Claremont School Board — December 4, 2024 | The budget season opens without a number

Participants

Everyone in the record. Attendance and the spelling of every board name come from the district’s **approved minutes of 4 December 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 **529 rows and 12,624 words**. **Students spoke 4,067 of those words — 32.2 per cent of the meeting.** Where the recording and the minutes disagree about who said something, this page reports both and says which is which.
Name	Role	Participation
Heather Whitney	Chair, Claremont School Board; member of the Finance Committee	110 segments, 2,270 words, 18.0 per cent. She opens (0:00:02), amends the agenda’s finance item herself (0:01:04), sets out the Finance Committee’s December schedule (1:09:11), declines to be comfortable with a board endorsement (1:20:01) and adjourns by consent (1:24:59). She places herself inside the Finance Committee on the record: “what our rationale as the Finance Committee are for recommending the budget as presented”. Surname collision: the SURNAME Whitney is the chair; every spoken Whitney in this recording is the FIRST name and means Whitney Skillen, who is absent.
Malachi Caple	Student presenter, Stevens High School — a junior and his class’s vice president	46 segments, 2,094 words, 16.6 per cent — the second-largest share of the evening, larger than the assistant superintendent’s and larger than the business administrator’s. He delivers the second half of the sleep-and-stress project (0:42:16 onward), reads the staff and student written responses aloud, and answers the board. His surname is never spoken on the recording; it comes from the approved minutes, which name “Sarah Wheeler and Malachi Caple”. The other presenter names him twice, and a student board member introduces him: “Our vice president is actually here. Malachi.”
Mike Koski	Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum, Instruction, Innovation and Assessment, SAU 6	59 segments, 1,647 words, 13.0 per cent. He presents three years of PSAT and SAT results from a slide deck that is in no public document (flag 2), from 0:04:15 to about 0:25:28. He speaks of the district’s own past decisions in the third person — on why whole-grade testing stopped in 2022, “you can talk to the new administration about that” — and points the board to a public comparison tool. He is also the meeting’s only central-office administrator of rank in the room; the agenda carries no superintendent’s report (flag 12). ASR renders him `Mr. Kosky`.
Mary Henry	Business Administrator, Claremont School District / SAU 6	59 segments, 1,346 words, 10.7 per cent. Her item was noticed as the default budget, the FY26 summary and a tax-rate tutorial; what she gives is an audit report and a calendar (0:59:01 to 1:16:45). She commits to finishing FY21 through FY24 “done by June”, to an auditor’s presentation in January by video, and to sending the board a budget “by the end of the week”. She is asked the deadline for the budget hearing and answers “January 14th, I’d have to go look at the schedule” (flag 7). She names two of her own staff by name in thanks.
Sarah Wheeler	Student presenter, Stevens High School — a senior	30 segments, 1,300 words, 10.3 per cent. She self-identifies at 0:34:17: “My name is Sarah Wheeler. This is Malachi. We did our project on sleep and stress.” She gives the survey design and the first half of the findings, and then, asked about graduation credits, describes her own day — an EMT course at another school, a college statistics class she reaches halfway through, a college English class, and a hospital shift after. Her account of one school counsellor for the whole high school is the sentence the board answered (0:55:37).
Candace Crawford	Board member; chair of Capital Improvements and of the SRVRTC Visioning Committee; member of the Finance Committee	54 segments, 1,059 words, 8.4 per cent. Three chair recognitions anchor her. She brings the letter to Senator Ward under Other Business, having given the board paper copies (0:02:24, 1:17:22), and she is the member who presses hardest on the compressed budget schedule: “That’s a very. Compressed schedule.” and “It is it is expecting a lot of the rest of the board.” She also answers the students on the counsellor vacancy. ASR renders her `Kenny` once, at 0.77 confidence, for Candy.
Arlene Hawkins	Board member; chair of the SAU 6 joint board; the board’s Curriculum Committee representative	75 segments, 1,063 words, 8.4 per cent. She flags her two Other Business items at the agenda amendments and delivers exactly those two, in that order, at the end — which is what ties her two diarizer clusters together. She rules herself off the Finance Committee on the record (“So I’m not on the finance committee, so I’m just asking for clarification”), corrects the business administrator on which policy committee is whose, supplies the procedural point that the motion needs a second, and closes the meeting’s substantive business with the SAU 6 quorum failure of the night before (flag 6). The approved minutes give two of this cluster’s questions to Bonnie Miles (flag 5).
Frank Sprague	Vice chair, Claremont School Board; chair of the Finance Committee	46 segments, 1,043 words, 8.3 per cent. Named four times inside the exchanges he is part of — the business administrator asks “One more question for you, Frank. What time do you want to do on Thursday?” and the chair credits “Mr. Springs Point” on the tax rate. He negotiates the December Finance dates, asks that the meeting be noticed (“Can you let Chelsea know so she can get it out.”), asks what the DRA deadline for a budget hearing is, moves the endorsement of the letter, and then the same cluster raises the point of order against it. This cluster is the page’s hardest attribution problem and the approved minutes bear directly on it (flag 5). ASR renders him `Mr. Springs`.
Lily Clark	Student board member (non-voting), Stevens High School — a junior	9 segments, 440 words, 3.5 per cent. She gives the first half of the student board members’ report from 0:27:33: the Puerto Rico trip fundraising, the school-wide charity drives, the winter pep rally, and the junior class’s board-game night on 5 December. The district prints her as Lilly Clark on every document, including this agenda and these minutes; the recording renders her first name Lily. This page follows the district in its own prose and records the conflict.
Miles Sheehan	Student board member (non-voting), Stevens High School — a junior	9 segments, 233 words, 1.8 per cent. He gives the music-department half of the report from 0:28:37 — the All-State festival, Tuba Christmas, the 17 December concert with children’s concerts the day before, and the caroling on the 19th. Name collision: the chair calls the pair up as “Mr. Miles and Miss Clark”, using his FIRST name where a surname would go, in a room that also seats Bonnie Miles. Every spoken Miles in this recording is the student.
