SAU 6 Board, Strategic Plan Presentation — November 21, 2024

A single-item meeting of the joint Claremont–Unity SAU #6 School Board, one week after its FY26 budget meeting and the night after the Claremont board met, generated from the recording’s dialogue transcript, the two-document posted packet and the draft minutes. Four things make this fifty-two minutes worth reading. The board had no quorum at the noticed hour, so the whole presentation and every word of discussion happened before the meeting was called to order — the gavel falls forty-five minutes into the recording, and the board’s own minutes say why. The citizens’ comment period that the agenda noticed and the minutes record was never called; the two members of the public who did speak spoke in the session the board says was not a meeting, and at the moment the item would have come the chair was thanking them for coming. The agenda and the twenty-two-page plan reached the district’s public Drive share at 2:00 p.m. on the day of the vote, four and a half hours before the meeting. And a five-year plan was adopted without a single dollar figure being spoken, against an FY26 SAU budget already before the board that increases by $305,000.54 and puts none of it in a contracted-services line. Timestamps link to the same moment in the Cablecast recording.

Body
SAU #6 School Board — the joint board of the Claremont and Unity school districts, twelve seats as printed on the agenda masthead (seven Claremont, five Unity). It is a "public body" under RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d), which names school administrative units expressly, together with “any committee, subcommittee, or subordinate body thereof, or advisory committee thereto”. RSA 194-C:5, III places in this board the power to “fix the salaries of all school administrative unit personnel”, the duty to apportion that expense among the districts, and the authority to “remove superintendents and other administrators”. RSA 194-C:4, II lists eighteen superintendent services every SAU must provide, among them curriculum, professional development, assessment of pupil achievement and needs assessment — so the plan adopted here is largely inside this unit’s remit. What this board does not have is the money; see flag 9. It is a different body from the Claremont School Board, which met the previous evening.
Date
Thursday, November 21, 2024
Board composition
Seven of twelve seats — the bare quorum, and not until partway through the evening. Present per the draft minutes: Candace Crawford, Michael Petrin, Shannon Popescu, Rocco Ruggeri, Frank Sprague, Heather Whitney, Arlene Hawkins. Absent: Marjorie Erickson, Atonya Hart, Kelly Simpson (all Unity), Bonnie Miles and Whitney Skillen (both Claremont). Five of Claremont’s seven seats and two of Unity’s five. The board’s own policy BBBH-S §C sets quorum at “more than fifty percent (50%) of total board members (seats) with at least one board member from each constituent District” — so seven, from both districts, is a quorum by one seat. See flag 2.
Start time
6:30 p.m. per the posted agenda, and not called to order then. The draft minutes carry an explanation printed above the agenda text: “as of 6:30pm, there was not a quorum of Board members, so the presentation from DMG came before the meeting was called to order; a quorum was present prior to the end of the presentation, so a meeting was then called to order for the purpose of discussing and voting on the strategic plan..” (the doubled full stop is the document’s). The gavel falls at 0:44:57 — “What I’m going to do now is call the meeting, our school board meeting to order at this time. So I’d like to call the saw six monthly meeting to order.” — forty-four minutes and fifty-seven seconds into the recording. The motion to adjourn comes at 0:50:40. Gavel to adjournment: five minutes and fifty seconds. The minutes time the adjournment motion at 7:27 p.m.; 6:30 p.m. plus fifty minutes and forty seconds of recording is about 7:21 p.m., a six-minute difference this page does not resolve. The 2025 amendment that added start and end times to the required contents of minutes took effect 22 August 2025 and does not reach this meeting.
Public comment
Noticed on the agenda under item II, and recorded in the draft minutes as “Citizens Comments-none”. It was never called. The chair went from the vote on the agenda straight to the only action item. Two members of the public did speak — at length, and at the chair’s express invitation — but they spoke before the meeting was called to order. See flag 1 and flag 12.
Location
Sugar River Valley Regional Technical Center, Goodrich Community Room, Claremont NH; audio broadcast on CCTV Channel 8 (per the posted agenda)
Recording
Cablecast: SAU 6 Board Meeting - 11/21/24 (show 16158). The Cablecast API gives the show a total run time of 3,112 seconds, 0:51:52; the dialogue transcript covers it in 199 rows and about 8,050 words. The strategic-planning consultant speaks 64 per cent of those words; the twelve-member board, between all five of its members who speak at all, accounts for 14 per cent.
Minutes
Draft only: 11.21.24 DRAFT SAU6 meeting minutes.pdf — filed not in this meeting’s packet folder but in the packet for the 12 December 2024 budget hearing, and reaching the district’s public Drive share at 4:00 p.m. Eastern on 12 December 2024, the 14th business day after the meeting and about two and a half hours before the meeting that approved them. They are unusually full and they name the mover and seconder of every motion; see flag 6 and flag 15. No approved-form version exists in any district public share.
Packet
Two documents in 3. SAU6 11.21.24 Strategic Plan Presentation, in the separate SAU 6 Schoolboard Packets share. The folder was created at 1:51 p.m. Eastern on the day of the meeting and both files landed at 2:00 p.m. — four and a half hours before the 6:30 p.m. start, against six days’ notice for the packet one week earlier. See flag 3.

