph reaches only bodies of state government, ¶III is the paragraph that governs a school board, and in any event ¶III’s conditions run to members participating remotely. Matt Upton is counsel, not a member, a quorum was physically present, and he arrived after the vote — so no electronic-participation question arises.