Noelle Kronberg	Clerk, Claremont School Board	Present and named, no attributed segment. The chair calls on her by name at 0:00:28 — “Would the clerk, Miss Cronenberg, please call? Roll call.” — and the roll that follows is a single unbroken segment of Here answers that cannot be split into names. She signs these minutes, and the chair thanks her for them on the record (flag 18). ASR renders her `Miss Cronenberg`.
Bonnie Miles	Board member; SRVRTC Committee	Recorded present in the approved minutes; no attributed segment in the dialogue file. The minutes give her three acts: asking how the psychology project originated, asking whether the assessments are done across the state and whether the district can compare to other towns, and seconding the motion to endorse the letter. The recording places the first two in the cluster this page files as Arlene Hawkins, and carries no audible second. Flag 5 sets out both readings; no word on this page is attributed to her.
Michael Petrin	Board member; chair of the Ad Hoc Communications Committee; SRVRTC Committee	Recorded present in the approved minutes; no attributed segment in the dialogue file. The minutes give him three turns: a question about trends in higher education and SAT requirements, an answer that the college-access programme still exists, and the point of order that stopped the board acting on the letter. The recording places all three in the cluster this page files as Frank Sprague. This is the fact that bears on a question the project has carried since November — whether the same cluster also contains the words “I only have an associate’s degree” (flag 5). No word on this page is attributed to him.
Whitney Skillen	Board member; chair of the Policy Sub-Committee	Absent, per the approved minutes. She is spoken of twice, by first name, in the exchange about who should receive the policies the business administrator has drafted: “Well, Whitney is the chair.” Her subcommittee gave no report (flag 11).
Christopher Pratt	Superintendent, SAU 6	Not heard, and spoken of in the third person. The business administrator says she needs “to sit down and probably meet with you and Chris at some point” and that she uploaded draft policies to a shared file; the chair hopes “Chris will be able to attend” the Finance Committee’s 12 December meeting. The minutes record no attendance for the administration, and this page does not assert he was absent. What is certain is that the agenda carries no superintendent’s report, and the agendas immediately before and after it both do (flag 12).
Chelsea Weatherford	Executive Assistant to the Superintendent, SAU 6	Not heard; named seven times. She is the person the chair confirms told her the psychology class had no exhibits to attach; the person the presentation is to be sent to “to be incorporated in the minutes”; the person asked to notice the Finance Committee’s meetings; and the person Crawford is to send the letter to so that it can “be added as an exhibit”. She is also the subject of the evening’s first Other Business item, a shout-out for completing a six-month certification. By-law 4.03(b) and (d) delegate posting notice and agenda materials to her post.
Unidentified	Voices in the room that no source names	31 segments, 112 words — 5.9 per cent of rows and 0.9 per cent of words. Almost all of it is backchannel: one roll-call Here whose owner cannot be recovered, ten short warm reactions during the student board members’ report that could belong to any of five people in the room, and fragments inside a two-and-a-half-minute stretch of failed-projector crosstalk. Elimination is not available, because Skillen’s absence leaves Miles, Petrin, Henry and Kronberg all unheard, so no name is printed for any of it.
Multiple	The room together	One segment, 17 words: the Pledge of Allegiance, recited over the chair’s own words and captured by the recognizer as a single voice.

Agenda

An official agenda was posted and is in the packet: _CSB Agenda 12.4.24.pdf, uploaded to the district’s public share on 3 December 2024, about thirty-one hours before the meeting. It names no exhibits at all — the only Claremont agenda in this stretch of the corpus that does not. Times in the left column are the agenda’s own; the links go to the moment the item was actually reached, and the order in which items were reached is not the order the agenda printed. Timestamps link to the same moment in the Cablecast recording. Hover or focus a cell to expand it.

Taken up	Item	Agenda text / disposition
6:30 p.m. 0:00:02	I. Call to Order and Pledge of Allegiance	Agenda: “I. 6:30 PM Call to Order and Pledge of Allegiance”. On tape: “I would like to call to order the December 4th, 2024 meeting of the Claremont School Board. All in attendance. Please rise and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance. Pledge allegiance to Merica and.” `Merica` is the recognizer losing the first syllable of America; the Pledge is recited over the chair’s words and the two are merged Anchored to the minutes’ 7:55 p.m. adjournment, this is about 6:29:45 p.m., and by-law 2.05 asks the chair to “commence the meeting at the hour appointed”.
6:35 p.m. 0:00:28	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: “Would the clerk, Miss Cronenberg, please call? Roll call. Here, here. Here.” and, in the next segments, three more Here answers. The roll is not separable into names — the answers arrive faster than the diarizer resolves them. The minutes give the answer: “Present: Candace Crawford, Arlene Hawkins, Bonnie Miles, Michael Petrin, Frank Sprague, Heather Whitney”; “Absent: Whitney Skillen”. By-law 2.05 wants the chair to open and the clerk to call the roll, and both happened (flag 18).
0:00:40	II.a.1 Consent Agenda (vote required) — Amendments and Final Approval of board agenda	Agenda: “a. Consent Agenda (vote required) 1. Amendments and Final Approval of board agenda”. On tape the chair recites the rule: “All items on the consent agenda will be accepted or approved without discussion. Unless a motion is made to move a specific item to the regular agenda. The item will be placed at the end of the agenda or as requested.” She then takes three amendments — her own substitution of the finance item, Crawford’s letter and Hawkins’s two items — and disposes of the whole by consent: “Are there any objections to the additions or the alterations to the agenda? Seeing none, we’ll accept the changes to the agenda.” No motion, no seconder, no vote, which by-law 2.10 expressly authorises: “When prompted by the chair consent agenda items will be moved,en masse, by consent (absence of objection)” — while the agenda’s own heading says vote required. Minutes: “Consent approval”.