Participants

Every seat on the agenda masthead, marked present or absent per the draft minutes’ roll call, plus the central-office administrators the masthead names, the consultant who gave the presentation and the two members of the public who spoke. Name spellings follow the agenda and the draft minutes; the automatic transcript’s rendering is given where it differs. Row and word counts are from the dialogue CSV. Two members recorded present — Michael Petrin and Shannon Popescu — have no attributed row anywhere in the file, and the whole board accounts for a seventh of the words spoken.
NameRoleParticipation
Arlene HawkinsSAU 6 Board Chair (re-elected 4/11/2024); chair of the SAU 6 policy subcommittee; Claremont School Board memberPresent, 31 rows and 795 words — the only board voice heard at any length. She opened the recording before the gavel (0:00:00), read the mission statement at the consultant’s invitation (0:06:31), invited the public to speak during the presentation (0:24:29), answered a citizen’s question on benchmark assessment at length (0:25:30), called the meeting to order (0:44:57), asked for the roll, moved the strategic plan herself (0:47:00), chaired the vote, and closed by putting progress monitoring on the record as a standing agenda item (0:50:12). She was also one of the four sitting board members on the working committee that drafted the plan; see flag 5.
Rocco RuggeriSAU 6 Board Vice Chair; Unity School Board memberPresent, 3 rows and 30 words — and all three are business. He read the vision statement (0:07:03), moved the agenda (0:46:18) and seconded the motion adopting the plan (0:47:11). The draft minutes name him for each. The consultant refers to him by first name in her closing (0:44:30).
Frank SpragueSAU 6 Board member; chair of the SAU 6 superintendent-evaluation subcommittee; Vice Chair of the Claremont School BoardPresent, 6 rows and 198 words. Named the priority he was most excited by — “Okay, I have to say staff effectiveness. I’m a former school administrator myself” (0:21:09) — and gave the only substantive speech in the discussion on the motion, on what the plan does for the superintendent’s annual goals (0:47:16). He moved the adjournment. He was named to the working committee in the June roster and is not on the November one; see flag 5.
Heather WhitneySAU 6 Board member; Chair of the Claremont School Board; Claremont Finance CommitteePresent, 4 rows and 107 words. Gave the sharpest board contribution of the evening — on trust, and on initiatives that do not last (0:23:28) — which the minutes render as “Heather Whitney shared that she believes this is something worth committing to”. She seconded the agenda motion (0:46:22) and thanked the participants during the discussion on the plan (0:48:18). The minutes also name her as the seconder of the adjournment, a voice the dialogue file leaves unnamed.
Candace CrawfordSAU 6 Board member; Claremont School Board member; SAU 6 policy subcommitteePresent, 3 rows and 34 words. Read the staff-effectiveness priority when the consultant called on her by name (0:13:14), and made the one procedural intervention of the meeting: immediately before the vote on the plan she asks “You need to take the road?” (0:48:43), which the dialogue file reads as roll. No roll-call vote was taken. She is one of the four board members on the working committee.
Michael PetrinSAU 6 Board member; Claremont School Board memberPresent per the draft minutes and per the roll — and attributed no row anywhere in the dialogue file. His roll answer survives inside the clerk’s own merged segment as “Michael. Peter. Here.” (0:45:47), the standing garble of his surname in this corpus. One unattributed voice reads the student-well-being priority after the consultant says “Go ahead Michael.” at 0:14:51. Two Michaels were in the room — this member and Assistant Superintendent Michael Koski, who speaks later in the same merged diarizer cluster — and nothing separates them, so the dialogue file leaves it unnamed and so does this page.
Shannon PopescuSAU 6 Board member (Unity)Present per the draft minutes — her first recorded attendance at an SAU 6 meeting since 11 April 2024, having been absent on 12 September and 14 November — and attributed no row anywhere in the dialogue file. Her roll answer is one of the undifferentiated Here replies absorbed into the clerk’s segment at 0:45:47. She was absent on 12 September and 14 November.
Marjorie EricksonSAU 6 Board member; chair of the Unity School Board; member of the strategic-planning working committeeAbsent per the draft minutes, as on 11 April, 12 September and 14 November. She is one of the four board members the plan names on its working committee — and the only one of the four from Unity — and she is not in the room when it is adopted. She speaks nowhere in the 2024 SAU 6 recordings.
Atonya HartSAU 6 Board member (Unity); superintendent-evaluation subcommitteeAbsent per the draft minutes. Her name in the roll is transcribed “that’s on your heart” (0:45:47).
Kelly SimpsonSAU 6 Board member (Unity)Absent per the draft minutes — the member who a week earlier had done the FY26 salary arithmetic aloud at the table and cast the only recorded No of that meeting.
Bonnie MilesSAU 6 Board member; Claremont School Board memberAbsent per the draft minutes, as on 14 November.
Whitney SkillenSAU 6 Board member; Claremont School Board member; superintendent-evaluation subcommitteeAbsent per the draft minutes — as on 11 April, 12 September and 14 November. Her name in the roll is transcribed “Wendy. Skilling.”. Two people on this board answer to Whitney — Whitney Skillen and Heather Whitney. Every reference on this page is to the one the minutes name.
Christopher PrattSuperintendent of Schools, SAU 6Present, 25 rows and 1,002 words — 12 per cent of the evening, and more than the whole board except its chair. He introduced the consultant (0:00:33), read the student-outcomes priority (0:10:28), answered a citizen on the parent group he had separately been recruiting (0:38:48), and gave the closing appeal the minutes summarise (0:49:06). He is the person who brought District Management Group to this district; he announced the engagement to the Claremont board on 15 May 2024 and it was never voted on by either board. See flag 4.
Michael KoskiAssistant Superintendent for Curriculum, Instruction, Assessment and Innovation, SAU 6Present, 6 rows and 131 words. The chair hands him a citizen’s question by name — “I don’t know if Mr. Kosky wants to.” (0:26:25), the transcript’s rendering of his surname — and he answers with the one-year-of-growth explanation the draft minutes credit to him. A member of the working committee that drafted the plan.
Noelle KronbergSAU 6 School Board ClerkPresent, 2 rows and 27 words, and never named aloud on this recording. The chair asks “And, would you please take the roll call of attendance.” (0:45:40) and this voice reads it. The identification rests on the agenda item (“Secretary Roll Call of Attendance of Board Members”), on the masthead and signature of the draft minutes (“Respectfully submitted by Noelle Kronberg, school board clerk”), and on the fact that the reader is a woman who is not the chair, not any of the seven members the roll finds present, not the superintendent, and does not appear in the roll she reads. She had been absent one week earlier, when the superintendent read all three rolls.
Tess Nicholson-PowersDirector, District Management Group (DMGroup), Boston — the strategic-planning consultantPresent, 86 rows and 5,170 words — 64 per cent of everything said at this meeting. She gave the whole presentation, set out the implementation structure the board was being asked to adopt, and flagged the quorum problem before anyone on the board did: “So tonight we’ll see if we have a quorum to approve the strategic plan.” (0:02:01). She had introduced the engagement to the Claremont board on 5 June 2024. She takes no part in the meeting after the gavel except to say thank you.
Mary HenryBusiness Administrator, SAU 6 (masthead)Named on the agenda masthead. Does not speak and is not mentioned. The FY26 budget she had presented to this board seven days earlier does not come up at all; see flag 4. She is a member of the working committee named in the plan.
Michael McCoskerDirector of Student Services, SAU 6 (masthead)Named on the agenda masthead and on the plan’s working-committee roster. Does not speak and is not mentioned in the minutes’ narrative.
Patrick O’HearnDirector of Human Resources, SAU 6 (masthead)Named on the agenda masthead and on the plan’s working-committee roster. Does not speak. His function is the second-largest driver of the FY26 SAU increase at $99,004.44.
Jeff SmallDirector of Technology, SAU 6 (masthead)Named on the agenda masthead. Does not speak, and is not on the plan’s working committee — the only central-office director who is not, in a plan twelve of whose twenty measures require new survey data to be collected.
Liz VogelCitizen; parent of a Maple Avenue School pupilSpoke, 6 rows and 194 words — before the meeting was called to order. Self-identified: “My name is Liz Vogel.” (0:30:46). She asked the evening’s one question about accountability — “I’m curious about the course correction options. So what does evaluation look like?” — and the draft minutes record it: “Liz Vogel (community member) asked about correction options and what the evaluation piece looks like to ensure that things keep moving forward”. She appears nowhere else in this corpus.
A second citizenCitizen; not named on the recordSpoke at greater length than any board member except the chair — before the meeting was called to order. She pressed repeatedly on how the plan measures pupils who are already at or above benchmark (0:24:36, 0:27:11, 0:27:29), drew a long answer from the chair and a second from the assistant superintendent, and later asked whether the superintendent’s parent group was one of the plan’s subcommittees (0:38:22). The draft minutes record her three times as “A community member” and never name her. She does not self-identify on the recording and no one addresses her by name, so this page does not name her either.
Citizens’ commentsAgenda item IINever called. The item is on the posted agenda; the draft minutes record “Citizens Comments-none”; the recording carries no invitation to comment at any point after the gavel. Members of the public were in the room throughout. See flag 1.

Agenda

Item numbering, wording and scheduled clock times from the posted agenda (SAU#6 School Board Agenda 11.21.24.docx.pdf), with dispositions from the draft minutes and the recording. Scheduled times are printed plain; the "Taken up" column gives the moment in the recording. The agenda’s own body is headed with the wrong date — it reads “SAU#6 School Board November 14, 2024 6:30 - 8:30 PM AGENDA” above a masthead that reads November 21 — and the draft minutes reproduce the error; see flag 7. The only substantive item was opened, moved, discussed and voted in two minutes and sixteen seconds, and the presentation it rested on had finished before the meeting began. Hover over (or Tab to) a clipped entry for the full text.

Taken upItemAgenda text / disposition
0:44:57I. Call to Order and Pledge of AllegianceScheduled 6:30 PM. Reached forty-five minutes into the recording, after the presentation had ended. The chair: “What I’m going to do now is call the meeting, our school board meeting to order at this time. So I’d like to call the saw six monthly meeting to order. And I would like to ask everyone to please rise for the Pledge of Allegiance.” She calls it the monthly meeting; this board had met eight days earlier. The Pledge follows at 0:45:19.
0:45:34II. General Business — cell phonesScheduled 6:35 PM. Agenda: “Turn off cell phones and electronic devices.” Delivered as “And just ask all people present to turn off cell phones in any.”.
0:45:45II. Secretary Roll Call of Attendance of Board MembersAgenda: “Secretary Roll Call of Attendance of Board Members”, with a parenthetical providing that members arriving after the meeting begins are to be noted present at the point in the agenda at which they arrive. The clerk reads the roll in a single merged transcript segment beginning “Candace Crawford.”; seven answers survive in it, matching the seven the minutes record present. No member is noted as arriving late, although the minutes state that the quorum assembled during the presentation.
0:46:05II. Agenda — Amendments and Final ApprovalNo amendments offered. The chair: “We have the agenda in our packet. Does anyone have any amendments to the current night agenda? The only item on there is the, consent of the procedure plans presented earlier.” Rocco Ruggeri moved (0:46:18) — “I’ll make a motion to accept the agenda as presented.” — Heather Whitney seconded, voice vote, no count. The minutes render the motion as “a motion to accept the agenda as written”.
Not calledII. Citizens CommentsOn the posted agenda as the last element of General Business. No invitation to comment was given at any point after the meeting was called to order. The chair moved from the agenda vote at 0:46:27 to the strategic-plan item at 0:46:35; the only words in between are a recognition of Heather Whitney and a reply of thanks, and then this: “All right. The first thank you, folks again for joining you very much. Thank you. Please stay in touch. Spread the word. Thank you.”. The draft minutes nonetheless record “Citizens Comments-none”. See flag 1.
0:00:00III.1 District Management Group (DMG) Strategic Plan Presentation — the presentationScheduled 6:40 PM as “District Management Group (DMG)Strategic Plan Presentation (Discussion/Vote)”. The presentation ran from the opening of the recording to 0:44:50, and ended before the meeting was called to order. It carries every question and answer of the evening, including both citizens’ interventions. The draft minutes narrate it in full and then say, in their own sequence, “At this point, Arlene Hawkins called the SAU6 School Board meeting to order”. See flag 2.
0:46:35III.1 — the voteThe chair: “First item on the agenda. And our only item on the agenda is the acceptance of the strategic plan. And I have in front of me a motion that I would like to make since I find it.” She moved it at 0:47:00: “I move that the saw six school board accept the Saw strategic plan for 2020 25 to 2030, as presented this evening by the DM.” Ruggeri seconded (0:47:11). Discussion: Sprague, then Whitney, then the chair. Candace Crawford asked “You need to take the road?” at 0:48:43; the chair answered “I’m making sure we don’t have discussion. All those in favor.” and took a voice vote with no count (0:48:50). The minutes: “Voice vote taken, all present voting in favor; the plan is adopted”. Elapsed from the motion to the declared result: one hundred and eleven seconds.
Not reachedIV. Future Dates/Future Agenda ItemsScheduled 8:15 PM. The agenda lists “SAU#6 FY26 Budget Public Hearing/Meeting- 12/12/2024” and “Unity Board Meeting- 12/10/2024”. Neither was read out and the item was not reached. The list also omits the SAU 6 meeting of 3 December 2024, twelve days away, for which an agenda and a four-document packet were later posted — and which the chair had asked for on 14 November. See flag 11.
Not reachedV. Other BusinessScheduled 8:20 PM and never called as an item. Two things were nonetheless said after the vote: the superintendent’s appeal for parent involvement (0:49:06) and the chair’s direction that the plan become a standing agenda item (0:50:12). The minutes record both, but under item III rather than item V.
0:50:40VI. AdjournmentScheduled 8:30 PM. Frank Sprague had already offered the motion once, at 0:48:56, cutting across the chair; she set it aside, took the superintendent’s closing remarks, and came back to him at 0:50:38 with “Mister Sprague. You have a motion.”. The minutes: “Frank Sprague made a motion to adjourn at 7:27pm, Heather Whitney seconded the motion; voice vote taken, all present voting in favor”. The seconding voice on the tape is not attributable; the attribution to Whitney is the minutes’.

Discussion timeline

Times are taken from the dialogue transcript (Output/Dialogue/16158 SAU6112124.mp4.CSV) and link into the recording. Quotations reproduce the transcript verbatim, ASR errors included, with editorial insertions in square brackets; stutters may be condensed unmarked and nothing else is. Quotations drawn from the agenda, the minutes, the strategic plan or a statute are attributed to that document in the sentence that carries them. Everything above 0:44:57 happened before the meeting was called to order. Hover over (or Tab to) a clipped entry for the full text.

TimeTopicWhat was said
0:00:00The chair opens a session that is not yet a meeting“Good evening folks. I’d like to welcome everyone who is here in person and everyone who’s watching us on CCTV. I’d like to welcome you to a presentation of the strategic plan and implementation being provided by the DM Group that we have been working with. Staff has been working with them, there has been student surveys, the community has had involvement, and it’s nice to see people here in the audience to join us.” No gavel, no roll, no statement that the board lacks a quorum. She hands off at 0:00:26: “So thank you for that. I’d like to have Mr. Pratt take over and introduce Tess.”
0:00:33The superintendent frames the engagement“Yeah. So, good evening everyone. So so tonight we have the district management group, as, as Hawkins says, stated that we’ve been working with them. Since when do we start? In June. Yeah. We tried to make it a very transparent process with involving the community, community members, parents, students, because this is a very important plan for the district moving forward.” The engagement in fact began in May; the plan’s own Phase I is dated May–July 2024, and the consultant corrects the month herself at 0:02:29: “Actually, I guess we started in May a little earlier than I thought.”
0:01:00What the plan is for“I think it’s going to take us to the next level in regards to how we operate the schools, how we run the schools, how we make our decisions. And the importance of a strategic plan is that we kind of build everything around it. And that’s why it was important to have, you know, so many people involved in creating this.” And at 0:01:18: “It’s pretty much the map, including the destination that we want to reach for saw six.” saw six is the recognizer’s standing rendering of SAU 6.
0:02:01The consultant, not the board, raises the quorumThe first mention of the problem that shapes the whole evening comes from the consultant, ninety seconds in. “So tonight we’ll see if we have a quorum to approve the strategic plan. But regardless, want to make sure that everyone feels confident in the components of the strategic plan as well as understand steps for implementation.” Nobody on the board says anything about it, then or later. The draft minutes put it in their own words: the note reproduced in the facts panel above.
0:03:08Who was consulted“So did that through quantitative data analysis, qualitative data analysis by talking to a lot of people, doing community feedback surveys, meeting student feedback as well, which took us into the actual development of the strategic plan from July to October, where we brought it back to the community again.” At 0:03:52 she quantifies it: “again, most notably, 120 student responses to that survey at the high school.” The plan’s own appendix gives the totals: 7 interviews, 13 focus groups, 120 student survey respondents, 61 community and family survey respondents, and about 30 attendees at community meetings.
0:04:21The working committee, described in one sentence“We then created a group just of stakeholders of district and school leaders and board members who took all of the input that was provided and actually got to work in drafting the strategic plan. So we met over the course of all of these meetings, really digging into that data and taking many iterations of drafts of plans to refine to make sure it did reflect what we heard from the.” And at 0:04:52: “So the last meeting this group had was about a month ago in mid-October, where we did go through that feedback.” No notice, agenda or set of minutes for any of those meetings has been located anywhere. See flag 5.
0:05:14A public document“Right. So as we get into the strategic plan, which many of you have in front of, you just want to share, you know, there’s really the meat of the strategic plan that you’ll use day to day, but this is going to be a publicly available document.” It had become one four hours earlier; see flag 3.
0:06:25The mission, read by the chair“So mission can I get a board member to read your mission statement? I’ll I’ll do that.” Then, at 0:06:31: “For us. Our mission, our mission is to inspire, engage and empower every student in Claremont and Unity to achieve academic excellence in a safe, positive and personalized learning environment.” The adopted plan prints the same words. The minutes credit the reading to Arlene Hawkins.
0:07:03The vision, read by the vice chair“A vision. Students will experience success and become lifelong critical thinkers and learners, creative problem solvers and engaged citizens.” The minutes credit it to Rocco Ruggeri; the plan prints “creative problem-solvers”.
0:08:20The theory of action — and where it puts the onus“So this logic statement really puts the onus on district leaders, though, to ensure that this happens. So if district leaders direct time and resources to strengthening core instruction, develop teachers instructional skills and ability to foster inclusive learning environments. Create systems to equip school leaders and staff with easily accessible and actionable data to drive instruction and decision making.” Completed at 0:08:50. And at 0:09:16 the fiscal consequence: “this should really be used in the future to guide resource allocation aligned to what you’ve documented and believe.” That is the only sentence in fifty-two minutes that connects the plan to money.
0:10:19Priority one: student outcomes, read by the superintendent“SC six will ensure that each and every student reaches it exceeds expected academic outcomes. By focusing on early literacy and numeracy and raising graduation rates.” The plan’s own text reads “reaches and exceeds”. Five measures follow, on K–2 literacy and mathematics, one year of growth, pupils with disabilities, and four- and five-year graduation rates — the one priority area with historical data behind every measure.
0:11:40A growth measure, and a measure for pupils with disabilities“And then also not only looking at proficiency, but that third one really focuses on growth. So how are students, maybe who are a couple of years behind? Are they making adequate growth?” And at 0:12:22: “the district having a high population, almost 1 in 4 students with disabilities in the district making sure that each and every student had their needs met and so felt it was really important to just be explicit about that in the strategic plan.” The plan’s Fast Facts page gives the figure as 24 per cent. See flag 13.
0:13:10Priority two: staff effectiveness — and the first red XThe consultant calls on a member by name: “Go ahead. Let’s get let’s give Candice a turn. She just raised it.” The reading, at 0:13:14: “Saw six will develop and retain highly effective teachers who see saw six as a place where they are valued, can thrive and have a positive impact.” Then, at 0:13:26, the admission that runs through the rest of the presentation: “The next three. There actually currently was no baseline data consistently across the district based on staff feedback.”
0:14:51Priority three: student wellbeing, read by an unidentified voiceThe consultant: “Who can I get to read that? Go ahead Michael.” The reading, at 0:15:03: “And so you since will ensure all students have the holistic supports they need to feel a sense of pride and belonging in school to experience success.” Two Michaels were in the room. The dialogue file leaves the reader unnamed and so does this page; see the participants table. Two of the four measures under this priority have no baseline either (0:15:40).
0:16:52Priority four: family and community engagement, read by the chair“I’ll do that and say you six will provide consistent and meaningful outreach to families and the community in order to cultivate a two way relationship of trust and collaboration.” The consultant explains the late change at 0:17:05: the priority had been headed outreach and became engagement on community feedback, because “it’s not about just district putting out communication, but really that engagement between district school and families.” All four of its measures are new: “So you can see here again, not actually data that has been collected in the past.” (0:18:29)
0:19:12Priority five: district office cohesionRead by an unidentified voice after a race for it — “Beat you to it.” — then, at 0:19:15: “Will develop responsive district level systems for internal communication to build alignment and cohesion across departments and schools.” All three of its measures are new (0:19:50), and the consultant sums the position up at 0:20:44: “So really just in summary, you know you can see there’s a lot of baseline data to collect. And that’s okay. That’s why we’re doing this.”
0:20:55The round-robin: what excites you, and what will be hardest“I would love to hear just one person. What are you most excited to prioritize moving forward? There’s a lot. You saw a lot of red X’s, which is okay because we’re going to do new things.” Sprague answers first (0:21:09), the superintendent second (0:21:26), and at 0:21:48 she asks the harder question: “Which of them do you think is going to be most challenging to implement?” One voice answers “All of the.”.
0:22:08The superintendent on the thing that kills plans“Everything in regards to, you know, implementation. I think having the strategic planning staff to work the challenge and really so it doesn’t fall by the wayside like it does in many places, is finding that effective way to implement it for people around us. So it’s not something that eventually just moves to the back burner, and we’re not using it as it was intended.”
0:22:36The chair on pupils who are already ahead“I just if I may, the the student outcomes priorities, I, I really like that it ensures each and every student reaches and exceeds academic outcomes. While the goals seem to be focused on early literacy, high school graduation, and the students who are in need of additional support, the the priority is for all students, those who are struggling, but also those who are exceeding the outcomes.” And at 0:23:04: “So we have to make sure we are meeting the needs of all of our students. And I think that is so important.”
0:23:28The one board contribution about whether any of this will hold“I think one of the biggest problems or challenges is to build trust within the district. And that this is something that’s not just we’ve had a lot of changes over the decades where a lot of initiatives and there’s not this long term follow through. So to get the buy in. I think from the staff in the, in the community to, recognize that this is something that’s going to happen and that it’s worth committing to instead of just worth, you know, listening and hearing about.” The minutes compress it to fourteen words. The dialogue file attributes the turn to Heather Whitney on the strength of that sentence.
0:24:27A citizen interrupts, and the chair invites her inA voice from the audience begins “Are you..” and the chair answers, at 0:24:29: “Oh, this is a presentation. Please feel free. Yes. Please feel free. Please do.” This is the only invitation to the public made at any point in the evening, and it is made before the meeting exists. See flag 1 and flag 12.
0:24:36The sharpest question of the night, from an unnamed member of the public“I just was looking at the outcomes as well and sort of going along with what, was saying, where I do like how it says that you’ve never seen it reaches or expected. How comes when my concern or reading this is that it’s looking at like the the growth, looking at the kids who are not yet meeting the benchmark and making certain is how we’re going to measure those kids who already are at benchmark, how are you doing their meeting, their, they’re receiving growth and that there’s and so I feel like this is very much our kids that are are below or needed grade level, but do have kids who are above.” The minutes: “A community member questioned how students’ needs will be addressed if they are meeting or exceeding benchmarks and how that data will be collected”.