0:01:04	II.a.2 Minutes Approval — 10.2.24 & 9.30.24 Joint City Council Meeting	Agenda, verbatim: “2. Minutes Approval- 10.2.24 & 9.30.24 Joint City Council Meeting”. On tape: “Minutes approval from 10 to 24 and nine 3024 of the Joint City Council.” `10 to 24` is 10.2.24 and `nine 3024` is 9.30.24; the chair reads the agenda’s own label The 2 October minutes were approved by this board on 16 October 2024. The two drafts actually in the packet are the 20 November draft and the 30 September joint draft. The joint minutes are genuinely approved here, on the forty-third business day; the 20 November draft is not, and waits until 18 December (flag 3). And 6 November appears on no consent list in this sequence at all (flag 14). Minutes: “Consent approval”.
0:03:18	II.b Citizens Comments	Agenda: “b. Citizens Comments-Please reference CSB Policy BEDH- Public Comment & Participation at Board Meetings.” On tape, the whole of it: “Next order of business assistant comments. Seeing no citizens comments, I won’t go through the diatribe of what’s expected from citizens.” `assistant comments` is citizens’ comments Twenty-two seconds, and the chair says outright that she is skipping the recital of the rules. Minutes: none. Policy BEDH B.3 authorises the close; whether it authorises skipping the invitation is flag 10.
0:25:33	II.c Student Board Member Report — Miles Sheehan & Lilly Clark	Agenda: “c. Student Board Member Report- Miles Sheehan & Lilly Clark”. Reached twice. At 0:03:40 the chair passes over it — “Seeing that they are not present, we are going to move on” — and at 0:25:33 comes back to it: “So do we have Mr. Miles and Miss Clark here? Sorry. We kind of. Would you like to give you reports?” Both students report. The chair later apologises for where they had been waiting: “thank you for, like, standing outside the windows. Are you sorry you were trapped out there? The best way to get in is the back door.”
6:40 p.m. 0:31:35	III.1 Stevens High School Psychology Class Presentation (Discussion)	Agenda: “1. Stevens High School Psychology Class Presentation (Discussion) Matt Hammond, SHS Psychology Teacher & students will be presenting on stress related to the new schedule.” Reached third, not first. At 0:01:39 the assistant superintendent proposes dropping it — “Speedrun scratching, number one, since nobody’s here” `Speedrun` is Suggest — and the chair holds it open to 6:40. The students arrive; the teacher named on the agenda is not among the voices, and the chair greets them as “from Mr. Hammond’s class”. Runs to 0:58:30 — twenty-seven minutes, the longest item of the evening.
0:04:15	III.2 Update PSAT Results (Discussion) — Mike Koski, Assistant Superintendent	Agenda: “2. Update PSAT Results (Discussion) Mike Koski, Assistant Superintendent”. Taken first, because the item above it had no presenters in the room. Twenty-one minutes of charts covering fall 2024 PSAT, spring 2023 and 2024 SAT, and the 2022 whole-grade administrations. The charts are in no document the public can reach (flag 2), and a board member says on the record that she cannot read the colours.
0:58:52	III.3 Default Budget & Proposed FY26 Budget Summary and Tutorial on School Budgeting, Funding, Tax Impact and Tax Rate Setting (Discussion) — Mary Henry	Agenda, verbatim: “3. Default Budget & Proposed FY26 Budget Summary and Tutorial on School Budgeting, Funding, Tax Impact and Tax Rate Setting (Discussion) Mary Henry, Business Administrator”. Replaced by the chair at 0:01:04, inside the consent agenda: “I myself would like to change one of the items on the on the action items, which is the discussion regarding the finances. We’ll be shifting to, a brief discussion about where we are at in the budgeting process, where we are at with audits currently, and updates on how we’re going to move forward with the Finance Committee in the next few weeks.” The chair introduces what follows as “the revised, presentation from Miss Henry”. No default budget, no FY26 summary, no tutorial, no exhibit and no number (flag 12). The identical item, with an Exhibit D, is III.3 on the 18 December agenda.
1:16:59	III.4 Sub-Committees (Discussion) — six named	Agenda: “4. Sub-Committees (Discussion) Reports by subcommittee chairs if available, consider topics board would like referred to committee for investigation or review”, then Capital Improvement (Crawford), Finance (Sprague), Policy (Skillen), Curriculum (Hawkins), SRVRTC (Miles, Crawford, Petrin) and Ad Hoc Communications (Petrin). On tape, the whole item: “Subcommittees, we’ve kind of discussed that there’s nobody needs to present for that or has anything to add. We’ve already talked about what’s going on with the finance committee.” Six headings, one sentence, no report. Minutes: “No updates”. By-law 1.05 requires four of the six to report to the full board monthly (flag 11).
8:20 p.m. 1:17:22	IV. Other Business	Agenda: “IV. 8:20 PM Other Business”, with nothing under it. Three items were added at the amendments and all three are taken here: Crawford’s letter to Senator Ward, which produces a motion and a point of order (flags 4 and 15); Hawkins’s shout-out for the executive assistant; and Hawkins’s request that every member attend the SAU 6 meeting of 12 December after the previous night’s quorum failure (flag 6). Reached at 7:47 p.m. on the minutes’ clock, thirty-three minutes ahead of the agenda.
8:25 p.m.	V. Future Dates / Future Agenda Items	Agenda, verbatim: “a) Claremont Board meeting- 12.18.24 b) Finance Subcommittee Meeting dates: 1-3 PM at SRVRTC John Goodrich Community Room. i) December 18, 2024 c) Claremont School Board FY26 Proposed Budget Public Hearing- 1/2/2025 d) Claremont School Board Deliberative Session- Saturday, February 1, 2025. Snow Date: Saturday, February 8, 2025”. Never read aloud as an item. The chair asks only “is there any other thank you items that would like to be put on next meetings agenda”. The printed list is already out of date: the 20 November agenda had noticed a Finance Subcommittee meeting for 1–3 p.m. on 4 December, and this agenda drops that date without a word (flag 1). The 18 December agenda moves the public hearing from 2 January to 15 January 2025.