0:25:30The chair answers at length“If I can respond to that, one of the things that has already been begun have been the benchmark assessments throughout the year. I believe it’s three points during the year, and every student is measured as to where they are. So we we are aware of students who are not where they should be or where they should be, and those who are exceeding the level.” And at 0:25:53: “Our plan, our growth, our steps is to make sure instruction is aligned with where those students are at.” … “So it takes time, and we’re really being very careful in implementing something that will be sustainable long term, because we haven’t had that until now.”
0:26:25The assistant superintendent is handed the question by nameThe chair: “I don’t know if Mr. Kosky wants to.” The answer, at 0:26:28: “I would just the the third bullet point, I would think kind of addresses this, that we want all students to make at least that one year of growth.” Then, at 0:26:39: “If. They’re at for 4.5 in the fourth grade, they should finish the year at 5.5. So they make that years worth of growth and kind of maintain that pace. So the teacher’s job is to to differentiate instruction, to make sure the kids who are a little bit ahead are still getting challenged and getting to, to do a little extra learning.” The minutes credit this to Assistant Superintendent Koski.
0:27:11The citizen presses again, and gets a straight answer“Then maybe it goes back to the the teacher one river providing instruction and.” … “Differentiates among a wide range of students with improvement.” At 0:27:29 she gives a concrete example, and the assistant superintendent concedes the point at 0:27:42: “Not within that. So you would use something different or have different materials. Yes. Right.” The minutes record the citizen’s conclusion in terms nobody speaks aloud: “The community member stated that she believes this comes back to teacher effectiveness and she does not feel that all teachers are equipped for that at this point”.
0:28:18The superintendent on what the district has been doing without“We’re not going to fully we have a lot of work to do. You know, we want to raise the bar. We want to have a game plan. But until now, I haven’t seen a game plan. We’re going into it blindly, you know, if we’re if budgets are, you know, if budgets are increasing or, you know, academic scores are going up or going down, we need this plan to show the community, say we’re all on the same page.” That single mention of budgets is the only occurrence of the word in the whole recording. He closes at 0:29:31: “We were just drawing cards and hoping that we’re going to get a full house. It’s just not going to happen.”
0:30:46Liz Vogel: what does course correction look like?“Have one more question. My name is Liz Vogel. I’m a kid in Maple Ave and one going to be coming into Maple Ave next year.” The recognizer drops a word; she is plainly saying she has a child at the school. Her question, at 0:31:29: “But what does that evaluation piece look like with regards to timing. Is it every year every six months. Are we touching base because, Chris, to your point, these things often sit on the shelf and collect us. And it’s just a shame to see that happen when so much energy gets put into it.”
0:32:03Implementation — the part the board was also adopting“Great, great. So implementation. So yes, as the district goes forward with the implementation, as Chris said, that’s you know, you’re kind of maybe not even halfway done to really make this plan become a reality.” Four requirements follow at 0:32:24: systems and structures to monitor progress, a culture of data analysis and accountability, tracking of implementation efforts, and communication structures.
0:33:10Whether the consultant stays is an open question“So when we do, you know, we were in discussion about whether district Management Group will support with this.” And at 0:33:35: “We’ve supported districts in implementation. We’ve also had districts go forth and do this on their own once they build that capacity.” No board member asks what either course would cost, and no figure is given. See flag 4.
0:34:06The implementation calendar the board adopted“So really the plan is going to be January through June through the end of the school year. Developing that implementation roadmap around what are our specific targets, what are initiatives that are aligned to those goals, and what are the specific, detailed action steps that we’re going to have to take to support this strategic plan?” The plan’s own appendix dates Phase IV “December 2024 - Ongoing”.
0:34:34What the board is told its own role is“Of course, superintendent is leading this work, but the role of the school board is to then allocate resources to hold the district accountable to meeting goals and communicate with the broader community on a regular basis.” Allocating resources is the first of the three, and the resources are not this board’s to allocate. See flag 9.
0:35:03The working committee continues, and spawns five subcommittees“You can obviously change the composition as needed now that you have the plan, but their role will be to actually look at that baseline data, propose those yearly targets.” At 0:35:44: “Typically, how we would recommend is the working committee gets divided into each of the priority areas to chair a subcommittee. So here of course, you’ve got your five priorities.” And at 0:36:10: “So typically we have those chairs and then anywhere between 5 to 8 people as part of those subcommittees. As part of this group, the working committee should meet on a monthly basis”. The board adopted this structure without discussing how any of those meetings would be noticed or minuted. See flag 5.
0:38:18A citizen asks whether the parent group is one of these subcommittees“Yeah, I know that. I believe the superintendent or maybe it was the high school that put out a request for a a family parent. It was that kind of is that the same grouping or excuse me subcommittee that would be this or was that kind of in advance of where you’re going with this, or is that something separate?” The superintendent, at 0:38:48: “It could fall into this, but initially it was something separate because we didn’t have any in place.” … “I mean, I got about 30 people responded.”
0:40:04The targets do not exist yet“But what’s going to be most important now is to set Smart goals. So goals that are very measurable in order to be definitive of whether you’ve been successful or not.” At 0:40:55: “The reason we don’t put those in the actual strategic plan is it’s likely those will change”. And at 0:41:37: “If you don’t know where you’re starting, then you can’t know where you’re going.” The board adopted twenty measures and no targets. See flag 8.
0:43:34The roadmap: which priorities have no baseline at all“So you have the strategic priorities and goals, district office cohesion and family community engagement. Their next kind of flag marker on the road is to collect that baseline data, since it does not exist where student outcomes, staff effectiveness, and student well-being already have some baseline data collected based on the metrics they’re using.”
0:44:30The plan can still be changed — and the presentation ends“All right. So in terms of next steps, you know I know if there’s you know sent this out before as I was joking with Rocco earlier, I’ve read it many times. So I probably haven’t memorized by now. But if there are any final adjustments we need to make, of course we’ll do that”. Then, at 0:44:50: “So I don’t know if we have a forum. Okay. So I’ll let you all take it from here. Yeah.” The recognizer’s forum is almost certainly quorum; the sentence is the handover to the board.
0:44:57The meeting is called to order — forty-five minutes in“Presentation. Again, thank you for joining us this evening. What I’m going to do now is call the meeting, our school board meeting to order at this time. So I’d like to call the saw six monthly meeting to order. And I would like to ask everyone to please rise for the Pledge of Allegiance.” Every word of discussion on the only item of business is now behind them. See flag 2.
0:45:45The rollRead by the clerk in one merged segment: “Candace Crawford.” — “Frederick Erickson that’s on your heart. Bonnie. Miles. Michael. Peter. Here. Shannon. Here. Rocky Ridge here. Kelly Simpson, Wendy. Skilling. Frank Sprague here, here, here.” The recognizer renders Marjorie Erickson as Frederick Erickson, Atonya Hart as that’s on your heart, Michael Petrin as Michael. Peter., Rocco Ruggeri as Rocky Ridge and Whitney Skillen as Wendy. Skilling. Seven answers survive; the chair’s own name and Heather Whitney’s are eaten. Seven of twelve is a quorum by this board’s policy, by one seat.
0:46:05The agenda is approved, and the citizens’ comment item is not calledThe chair: “We have the agenda in our packet. Does anyone have any amendments to the current night agenda?” Motion, second, voice vote (0:46:18–0:46:27). Then, at 0:46:35, with members of the public still in the room: “All right. The first thank you, folks again for joining you very much. Thank you. Please stay in touch. Spread the word. Thank you. First item on the agenda. And our only item on the agenda is the acceptance of the strategic plan.” The next item on the posted agenda was Citizens Comments. See flag 1.
0:47:00The motion“I move that the saw six school board accept the Saw strategic plan for 2020 25 to 2030, as presented this evening by the DM.” 2020 25 is the recognizer reading 2025 aloud; the DM is DMGroup. Ruggeri seconds at 0:47:11. The chair, at 0:47:13: “All those any discussion? Yes.” — she begins to call the vote and catches herself. The minutes render the motion as “a motion to adopt the strategic plan as presented”; the word on the tape is accept.
0:47:16The only substantive discussion after the gavel“I just one of the things that you asked whether it’s sites us and I found something else that excites me. So I’m I’m on the Rocco and I are the two of the four members of the superintendent evaluation committee. And so I was looking at page 15 and the top of that, and I made a little brackets around the superintendent board.” Continued at 0:47:38: “we are probably going to have a pretty good set of ready made goals every year. And what gets written gets done.” Page 15 of the plan is the District Office Cohesion page; page 16 is Next Steps, which is where the board’s oversight role is described. The speaker’s page reference cannot be checked against the words he used.
0:48:14Thanks, and a member asks for a rollThe chair: “Any other comments?” Whitney, at 0:48:18: “Thank everybody for all the hard work and the hours that have been doing to this.” The chair, at 0:48:22: “It was excellent. And people have been working hard and the input and the conversations have been really good and in-depth, having been a part of some of them. And kudos to our superintendent for bringing this initiative forward for our district.” Then, at 0:48:43, Candace Crawford: “You need to take the road?” Read by the dialogue file as roll.
0:48:46The vote“I’m making sure we don’t have discussion. All those in favor.” One I is audible at 0:48:50, then “Opposed abstentions. Motion passes.” No count, no roll, no names. The minutes: “Voice vote taken, all present voting in favor; the plan is adopted”. A five-year plan for a two-district school administrative unit is adopted one hundred and thirty seconds after the motion. See flag 11.
0:49:06The superintendent’s closing appeal“A good time. You know, I wanted to say it while the people who attended tonight were here. Because I think it shows a lot that, it’s not the best night out. And I think, you know, we had people to attend, but I just want to make that other push as that. We cannot do this alone.” At 0:49:29: “We want parents to be true partners to help us move forward.” … “I think any school administrator myself would welcome parents to get involved in the subcommittees that were trying to create, because that’s where we’re going to make a real difference.” The subcommittees he is inviting the public into are the ones the board had just voted into existence without discussing how they would be noticed.
0:50:12Progress monitoring becomes a standing agenda item“And if I can just add in, in order for this to be a living document, which it it needs to be, I can see this as a standing agenda item on our school board agendas, so that we continue the conversation and have some progress monitoring occurring as we move forward. So thank you for being here this evening.” The minutes carry it: “Arlene Hawkins added that this should be a standing agenda item for progress monitoring”. See flag 14.
0:50:40AdjournmentThe chair: “Mister Sprague. You have a motion.” Sprague: “To make a motion. We adjourn.” A voice, at 0:50:42: “We have a second. Second.” Voice vote, and the chair closes with “Thank you very much.”. The minutes time it at 7:27 p.m.