8:30 p.m. 1:24:59	VI. Adjournment	On tape: “If there’s no objection to a during the meeting, I’d like to adjourn the meeting seeing no objections.” Minutes: “Consent adjournment 7:55pm”. By-law 2.07 supplies the device expressly, and RSA 91-A:2, II’s mover-and-seconder duty bites only where there is a motion, so there is nothing here for the minutes to have omitted.

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. 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, a board policy or a statute are labelled as such in the sentence that carries them.

Time	Topic	What was said	Flags
0:00:02	The chair opens, and gets the date right	“I would like to call to order the December 4th, 2024 meeting of the Claremont School Board. All in attendance. Please rise and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance. Pledge allegiance to Merica and.” Worth recording because the same chair’s opening on 16 October was transcribed as October 16th, 2021 Anchored to the minutes’ 7:55 p.m. adjournment this is about 6:29:45 p.m.
0:00:28	The clerk is present, and reads the roll	“Would the clerk, Miss Cronenberg, please call? Roll call. Here, here. Here.” `Miss Cronenberg` is Noelle Kronberg The answers run together and no name can be separated from them. This is the second consecutive meeting the clerk has been present for, after an autumn in which she was absent on 21 August, 18 September and 14 November and four different people read the roll in her place.	POSITIVE
0:01:04	The consent agenda names minutes already approved — and the chair replaces the budget item	“Minutes approval from 10 to 24 and nine 3024 of the Joint City Council. And I myself would like to change one of the items on the on the action items, which is the discussion regarding the finances. We’ll be shifting to, a brief discussion about where we are at in the budgeting process, where we are at with audits currently, and updates on how we’re going to move forward with the Finance Committee in the next few weeks.” Two things happen in one segment. The minutes label repeats an error the assistant superintendent had corrected aloud on 20 November; and the evening’s only budget item is replaced before anyone has seen it.	MEDIUM OBSERVATION OBSERVATION
0:01:39	The administration proposes dropping the students’ item; the chair holds it open	“Speedrun scratching, number one, since nobody’s here.” `Speedrun` is Suggest The chair: “If they don’t show up by, 640, we will move forward. And they were aware that it was this evening, and I did speak to Chelsea, and Chelsea said there were no, exhibits to be attached and that they were just going to come up and present.” That sentence is why the packet has no student exhibit on the day — and why the one that arrives two days later is worth recording.	POSITIVE
0:02:24	A board member describes a document the public cannot see	“I gave a copy to all board members, and it’s, it’s a that talks about the calm down, lawsuit that Claremont was a code printed, and that’s what it’s about.” `the calm down` is ConVal and `a code printed` is a co-plaintiff — both are standing garbles in this corpus Paper copies to the seven; nothing online. By-law 2.09 asks for agenda items with “all backup information, where applicable, being provided by the board member”, fourteen days ahead. This is the fact the point of order rests on eighty minutes later.	POSITIVE
0:02:40	The SAU 6 chair flags her two items — and says neither needs a decision	“I have, one item that is a kudos to someone. And then a request for next week’s s, a board meeting request and their other business. Neither of which require a decision.” `s, a` is SAU She is right about her own items and it is the standard the board fails to hold the third item to. Both of hers are informational; Crawford’s produces a motion.
0:02:54	The chair thanks the clerk for the minutes, on the record	“Are there any requests of changes or alterations to our minutes? And while I just want to say thank you for you do great minutes and yes, yes, it’s it’s really appreciated and we can actually use them.” and “when I was reading them over I just was like these are awesome. So thank you very much.” Recorded because this page goes on to show two places where those minutes and the recording disagree — and because a clerk who is thanked is a clerk who is there.	POSITIVE
0:03:18	Citizens’ comments, and the chair says she is skipping the recital	“Next order of business assistant comments. Seeing no citizens comments, I won’t go through the diatribe of what’s expected from citizens.” `assistant comments` is citizens’ comments Board policy BEDH, section B.3, lets the chair close “after there is no response to the Board Chair’s vocal invitation”; B.5 then requires her to open “Board Discussion Regarding Citizens Comments”. Neither the invitation nor the discussion step is separable from this one sentence.	OBSERVATION
0:04:15	Three years of assessment data, from slides nobody outside the room can see	“So, good evening. We’re going to go through this fall’s PSAT results and go back a couple of years and compare them to see if we can detect any trends.” He runs the deck himself: “But why don’t we start with this fall’s. Let’s try turning it on. Here we go.” The deck is in no packet, no exhibit list and no share. By-law 2.09: “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”.	MEDIUM
0:04:41	Thirty-seven students of about a hundred and eighty	“So fall PSAT results. 37 students took it in grades 9 to 11. I have approximately maybe 180. That would be in those three grades.” The minutes render the same figures: “37 students in grades 9-11 (out of approximately 180) took the PSAT”. About one student in five. Grade nine had fewer than ten participants, so its scores were suppressed: “they don’t break out scores if it’s less than ten.”
0:06:44	A board member cannot read the chart, and there is no copy of it anywhere	“I’m sorry. Mr.. The color differentiation is difficult for me to determine between achieve no and math meets I’m not on the.” She works it out in the room and moves on. This is the concrete cost of flag 2: a member of the public who watches the whole recording sees the same chart at the same distance, with no downloadable original to fall back on, and the approved minutes give the charts in prose only.	MEDIUM
0:10:24	Self-selected cohorts against whole-grade testing — the interpretive problem the board never resolves	“In grades nine through 11 took the test in the. We had 95 test takers. So the whole 11th grade takes the test.” and then “Partly that may be to students who are forced to take the test that have no interest in taking an SAT test. If they know they’re not going to college, there’s no incentive to try or do. Well.” The chair and Crawford take opposite sides of the same question and neither position is put to a decision: Crawford, “I mean, I could argue either way, but I think there’s plus and minus is to both both ways.”
0:14:37	Below the state average when the whole grade is tested	“Our state averages, orange and green for that year. So we’re performing a little under state average. Compared to national average. When we looked at these test scores where the students selected themselves, they scored above the national average for SAT and SAT scores in both English and math. But when we test the whole grade. We’re coming out below a state average.” The minutes carry it as “the proficiency of the entire grade was just below the state average”. Math proficiency is given at about 30 per cent against English in the low seventies, and no board member asks what is being done about the gap.