Items flagged for review

Flags are a reviewer’s aid produced by comparing what happened at this meeting against state and federal law as it stood on 21 November 2024. They are not findings of violation, they are not legal advice, and they may be incomplete or wrong. Every rule-based flag names and links the provision it rests on; where no verified rule reaches a concern it is labelled an observation and says so. Positives are included because an evenhanded record is the point.

HIGH The public comment period the agenda noticed and the minutes record was never opened — and at the moment it fell due the chair was thanking the citizens in the room for coming

RSA 189:74 requires a school board to “provide the opportunity for the public to comment on school district matters at a meeting of the school board held under RSA 91-A:2” and provides that “The public comment period shall be for no less than 30 minutes”. The section has exactly two exceptions — paragraph II excepts emergency meetings under RSA 91-A:2, II, and paragraph III excepts a meeting whose sole purpose is to enter nonpublic session under RSA 91-A:3. This meeting was neither. It was noticed, it was open, it transacted ordinary business, and it did not go into nonpublic session at any point. The section does not distinguish regular meetings from special ones, and it was enacted by 2022, 333:1, effective 6 September 2022, and has never been amended.

The item existed and it was reached over. The posted agenda lists “Citizens Comments” as the last element of item II, General Business, immediately after the approval of the agenda. On the recording the chair disposes of the agenda at 0:46:27 and opens the strategic-plan item at 0:46:35. Between those two moments she says “Heather. Heather.” and a voice answers “Thank you, thank you.”; then, with members of the public still in the room, this: “All right. The first thank you, folks again for joining you very much. Thank you. Please stay in touch. Spread the word. Thank you. First item on the agenda.” No invitation to comment is given at any point after the gavel, and none is given before it either except the chair’s spontaneous “Oh, this is a presentation. Please feel free.” at 0:24:29, forty minutes earlier and outside the meeting.

And the record says otherwise. The draft minutes print “Citizens Comments-none” between the agenda motion and the discussion items — the same formula this board used on 14 November, when the chair actually opened the item and observed that nobody was there. Here the formula records a disposition that did not occur. It is also not true that nobody was there. The same minutes record “A community member” asking questions three separate times and name “Liz Vogel (community member)” asking a fourth. Members of the public were in the room from the start of the recording to the end of it.

And the public had been invited, by the superintendent, the night before. He used his report to the Claremont School Board on 20 November to do it twice — on the recording of that meeting, Cablecast show 16157: “I pushed out a message last week inviting people to join us tomorrow night for the rollout of the strategic plan for the board” and, later in the same meeting, “I also just want to throw up really encourage the public, whether you’re here in person or through CCTV, to, you know, to tune in tomorrow night in regards to the strategic plan”. People came, on what the superintendent himself calls a night when “it’s not the best night out” (0:49:06). The item that exists so that they can be heard was not called.

Two questions the text does not settle, and neither rescues this. Whether the thirty minutes is a floor on elapsed time or on the opportunity offered is unsettled; here nothing at all was offered, so the question does not arise. And whether a section addressed to “School boards” reaches the joint board of a school administrative unit — a body RSA 194-C:5 calls “The school board of each school administrative unit” but which governs no schools — is a question no located authority answers. This board answers it itself: its own agenda carries the item, its own minutes record a disposition for it, and it opened the item properly one week earlier. The page takes the board at its own word.

Graded HIGH on the unmitigated limb. This is not a case of an item offered to an empty room. The public was present, had been speaking, and was thanked and released at the exact point in the order of business at which the statute and the board’s own agenda placed their right to be heard. The whole meeting, gavel to adjournment, ran five minutes and fifty seconds; the statutory comment period is thirty minutes.

Sources: RSA 189:74 — 2022, 333:1, eff. Sept. 6, 2022, never amended; the only exceptions are ¶II (emergency meetings under RSA 91-A:2, II) and ¶III (a meeting whose sole purpose is to enter nonpublic session under RSA 91-A:3); SAU#6 School Board Agenda 11.21.24; 11.21.24 draft SAU 6 minutes; RSA 194-C:5; the superintendent’s two invitations are on Cablecast show 16157, the Claremont School Board meeting of 20 November 2024; companion page SAU 6 Board — November 14, 2024, at which the item was opened and closed properly.

HIGH A quorum of this board discussed the only item of business for forty-five minutes before the meeting was called to order, and nothing in the public record says at what moment the meeting began

The board says so itself. Printed above the agenda text in the draft minutes: “as of 6:30pm, there was not a quorum of Board members, so the presentation from DMG came before the meeting was called to order; a quorum was present prior to the end of the presentation, so a meeting was then called to order for the purpose of discussing and voting on the strategic plan..” The consultant had raised it at 0:02:01 — “So tonight we’ll see if we have a quorum to approve the strategic plan.” — and no board member mentions it on the recording at all.

What the statute says a meeting is. RSA 91-A:2, I defines a meeting as “the convening of a quorum of the membership of a public body” … “for the purpose of discussing or acting upon a matter or matters over which the public body has supervision, control, jurisdiction, or advisory power”. Its only carve-out is for “A chance, social, or other encounter not convened for the purpose of discussing or acting upon such matters”. This gathering was convened for exactly that purpose, at the noticed hour and place, on the noticed subject. There is no work-session or presentation exclusion in the statute. So from the moment the seventh member sat down, a meeting of this public body was in progress, whatever the gavel said.

And that moment is not recoverable. Nobody announces the quorum. No member is noted as arriving. The minutes say only that it happened “prior to the end of the presentation”. Working from the recording, the chair speaks at 0:00:00, Ruggeri at 0:07:03, Crawford at 0:13:14, Sprague at 0:21:09 and Whitney at 0:23:28; Petrin and Popescu are recorded present and never speak at all, so the moment when the seventh member joined cannot be fixed from the tape either. The roll taken at 0:45:45 is taken after everything of substance has happened, and it notes nobody as a late arrival although the agenda expressly provides for that.

What turns on it. Three things, and all three actually went wrong. The citizens’ comment period fell in the five minutes and fifty seconds after the gavel rather than in the forty-five before it, and was skipped (flag 1). The agenda was approved after every item on it except the vote had already been performed. And the only formal deliberation the minutes can record — the discussion on the motion — consists of one member’s remarks about superintendent goals and two expressions of thanks, because the real discussion had happened in the previous half hour, in a session the board says was not a meeting.