0:19:38	The sentence this project has carried since November	“So both of our kids participated in that because I’m not considered to have a higher degree because I only have an associate’s degree. So that’s part of the criteria as your parents. So both my my wife and I both have socialist degrees. So my kids are considered to have parents that don’t have higher education. So both of my kids participated in that.” `socialist degrees` is associate’s degrees, at recognizer confidence 1.00 The dialogue file files this in the vice chair’s cluster and says on its face that a human should settle it, because the same man elsewhere in this corpus describes himself as a principal of three high schools. The approved minutes of this meeting give the surrounding turn to Michael Petrin (flag 5).	MEDIUM
0:23:43	Where the public can check the district against every other district	“There’s a website I report. If you Google I report NH and you can compare every schools, public school and every public school district including charters in the state. You’ll see their average SAT scores.” `I report` is iReport, the Department of Education’s public school-data site; the minutes print it correctly Asked how the poorer towns compare, he answers plainly: “In general, the poorer towns are near the bottom.” The exchange sits four minutes before the meeting reaches a letter arguing that the State underfunds exactly those towns, and nobody connects the two.
0:27:33	The student board members report — fundraising, drives and a pep rally	“Student council is also holding a winter pep rally. We’re working on the logistics right now, and all the different activities we hope will get everyone involved. And we’re also deciding on our spirit week. And then Myles and I are juniors, so we’re currently trying to fundraise for our problem this year and our senior trip.” `our problem` is our prom That one clause is what separates the two student board members in a recording that merges them into one voice cluster. Several students and staff are named in this report; this page does not reproduce those names, and neither do the minutes.
0:28:37	The music department, and a teacher who drives from Durham every Monday	“Stephen’s high school attended the New Hampshire All-State Music Festival again this year with our biggest group of auditions.” and, on the restarted jazz band: “We meet every Monday. And a student at Unh. We call him Mr. Stewart. He comes all the way. He drives all the way here to teach us jazz band for an hour, and then drives all the way back every week on Monday.” `Unh` is UNH; the minutes say “a professor from UNH” where the students say a student A board member asks the obvious question and gets the obvious answer: “He’s a phenomenal musician.”
0:32:29	The chair asks for the students’ deck to be put in the public record	“Well, is there any way this could somehow be given to Chelsea to be incorporated in the minutes so that everybody has an opportunity to have the public access?” and later “And this will be available to the public. Just so you know, it’s on the website”. It was. SHS ECH Psychology Class Presentation_0001.pdf reached the packet folder on 6 December 2024 — two days after the meeting, and three days after every other file in the folder. The board asked for a student document to be published and it was; the administration’s own deck, which a by-law required, was not.	POSITIVE
0:34:17	The projector fails and the students present without slides	“Okay, so we couldn’t get it on the screen. So I’m just gonna work with what we got. My name is Sarah Wheeler. This is Malachi. We did our project on sleep and stress. A big question was how to sleep and stress affect your brain functions.” Two and a half minutes of crosstalk precede it, during which the chair observes “Happened to have our IT expert here tonight.” and the assistant superintendent replies “Just emailed that. Yes.” The room saw no slides; the public later got the whole deck.
0:34:44	The survey design: 194 students and staff, all four grades	“By the end of this, we collected, surveys from 194 students and staff from all four grades. We broke it down from genders. Grade level. We very much took into account everybody has their own situations. There’s different locations that stress comes from and origins.” and the hypothesis stated openly: “We took all of that into account to really nail down where the stress is coming from. And if it is originating from this new schedule.” The deck itself says the class set out “to see if any of the results might have a correlation to the new period schedule”.
0:39:53	The headline number: 63.8 per cent above average stress	“So what does this tell us? Out of 194 students and staff, 124 reported to have above average stress stress levels. This means that 63.8% of student and staff attending Stevens High School has higher stress levels than they should.” The deck reports the same and adds the distribution: 3.7 per cent at the bottom of the scale, 11.1 per cent at the top, and, on origin, 52.4 per cent both home and school, 36.5 per cent school, 11.1 per cent personal. The approved minutes reproduce all five figures correctly.
0:42:16	A teacher’s arithmetic, read into the record by a student	“One of our staff responses was they need more preparation time. Each minute of prep time is prepping for six minutes of class time. This 10s of prep time for each minute of class for students. I have about 100 students this year. If I spend 30s of time, which is a gender generous underestimate, grading one assignment from each student that is about an hour of grading per assignment.” and the conclusion: “we are responsible for preparing class materials, making copies, completing disciplinary disciplinary referrals, meetings, subbing when available, cleaning our classroom spaces”. The written response in the deck reads “our expectations outside of our contractual time have rapidly increased in an unsustainable way”.
0:45:08	The response the recognizer inverts — and the page does not correct	“We’ve been let down and we’re letting students down. I’m embarrassed. I can’t hold myself to a high standard than to than to which I’m currently working. However, I cannot sustain my normally high standard of teaching in this environment and survive the year without significant physical or mental cost.” The written response in the packet document says the opposite of that middle sentence: “I hold myself to a higher standard than that to which I am currently working”. A missing negation is never supplied on these pages. The transcript stands as recorded and the document is quoted beside it, and the reader can see which is which
0:48:03	A student’s response on the graduation rate	“I’ve heard more students say they want to drop out and that they are failing many classes. This year. Our graduation rate was at 79.5 in 2022, and well, last year it went up to 81%. I’m afraid that with this new schedule it would drop again. We see teachers and students having to take mental health days because of the stress, and we aren’t even two months into the school year.” The deck prints the same two figures. Neither figure is checked by anyone at the table, and the district publishes no rebuttal in this packet.