Graded HIGH on the unmitigated limb, with two things stated for balance. The session was open, it was broadcast, nobody was excluded, and the draft minutes narrate it in unusual detail — four pages of it, including both citizens’ questions and the answers. The defect is not concealment; it is that this public body cannot say from any public record when it began to meet, and that the protections attaching to a meeting were sequenced around a gavel rather than around the quorum. The 2025 amendment adding start and end times to the required contents of minutes took effect 22 August 2025 and is not applied to this 2024 meeting.

Sources: RSA 91-A:2 — I (definition of a meeting; the chance-or-social encounter carve-out) and II (notice; minutes contents; five business days) — 2023, 188:1, eff. Oct. 3, 2023, the text in force on this date; the start-time and end-time additions are 2025, 112:1, eff. Aug. 22, 2025 and are not applied here; RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d); 11.21.24 draft SAU 6 minutes; SAU#6 School Board Agenda 11.21.24; Policy BBBH-S §C (quorum).

MEDIUM The agenda and the twenty-two-page plan reached the public share at 2:00 p.m. on the day of the vote — four and a half hours before the meeting, against six days a week earlier

Drive metadata for the packet folder 3. SAU6 11.21.24 Strategic Plan Presentation and both of its files, retrieved 2026-08-29:

Both files carry a modifiedTime about six minutes before their own creation and about three minutes after the folder’s — the upload-session artefact this project has documented repeatedly, which establishes nothing about when either document was written. The call to order was at 6:30 p.m. One week earlier the same board’s ten-document packet had been in the public share for six days.

What this is not. It is not asserted as a violation of RSA 91-A:2, II. That paragraph requires “a notice of the time and place of each such meeting” to be “posted in 2 appropriate places one of which may be the public body’s Internet website” at least twenty-four hours ahead; it does not require an agenda or any document, and the SAU 6 website as it stood in 2024 cannot be inspected from here. A notice may well have been posted elsewhere on time. What can be established is what the public could read, and when.

The board’s own rules are stricter than the statute and were not met. Policy BBBH-S §I.5.a, adopted by this board, requires that “Except in emergencies, written notice of each meeting is expected from the Superintendent’s office well in advance of the appointed time”; §I.5.c requires that “Items to be included on the agenda for discussion or action of the SAU Board at a meeting shall be submitted to the Superintendent seven (7) days prior to the day of the meeting”. And Policy BEDB, which this same board adopted at first reading seven days before this meeting, provides that “The agenda and supporting materials should be distributed to Board members at least seven days prior to the Board meeting” and that “both the agenda and the supporting materials may be reviewed by the public prior to the meeting”.

Graded MEDIUM on the mitigating limb, and the mitigation is real: this plan had been through two rounds of community engagement, a September community meeting of about thirty people, a family survey and a student survey, and the consultant says at 0:44:30 that the draft had been circulated. The public had seen the substance. What it had not seen, until four and a half hours before the vote, was the document.

Sources: Drive folder and file metadata for 3. SAU6 11.21.24 Strategic Plan Presentation, SAU#6 School Board Agenda 11.21.24 and SAU Strategic Plan 2025-2030, retrieved 2026-08-29; RSA 91-A:2, II; Policy BBBH-S §I.5.a and §I.5.c; Policy BEDB (adopted at first read 14 November 2024).

MEDIUM A five-year plan was adopted without a single dollar figure being spoken, against an FY26 SAU budget already before the board that adds $305,000.54 and puts none of it in a contracted-services line

The word budget occurs once in fifty-two minutes, in the superintendent’s “if we’re if budgets are, you know, if budgets are increasing or, you know, academic scores are going up or going down, we need this plan to show the community” at 0:28:18. No cost is stated for anything. No contract is named. No funding source is named. The nearest the room comes to money is the consultant’s “this should really be used in the future to guide resource allocation aligned to what you’ve documented and believe.” at 0:09:16 and her statement of the board’s role at 0:34:34: “the role of the school board is to then allocate resources”.

What the plan actually commits to. By the presenter’s own account, slide by slide, twelve of the plan’s twenty measurable goals have no baseline data at all — three of four under Staff Effectiveness, two of four under Student Wellbeing, all four under Family and Community Engagement and all three under District Office Cohesion. Every one of those twelve rests on a survey instrument that does not exist: staff surveys, student perception surveys and family surveys, to be built, administered and analysed between January and June 2025. On top of that the plan installs a working committee meeting monthly and five subcommittees of five to eight people each meeting monthly, and leaves open whether the consultant is paid to support any of it: “we were in discussion about whether district Management Group will support with this.” (0:33:10)

What the FY26 SAU 6 budget carries for it. Exhibit A had been before this board for seven days. Its bottom block reads: FY25 budget $2,489,151.00, FY26 proposed $2,794,151.54, increase $305,000.54, then two revenue lines of $50,000.00 and $75,000.00 and a “Total Budget % Increase” of 7.23% — which is the increase net of revenue; the increase in spending is 12.25 per cent. Against that increase, every contracted-services line in the unit is unchanged:

And the money that paid for the plan had a deadline that has passed. When the engagement was presented to the Claremont board on 5 June 2024 the chair closed the item by telling the public it was “funded by Esser funds” and “a completely budget neutral endeavor”. ARP ESSER funds had to be obligated by 30 September 2024. The plan’s own appendix dates Phase IV, Implementation, “December 2024 - Ongoing”. Whatever pays for implementation, it cannot be the fund the board was told was paying for the design — and nobody at this meeting asks.

Graded MEDIUM, not HIGH, and the limits are worth stating. No located rule requires a school administrative unit to cost a policy document before adopting it, and this plan is a statement of priorities rather than an appropriation. RSA 194-C:4, II(r) makes “Consultant identification” one of the superintendent services an SAU provides, so engaging a firm is squarely within the unit’s function. The board also had reason to think the money question was elsewhere: the Claremont Finance Committee had begun its FY26 budget two days earlier, and its chair — Frank Sprague, who sits on this board and is the only member who spoke in the discussion here — opened its 13 December session by saying the committee’s test would be “How does this cost support the strategic plan?”. The flag is that the SAU board adopted the plan, on the one night it was asked to, without anyone asking what it costs or who pays — three weeks before it adopted the budget that was supposed to carry it.

Sources: Exhibit A — SAU FY26 Proposed Budget V1 (every figure above is from its Increase-Decrease column and its bottom block); SAU Strategic Plan 2025-2030, priority pages and Appendix; RSA 194-C:4, II(r); the 5 June 2024 characterisation is on Cablecast show 15786 and in the approved minutes of that meeting — see companion page Claremont School Board — June 5, 2024; the ESSER obligation deadline and the 2 CFR liquidation rule are set out on that page; the Finance Committee’s test is spoken on show 16215, 13 December 2024; companion page SAU 6 Board — November 14, 2024 for the FY26 budget discussion and the contracted-services consensus.

MEDIUM The committee that wrote the plan has four sitting board members, met for seven months, and has left no notice, agenda or minutes anywhere — and its board membership changed between June and November with no vote

The adopted plan names its authors. Under “Strategic Planning Working Committee” it lists fifteen members: the superintendent, the assistant superintendent, the director of student services, the human-resources director, the business manager, six principals — and four sitting members of this board: Arlene Hawkins, Candace Crawford, Heather Whitney and Marjorie Erickson. The consultant describes its work at 0:04:21: “We then created a group just of stakeholders of district and school leaders and board members who took all of the input that was provided and actually got to work in drafting the strategic plan. So we met over the course of all of these meetings”, and dates its last sitting at 0:04:52 to mid-October.

No notice, agenda, minutes or recording of any of those meetings has been located — not in the SAU 6 Schoolboard Packets share, not in the Claremont packets share, not in the Claremont Meeting Minutes share. The five subcommittee folders linked from the district’s own board page were read on 2026-08-29 and hold nothing from 2024. The honest limit, as on every page in this run: the destination the board’s rules point to is its website, and the site as it stood in 2024 cannot be inspected from here. This is not published where this project can reach it, not never created.

The board’s own policy is the sharpest authority here, sharper than the statute. Policy BBBH-S §I.5.f provides: “Minutes of all SAU Joint Board or Joint Board sub/advisory committee meetings shall be prepared and disclosed or sealed in accordance with RSA 91-A:2, II & III, and 91-A:3, III”. The rule is the board’s own, it names advisory committees expressly, and it attaches the full minutes duty to them. RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d) points the same way, reaching “any committee, subcommittee, or subordinate body thereof, or advisory committee thereto” of a school administrative unit.

Where the argument is genuinely two-sided. No vote of this board creating the committee or appointing its members appears in any SAU 6 minutes located, and the committee was assembled by the administration with the consultant — so whether it is a committee of the board or a working group of the superintendent’s is a real question, and four of twelve members is not a quorum. What is not in doubt is that its product came to this board for adoption, that its continuing role was described to the board as fixed (“that working committee that has already been established, they will stay and be that working committee of implementation”, 0:33:35), and that the board adopted that arrangement.