0:48:43	The sharpest sentence in the survey, and the recognizer’s version of it	“Having mental health issues, behavioral problems, and grades are slipping. Why is admitting during the fact that our students are failing? I understand that it is not 100% your guys’s fault. I understand you guys are trying.” `admitting during` is admin just ignoring — the packet document prints the written response as “Why is admin just ignoring the fact that our students are failing?” The garble turns an accusation against the administration into nonsense, which is exactly why the document matters.
0:49:31	The conclusion, with a second inverted negation	“Many respondents stated that they felt lack of support through the school and requested more efforts to further support their student body. Along with that, many people feel heard and or feel unsupported by Avenue. We hope that you will take everything we have provided today into consideration to help us find a solution to the decreased stress levels.” `Avenue` is admin; the packet document’s own conclusion reads “many people feel unheard and/or feel unsupported by admin”, so `feel heard` is a dropped negation. It is not supplied here
0:50:00	The board thanks them, and promises to digest it	“First, thank you very much for coming in giving this presentation. Clearly a ton of work was put into it. You both presented very professionally. You should be very proud of yourselves. It was an excellent presentation, same presentation. And we appreciate hearing about this qualitative kind of assessment that you’ve done. And I think the board will digest this and certainly take it into consideration.” Fourteen days later the board did. Item IV.2 on the 18 December agenda is “High School Schedule Review (Discussion) (Exhibit B) Dr. Michael Herrington, SHS Principal”.	POSITIVE
0:50:50	Where the project came from	“So, for our psychology class, Mr. Hammond wanted to do a project that, he noticed that a lot of kids in our class, we don’t have a very big class. So it’s pretty apparent when people are tired. Like many a few people in our class would have their heads down every day.” and, on ending up here: “And honestly, I didn’t think it would get to the school board. I thought it was just going to be another project in class.” The approved minutes attribute the question that drew this answer to Bonnie Miles; the recording places it in the cluster this page files as Arlene Hawkins (flag 5).	MEDIUM
0:52:41	Credits, and the pressure to graduate with twenty-seven of them	“So there are different credit levels so you can graduate with. Now there’s the 21 I believe a 23 and then 27. However, with the way a lot of our schedules are kind of set up, many people graduate with more than a 27 credits” and “We most students this year are taking 6 or 7 classes. I have one study hall”. The minutes summarise it as “the minimum is 21 credits, but there is a push to graduate with 27 credits for the NH state scholars” — *the phrase NH state scholars* is in the minutes and not on the recording.**
0:53:40	One student’s day, described to the board that set the schedule	“I am taking the EMT course that’s offered for us. And with that, because it is at a different school, I travel and I go to my my schedule is not not okay and not what it’s supposed to be. Honestly, I leave my fourth period, ten minutes into class and I get back, halfway through my sixth period, and I go to college stats.” and “I come back and I am in college stats trying to pass, and I have 20 minutes to get all the knowledge into my head. And then I go to my college English class, and then I get to leave for the day, go home and I go to work at the hospital.” The other presenter says the same of a technical-centre course: “I get back halfway through advisory, which is a study hall.”
0:55:37	One school counsellor for the high school — and the board’s answer	“We have one guidance counselor. And with the amount of students that we have, it’s kind of hard to give to get to meet with each individual student and give what they want.” The other presenter: “having one guidance counselor, it’s not just hard on us as a student body, it’s hard on her.” Crawford answers for the board: “we are trying actively to to fill those positions. There are there are two open positions and we can’t find teachers.” Two vacancies, stated on the record, in the same evening the board declined to look at a budget.	OBSERVATION
0:57:44	The students say what they came for	“We really didn’t come here to like almost attack you guys and tell you the reason that we, we just we felt like it was more of a one, like the students were just seeing what was happening and not seeing the reason why. We just kind of wanted to be encouraged from the student body to you guys.” The other presenter: “we see that you guys are doing stuff, but it’s just we just want to really show you the impact that’s happening.” A board member closes it: “coming here and presenting what you have done is a way that you can feel heard because you’re here.”
0:59:01	The audit backlog, and the first good news in it for three years	“I want to start off with some good news. Audits are going well. Auditors have been in the building, which is good.” and, on method: “Some of them looking for being creative in finding ways to find stuff that isn’t in files. Through other avenues, like copies of checks called bank.” FY21 is being written up and FY22 has started. She thanks two of her own staff by name. RSA 21-J:19 is permissive as to timing, so a backlog is a control weakness rather than a missed statutory deadline — but it is a backlog reaching back to fiscal 2021.	OBSERVATION
1:00:25	A date for the whole backlog, and the chair reads it back	“I can see light at the end of the tunnel to see that we should have all of these audits through 24 done by June, I would say.” The chair puts it on the record deliberately, after Crawford says “So just for the minutes”: “There’s almost 20. They’re actively working on 22. And then we’re hoping or the the expectation is that 23 and 24 will be completed by June of 2025.” A commitment with a date, made and minuted. The minutes carry it: “She believes all the audits through FY24 will be done by the end of June 2025”.	OBSERVATION
1:01:28	The auditors will present in January — by video, because there is no meeting to spare	“Oh I think and we’re planning on sometime in January. Yeah. To have the auditors give us their presentation if we can. We bring down one meeting.” then “We’re down one meeting. We’re going to be short. One meeting that is going to be available to us in January because we have a public hearing.” The arithmetic behind that sentence is by-law 2.01 and the calendar: the first and third Wednesdays of January 2025 are the 1st and the 15th, and 1 January is a legal holiday under RSA 288:1. Crawford pins the audit down: “so 21 the results of the 21 audit will be presented in January of 25.”	OBSERVATION
1:04:44	Policy work waiting for a committee whose chair is not in the room	“So may I ask one more question? Will there be implications for the policy committee? Do you think?” — “Yes, we will have some more for you to do. Okay. Definitely. Yes, definitely. So I need to sit down and probably meet with you and Chris at some point.” Then the correction, and it is exact: “Well, Whitney is the chair.” — “Yeah, that’s the s a you.” `s a you` is SAU; the speaker chairs the SAU 6 policy committee and Whitney Skillen chairs the district’s Two policy committees, two chairs, and the business administrator had the wrong one.	OBSERVATION
1:05:12	Draft policies in a shared drive that nobody has reviewed	“Because we have. I’ve been working on them, and I have written some of them already. I just need. I think I’ve dumped them into the file that you guys have or Whitney has out there. Chris, I uploaded them into there. That’s what I had written. So I just don’t know if they’ve been reviewed yet”, answered with “If you could, if you could send an email identifying where they are. Because I go through it very often… And it would be helpful to know where in the shared file it is, rather than trying to search for it.” By-law 1.05(2) requires the Policy Committee to meet monthly and report to the full board monthly. It gave no report on 20 November and none here.	OBSERVATION
1:06:00	The board has not yet seen a budget — on 4 December	“So we’re getting the budget out to the finance committee by the end of the week. Yep.” — “Yes. We’re moving ahead with that. I have a meeting with a few people tomorrow just to go over personnel, to make sure that what we have open. We have open.” That is the whole state of the FY26 budget at this meeting: it does not exist in a form anyone has read. The 20 November agenda had noticed a Finance Subcommittee budget meeting for 1–3 p.m. on this very afternoon, and nothing in this discussion refers to one having happened (flag 1).	HIGH
1:07:22	Two Finance Committee meetings set on camera, a day apart	“I emailed Frank and asked him if we could get together for just finance Committee on on Thursday.” and “And then on the 13th, having one that would be here and would be on CCTV.” Thursday 12 December and Friday 13 December, plus a third on Wednesday 18 December from 1 to 3. The vice chair asks for the notice to go out: “Can you let Chelsea know so she can get it out.” Only the 13 December meeting has a public record.	HIGH
1:09:11	The sentence that describes the 12 December meeting	“We’re going to do the the first meeting on the 12th is just to do a pre meeting for, the 13th. So we can go over everything within the budget, make sure that we understand what we’re doing before we, come out in public and that all of our customers are pretty much answered and ready to go.” `our customers` is almost certainly our questions; the sense of the sentence does not turn on it and, restated: “Before we go out and publicly discuss what’s within the budget.” By-law 1.05(b) says the opposite of the premise: subcommittee meetings “are meetings open to the public and are subject to New Hampshire’s Right to Know Law”. The 12 December meeting was itself public, and no notice, agenda, minutes or recording of it has been found.	HIGH
1:10:41	A board member says the compression is a loss to the public	“That’s a very. Compressed schedule.” then, in full: “I know last year we spent several meetings going over the budget. And then I thought it was a very clear process. And I think the public responded to that clarity and to have it compacted. I think is unfortunate.” The chair agrees and offers to lengthen the 13 December meeting. Last year’s comparison is checkable: the FY25 season ran through televised Finance meetings on 13 December 2023, 18 December 2023 and 5 January 2024, and a board budget vote on 20 December 2023. There is no FY26 board budget vote in December 2024 at all.	OBSERVATION
1:11:46	A member off the committee asks how much of this the public will see	“So I’m not on the finance committee, so I’m just asking for clarification. Last year, there were several meetings that were televised for this year. There’s going to be one on Friday, will there?” The answer settles at three: the 19 November meeting already held, 13 December, and 18 December. The 12 December meeting is not among the three, and nobody says it will be televised. Her closing line is the record of what changed: “And that’s what you had last year with three meters. Thank you.” `three meters` is three meetings	HIGH
1:12:50	Recommend, not approve — and the statute in the background	“I think it’s what we’ll be deciding what we’re going to send to the rest of the board at that meeting.” — “Recommend and bring it to the hearing. And then after the hearing, you’ll need to make.” — “The hearing. We can change it.” — “Oh, yes. Yes.” Everyone in that exchange has it right. RSA 32:5, I directs the governing body, “after the conclusion of public testimony”, to “finalize the budget to be submitted”; ¶II bars only the insertion of a new purpose or a larger amount after the hearing. A post-hearing change is the statute working as written.	OBSERVATION
1:13:06	A rehearsal for the public hearing, and an alignment to the strategic plan	“Mary and I briefly chatted about this. Is that developing a presentation that we can kind of do a trial run on what we’re going to present at the public hearing to, so we can have all of our ducks in a row for the deliberative session to make sure that we’re articulating our goals and, and how we’re aligning the budget to the newly presented strategic plan and what our rationale as the Finance Committee are for recommending the budget as presented.” The strategic plan is thirteen days old — adopted by the SAU 6 board on 21 November 2024, at a meeting that had no quorum at its noticed hour.