And the roster changed with no record. The June 2024 deck in the Claremont board’s 5 June packet lists fifteen members under the heading “Working Committee Members”, four of them board members: Candace Crawford, Arlene Hawkins, Frank Sprague and Marjorie Erickson. The roster published in the adopted plan names Candace Crawford, Arlene Hawkins, Heather Whitney and Marjorie Erickson. One member left and another joined the body drafting the district’s five-year plan, and no vote, minute or spoken sentence anywhere in this corpus records it.

Graded MEDIUM on the mitigating limb: the committee’s work was described publicly at three board meetings, its membership is published in the plan itself, and its output was brought to an open meeting for an open vote. What is missing is any contemporaneous record of what it decided, when it met, or who authorised the change in its membership. The board then voted to give the same committee five new subcommittees, of five to eight people each, meeting monthly — and no one asked how those would be noticed.

Sources: SAU Strategic Plan 2025-2030, page 5 (“Strategic Planning Working Committee”); Exhibit F- DMGroup_SAU6_Strategic Planning Board Introduction (1).pdf, slide 14, in the Claremont 5 June 2024 packet (the June roster, read in full 2026-08-29); Policy BBBH-S §I.5.f; RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d); RSA 91-A:2, II; companion page Claremont School Board — June 5, 2024.

MEDIUM The minutes reached the public on the fourteenth business day, in the same upload as the previous meeting’s, and the approved version has never been published

RSA 91-A:2, II requires that minutes “shall be promptly recorded and open to public inspection not more than 5 business days after the meeting”, and defines a business day as 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday to Friday excluding national and state holidays. The Drive createdTime of a file is the moment it became visible in the district’s public share, and this page rests the finding on it.

Graded MEDIUM on the mitigating limb, and the mitigation is substantial. These are the fullest SAU 6 minutes in this corpus — five pages for a fifty-two-minute session, narrating a presentation that happened before the meeting, recording both citizens’ questions and the answers to them, and naming the mover and seconder of every motion as RSA 91-A:2, II requires. They also state, unprompted, the fact that makes this meeting unusual: that there was no quorum at 6:30. See flag 15. The delay is structural rather than a failure of the clerk.

Sources: RSA 91-A:2, II — mover/seconder clause 2018, 244:1, eff. Jan. 1, 2019; current paragraph 2023, 188:1, eff. Oct. 3, 2023; the start-time and end-time additions are 2025, 112:1, eff. Aug. 22, 2025 and are not applied here; RSA 288:1 (legal holidays); Drive file metadata for 11.21.24 draft SAU 6 minutes, retrieved 2026-08-29; 5. SAU6 12.12.24.

OBSERVATION The agenda for this meeting is headed with the previous meeting’s date, and the minutes reproduce the error

The posted agenda carries a masthead reading “November 21, 2024 6:30PM Sugar River Valley Regional Technical Center” and then, immediately above the numbered items, a second heading reading “SAU#6 School Board November 14, 2024 6:30 - 8:30 PM AGENDA Goodrich Community Room”. The body of the agenda for the 21 November meeting is dated 14 November — the date of the meeting eight days earlier, whose agenda this document was plainly built from.

The draft minutes, which reproduce the agenda as their skeleton, carry the same wrong heading. So does the note about the quorum, which sits directly beneath it. A member of the public reading either document finds two dates on the same page and no indication which governs.

Labelled an observation because no located rule prescribes the form of a school board agenda — RSA 91-A:2, II requires notice of the time and place, not an agenda — and because the masthead, the file name, the packet folder name and the minutes’ own title block all give the correct date. It is recorded because this project has tracked defective citations and copied headers through this board’s paperwork since December 2023, and because the agenda is the document that tells a citizen which meeting the notice is for.

Sources: SAU#6 School Board Agenda 11.21.24; 11.21.24 draft SAU 6 minutes; RSA 91-A:2, II.

OBSERVATION The board adopted twenty measurable goals, twelve of which have no baseline and none of which has a target — and one of the twenty measures a thing that falls when reporting falls

The plan sets five priorities and, under them, twenty measures. By the presenter’s own account twelve of the twenty have no baseline data: three of the four under Staff Effectiveness (0:13:26), two of the four under Student Wellbeing (0:15:40), all four under Family and Community Engagement (0:18:29) and all three under District Office Cohesion (0:19:50). The roadmap slide groups it differently, putting two whole priorities in the collect-the-baseline stage (0:43:34); the two accounts are not identical and the page reports both.

None of the twenty carries a target. That is deliberate and it was explained: “The reason we don’t put those in the actual strategic plan is it’s likely those will change” (0:40:55), and “If you don’t know where you’re starting, then you can’t know where you’re going.” (0:41:37). The targets are to be set by the working committee and its subcommittees and finalised, per the plan’s own timeline slide, in June 2025. So the instrument the board adopted commits the unit to twenty directions of travel and to no distance in any of them, and the body that will supply the numbers is a committee with no published minutes (flag 5).

One measure is worth reading twice. Under Student Wellbeing the plan sets out to “Decrease the number of bullying and harassment investigations”. That is a count of the district’s own responses to reports, not a count of incidents: it falls if fewer reports are made, if fewer reports are opened as investigations, or if the conduct genuinely declines, and the measure cannot tell those apart. New Hampshire’s pupil safety and violence prevention law, RSA chapter 193-F, requires a school to investigate reported incidents; a goal expressed as fewer investigations sits awkwardly beside that duty. No board member raises it. RSA 193-F:4’s enumerated list of required policy elements was amended by 2025, 57:1, effective 1 August 2025, after this meeting, so the chapter is cited here rather than the list.

Labelled an observation, not a defect. Setting priorities before targets is ordinary strategic-planning practice, the consultant defended it clearly, and the plan is explicit that the targets follow. The chair’s own answer to it is flag 14. The observation is that on 21 November 2024 the board voted for a five-year instrument in which the only quantified thing is the year 2030.

Sources: SAU Strategic Plan 2025-2030, priority pages 11–15, Next Steps page 16 and Appendix; RSA chapter 193-F (Pupil Safety and Violence Prevention) — RSA 193-F:4’s list amended 2025, 57:1, eff. Aug. 1, 2025, after this meeting; 11.21.24 draft SAU 6 minutes.

OBSERVATION What this board can deliver of this plan, and what it cannot: the remit is broad, the money is not its own

The plan is written throughout in the first person of the unit: “SAU #6 will ensure that each and every student reaches and exceeds expected academic outcomes”, “SAU #6 will develop and retain highly effective teachers”, “SAU #6 will ensure all students have the holistic supports they need”. It is worth setting out precisely what that means, because the answer is less simple than either extreme.

The remit is genuinely broad. RSA 194-C:4, II lists the superintendent services every school administrative unit must provide, and among its eighteen subparagraphs are curriculum development and “provisions of staff training and professional development” (c), “Recruitment, supervision, and evaluation of staff” (b), assessment of pupil achievement (e), district needs assessment (f), annual budgeting (p) and “Consultant identification” (r). Four of the plan’s five priorities map onto that list. This is not a document about matters outside the unit’s function.

What the board has, in its own right. RSA 194-C:5, III — not ¶I — is where this board’s hard powers sit: it “shall fix the salaries of all school administrative unit personnel, shall apportion the expense of the salaries and benefits among the several districts, and shall certify the apportionment to their respective treasurers and to the state board of education”, and it “shall have the authority to remove superintendents and other administrators”. RSA 194-C:9, I adds the budget for the unit’s own expenses, adopted “At a meeting held before January 1” and apportioned half on average membership and half on equalized valuation. That is the whole of it.

What it does not have. The money. Almost everything the plan measures is delivered in classrooms this board does not fund: early literacy and numeracy instruction, social-emotional supports, family engagement events, teacher professional development. Those are appropriated by the Claremont and Unity school district meetings. The plan’s own Fast Facts page gives the scale — Claremont’s operating budget $39,980,311, Unity’s $3,902,342 — against an SAU budget proposed at $2,794,151.54, six per cent of the three budgets combined. Nor does this board hire the teachers whose effectiveness is priority two: RSA 189:39 provides that “Superintendents shall nominate and school boards elect all teachers employed in the schools in their school administrative unit”, and the electing boards are the district boards.

Labelled an observation because nothing here is a defect. It is recorded because the consultant told this board its role was “to then allocate resources to hold the district accountable to meeting goals” (0:34:34) and because the plan’s Next Steps page assigns “essential guidance and oversight” to a body it calls the Board of Education (flag 10). A reader should know that the board which adopted this plan cannot appropriate a dollar toward it outside its own six-per-cent budget, and that the two boards which can — one of which, Unity’s, was then in the middle of a withdrawal study — did not vote on it.

Sources: RSA 194-C:4, II(b), (c), (e), (f), (p) and (r) — 1996, 298:3, eff. Aug. 9, 1996; 2010, 5:2, eff. June 18, 2010; RSA 194-C:5, III — 1996, 298:3, eff. Aug. 9, 1996, never amended; RSA 194-C:9, I (budget before January 1; apportionment ½ average membership and ½ equalized valuation; certification prior to January 15 to each constituent board’s chairperson) — 2003, 279:1, eff. Sept. 16, 2003, with ¶IV added by 2024, 329:1, eff. Oct. 1, 2024; RSA 189:39 — 1971, 371:2, eff. Aug. 27, 1971, never amended; SAU Strategic Plan 2025-2030, Fast Facts page 3 and Next Steps page 16; Exhibit A — SAU FY26 Proposed Budget V1.

OBSERVATION Three things inside the adopted document: a governing body that does not exist, a definition of chronic absence that contradicts the one given to the board, and a technical centre reclassified

The plan is now the district’s governing statement of priorities for five years, so its own text is worth reading closely.

Labelled observations. None is a breach of any rule, none was raised in the room, and the second is the only one with practical consequence — a measure whose baseline and whose target may be computed on different definitions is a measure that can move without anything changing. All three are recorded because the board voted this document into force without amendment and the consultant had expressly offered to make changes: “if there are any final adjustments we need to make, of course we’ll do that” (0:44:30).

Sources: SAU Strategic Plan 2025-2030 — Fast Facts page 3, Student Wellbeing page 13, Next Steps page 16, Appendix page 20; RSA 194-C:5; RSA chapter 188-E (career and technical education); 11.21.24 draft SAU 6 minutes.

OBSERVATION A bare quorum, a voice vote with no tally after a member asked for a roll, no weighted vote, and a future-dates list that omits the next meeting

The quorum was exactly the minimum. Policy BBBH-S §C sets it at “more than fifty percent (50%) of total board members (seats) with at least one board member from each constituent District”. Twelve seats; seven present; five Claremont and two Unity. One further absence and the plan could not have been adopted — which is why it was not adopted at 6:30.

A member asked for a roll and did not get one. At 0:48:43, in the seconds before the vote, Candace Crawford says “You need to take the road?” — read by the dialogue file as roll, the standing garble in this corpus. The chair answers “I’m making sure we don’t have discussion. All those in favor.” and takes a voice vote. One I is audible; the tape carries no count, no names and no audible opposition. The minutes record “Voice vote taken, all present voting in favor”. That is the 2024 pattern for this board: across 12 September, 14 November, 21 November and 12 December, the only tally of any kind on any recording is the single counted dissent at the December budget vote.

Weighted voting was available and not demanded. RSA 194-C:8 entitles each district to one vote for each sixteen pupils in “All votes regarding school administrative unit affairs”, but weighted votes “shall only be used upon the demand of a majority of the members of any board present and voting”. No demand was made, so the uncounted voice vote is not irregular. It is worth recording only because two of Unity’s five seats were filled, Unity’s own board chair — one of the four members of the committee that wrote the plan — was absent, and Unity was at that moment about fifteen weeks from the March 2025 town vote on withdrawing from this unit.

And the Future Dates list skips the next meeting. Item IV lists the 12 December budget hearing and a 10 December Unity board meeting. It does not list the SAU 6 meeting of 3 December 2024, twelve days away — the meeting the chair had called for on 14 November (“We need to have another meeting prior to the public hearing”), for which an agenda and a four-document packet were eventually posted at 11:13 a.m. on the day it was to be held, and which then failed for want of a quorum and left no minutes at all. The item was in any case never reached.

Sources: Policy BBBH-S §C and §D; RSA 194-C:8 — 1996, 298:3, eff. Aug. 9, 1996; 11.21.24 draft SAU 6 minutes; SAU#6 School Board Agenda 11.21.24; Drive metadata for SAU#6 School Board Agenda 12.3.24.docx.pdf in 4. SAU6 12.3.24, retrieved 2026-08-29; the 14 November request is on Cablecast show 16142 — see companion page SAU 6 Board — November 14, 2024.

POSITIVE The chair invited a member of the public to interrupt the presentation, and what followed was the only real exchange of the evening

At 0:24:27 a voice from the audience starts a question and stops. The chair answers immediately: “Oh, this is a presentation. Please feel free. Yes. Please feel free. Please do.” What follows is the substantive heart of the meeting.

A member of the public argues, twice, that the plan measures the pupils who are behind and not the pupils who are ahead (0:24:36, 0:27:11). The chair answers at length on benchmark assessment three times a year (0:25:30). The chair then hands the question to the assistant superintendent by name, and he answers it concretely: “If. They’re at for 4.5 in the fourth grade, they should finish the year at 5.5.” (0:26:39) The citizen presses on materials for pupils working above grade level and gets a straight concession: “Not within that. So you would use something different or have different materials. Yes. Right.” (0:27:42) Liz Vogel then asks the accountability question — what does course correction look like, and how often — and it becomes the transition into the implementation half of the presentation (0:31:29).

Two members of the public, between them, spoke more words at this meeting than any board member except the chair, and drew answers from the chair, the assistant superintendent, the superintendent and the consultant. The draft minutes record all of it, including the citizen’s conclusion that the answer depends on teacher effectiveness and that not all teachers are yet equipped for it.

The corollary is flag 1, and it is why this is a positive with an edge on it: every word of this happened before the meeting was called to order, and the period the statute sets aside for exactly this was never opened.

Sources: dialogue transcript Output/Dialogue/16158 SAU6112124.mp4.CSV; 11.21.24 draft SAU 6 minutes; RSA 189:74.

POSITIVE The plan measures growth, not only proficiency, and names pupils with disabilities explicitly — in a district where nearly one child in four receives special education

Three of the five Student Outcomes measures are proficiency measures. The third is not: “Increase the percentage of students who make at least one year of growth in literacy and math based on local benchmark assessment”. The consultant says this is unusual, and says why it matters: “Having worked with a lot of district, it’s not always that districts include that growth goal explicitly in the plan” … “so that each student really had that entry point here to make sure that they, wherever they started, were making at least one year growth to stay on their individual trajectory.” (0:29:43)

It is also the measure that answers the citizen’s objection, and the assistant superintendent uses it to do so on the spot (0:26:28). A proficiency-only plan in a district whose own appendix records reading proficiency “below 50%” would have set targets that the strongest pupils meet without moving.

And the fourth measure names a group by name: “Increase the percentage of students with disabilities meeting or exceeding expectations in ELA and math based on local benchmark assessments”. The reason given at 0:12:22 is the district’s own composition — “the district having a high population, almost 1 in 4 students with disabilities in the district making sure that each and every student had their needs met and so felt it was really important to just be explicit about that in the strategic plan.” The plan’s Fast Facts page puts the figure at 24 per cent, against 46 per cent economically disadvantaged. A five-year plan for this district that did not name that group would have been a plan with a hole in it.

Sources: SAU Strategic Plan 2025-2030, Student Outcomes page 11, Fast Facts page 3 and Appendix pages 19–20; dialogue transcript.

POSITIVE The chair put progress monitoring on the record as a standing agenda item, unprompted, in the last minute of the meeting

After the vote, after the superintendent’s closing appeal, and with the adjournment motion already offered, the chair added this at 0:50:12:

“And if I can just add in, in order for this to be a living document, which it it needs to be, I can see this as a standing agenda item on our school board agendas, so that we continue the conversation and have some progress monitoring occurring as we move forward.”

It is the answer to the objection two other people in the room had already raised — Heather Whitney’s “we’ve had a lot of changes over the decades where a lot of initiatives and there’s not this long term follow through” (0:23:28) and Liz Vogel’s “these things often sit on the shelf and collect us” (0:31:29) — and it is the only durable governance commitment the board made all evening. The draft minutes carry it: “Arlene Hawkins added that this should be a standing agenda item for progress monitoring”.

Recorded as a positive without any claim about what followed. It was said, it was minuted, and it is the sentence a later reader should measure this board against.

Sources: dialogue transcript; 11.21.24 draft SAU 6 minutes.

POSITIVE The minutes are the fullest set this board has produced, they name the mover and seconder of every motion, and they disclose the quorum problem the recording never mentions

Six pages for a fifty-two-minute session, four of them narrating a presentation that formally happened outside the meeting. They record the consultant’s methodology and timeline, each of the five priorities and what was said about it, the answers of four different people to the round-robin question, both citizens’ interventions and every answer given to them, and the implementation structure slide by slide. Several passages report things the automatic transcript loses.

They satisfy the mover-and-seconder requirement in full. RSA 91-A:2, II provides that “The names of the members who made or seconded each motion shall be recorded in the minutes”, a requirement in force since 2018, 244:1, effective 1 January 2019. Both motions are minuted with both names: “Rocco Ruggeri made a motion to accept the agenda as written, Heather Whitney seconded the motion” and “Arlene Hawkins made a motion to adopt the strategic plan as presented, Rocco Ruggeri seconded the motion”. The dialogue file independently attributes all four of those turns to a voice. The adjournment is minuted the same way — Sprague moving, Whitney seconding — and there the recording supports only the mover; the seconding voice is not attributable, and the name is the minutes’.

And they disclose the thing nobody said aloud. The note about the missing quorum — the fact on which flag 2 turns — exists nowhere on the recording. No board member mentions it; the consultant’s aside at 0:02:01 is the only trace. The clerk wrote it into the minutes anyway, at the top, before the agenda. A public body that had wanted to bury this would simply have started the minutes at the gavel.

The delay in publishing them is flag 6, and the absence of an approved version is real. The document itself is the best-quality record this board produced in 2024.

Sources: 11.21.24 draft SAU 6 minutes; RSA 91-A:2, II — mover/seconder clause 2018, 244:1, eff. Jan. 1, 2019; dialogue transcript.

Appendix — source files

Official and public sources

Packet documents (exact Drive file names, district typographical errors included)

Other district documents relied on

Project files (relative links work when this page is opened from Output/HTML/)

Laws and rules cited on this page