1:14:09	The objection to deciding a budget on the day it arrives	“It is I think that but we I think having the Finance committee make a recommendation on the afternoon for the board to see it that night and, and act on it. It’s really expensive.” — corrected in the next breath by the chair, “It’s really what it’s expecting”, and by the speaker herself, “It is it is expecting a lot of the rest of the board.” The objection was well founded. On 18 December the board did not move the budget to a dollar figure at all; the FY26 number waits for an emergency meeting on 7 January 2025.	OBSERVATION
1:15:07	The deadline question, and an answer a week early	“So what does the DRA say about what’s our drop dead on a public hearing for the for the.” — “Budget January 14th, I’d have to go look at the schedule.” 14 January 2025 is the second Tuesday in January, which RSA 40:13, II-a(a) makes the last date for posting notice of the hearing. The last date for the hearing is II-a(c), the third Tuesday — 21 January 2025. The answer is a week conservative, and it is hedged on its face.	OBSERVATION
1:16:11	The hearing has not been warranted, and the board gives itself until mid-January	The chair: “So our our target, our goal is to have the public hearing on I believe it’s the second.” Then: “January 2nd. Correct. But that hasn’t been warranted yet. So that if we don’t have that opportunity, we have until the middle of January. Is that correct?” — “Yes. And it’s all fluid. But that’s the lack of said. This is the aspiration for now.” Both readings are right, and the fallback is the one that happened: the 18 December agenda moves the hearing to 15 January 2025 (flag 7).	OBSERVATION
1:16:59	Six subcommittees, and no report from any of them	“Subcommittees, we’ve kind of discussed that there’s nobody needs to present for that or has anything to add. We’ve already talked about what’s going on with the finance committee.” Minutes: “No updates”. By-law 1.05 requires Finance, Policy, Capital Improvement and each Ad Hoc committee to “report to the full Board monthly”, and the Curriculum representative quarterly. Two of the six met within six days of this meeting — the SRVRTC Visioning subcommittee on 9 December and Capital Improvements on 10 December, both minuted in the 18 December packet.	OBSERVATION
1:18:05	The letter, and the figure it asks the State for	“they they recommended that the adequacy a be set at a little over 7300 students per student as a result of the the, convey a lawsuit. And so our state senator is Ruth Ward, and she happens to be, the chairman of the education committee in the Senate. And this is a letter asking as her constituents to have a bill to increase adequacy aid to the 7356 per student.” `convey a` is ConVal; `7300 students per student` is a recognizer stumble on per student The letter itself asks the senator to “Increase the State’s annual base adequacy aid payment from $4,100 to $7,356.01 per pupil.”	OBSERVATION
1:18:50	The baseline, and the case it rests on	“Right now, it’s 4100 to do what the state Supreme Court said was she should do. And so I wanted you to all see the letter. And if we could I don’t know whether the board feels comfortable being in support of this letter. I, as an individual do, but I would love to see, since we were plaintiffs in this, I think we should be, supporting this effort.” $4,100 is the figure in RSA 198:40-a, II; the figure actually in force for FY25 is $4,182, because RSA 198:40-d adds 2 per cent annually from 1 July 2024 (flag 9).	OBSERVATION
1:20:01	The chair declines, and invites the motion anyway	Asked whether the board would take a vote to sign as a board: “I don’t I personally don’t feel comfortable with that. But there can be a motion made I which is fine.” Ninety seconds earlier she had said “I don’t know if we need to do a motion to vote on it, but I think it’s more than fair if anybody wants to sign on, to sign on to that. And universally, I think the board has expressed support for this.” A presiding officer stating her own position and then leaving the floor open is not a defect; by-law 4.01(b) gives the chair a vote on any question.
1:20:07	The motion, and a member reminding the room it needs a second	“I’ll make the motion.” then “We we, endorse the letter. This Crawford has given us as the as the Claremont School Board.” Then: “He needs a second. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to interrupt. Okay. Thank you. Made a motion. We need a second. So a second. Okay. Now, if you want to.” No second is audible on the recording. The approved minutes name one: “Bonnie Miles seconded the motion” — which is what RSA 91-A:2, II requires minutes to record (flag 4).	MEDIUM
1:21:02	The point of order that stops the board acting	“That’s my motion. Good. Kind of a point of order question.” then “And I, you know, I have for this letter, but this is not on our agenda. It’s not under the discussion reaction items. So technically, I’m not sure we can take action in the motion on this item.” `discussion reaction items` is discussion / action items, the agenda’s own heading III One CSV segment carries the end of the motion and the start of the point of order, which is the clearest sign in this file that the cluster holds two men. The minutes attribute the point of order to Michael Petrin (flag 5).	POSITIVE MEDIUM
1:21:20	The by-law, stated correctly from the floor	“Right. Other business should be non decisive. Not not not making a decision.” and, from the mover, “There may be members that are here that this was not on the agenda… That was coming up tonight.” That is by-law 2.09 almost word for word: “Items brought up under new business should be informational, requests for future meetings or agenda items. If an item requiring action is brought up under new business the item must be deemed emergency or time sensitive that cannot be put off until an upcoming meeting.” Nobody suggested this letter was either.	POSITIVE
1:21:33	How a seconded motion left the floor	The chair: “I think we can leave. The option is lay on the table until next meeting. Or we can individually sign the the letter as school board members if we choose.” The mover of the letter: “I would ask that it be transferred to next week for next meeting motion.” The mover of the motion: “With the comment that I think that it’s very important that that this be communicated as a board.” No vote, and no word of withdrawal, is spoken. The minutes supply one: “Frank Sprague withdrew his motion but that he believes the Board should collectively support the letter” (flag 4).	MEDIUM
1:22:01	Counsel’s advice on advocacy, reported from memory	“I, I agree with what you’re saying and previously with a different issue. I have spoken to our attorney about advocacy and he said school boards should they are advocates and we should be advocates for our students in education. So that’s within keeping of our role just to kind of put that out there also.” No opinion is produced and none is in the packet, and the advice is offered on a different issue. It is recorded here as what was said, not as legal advice this page relies on.
1:22:27	The chair asks for the letter to be published as an exhibit	“And if you, if you wouldn’t mind sending this to Chelsea so it could go in the record. Yep. And be added as an exhibit, that would be great.” It was. Exhibit C- Dear Senator Ward.docx.pdf is in the 18 December packet, and item IV.4 of that agenda is “NH Senator Letter (Vote) (Exhibit C) Submitted and discussion to be led by Candace Crawford”. Two weeks from an out-of-order motion to a properly noticed action item with a published exhibit.	POSITIVE
1:22:35	A public meeting on school funding, announced for a week later	“The funding fairness project is having school funding and property taxes in Newport, hosting a public meeting, much like we had in Claremont we had six months ago. And, I’m going to send it to Josh to put on CCTV. The meeting is next Wednesday, December 11th at 6 p.m..” The chair adds: “Everybody knows what their tax rate is. And so, it behooves everyone in the, in the community interest in the tax rate to take an interest in how education is funded, right, in the state of New Hampshire.” The tax rate is the only local money figure gestured at all evening, and it is never stated.	OBSERVATION
1:23:29	A staff certification, named on the record	“The first item is a shout out to Chelsea Weatherford. She has completed a six month class that was offered by the American Society of Administrative Professionals. She received her certification and she’s going to continue taking continuing Ed credits to maintain that certification.” The same person is named seven times this evening as the destination for the presentation, the notices and the letter — the single point through which this board’s public record passes.
1:23:54	The SAU 6 board failed for want of a quorum the night before	“My second other business is that next Thursday we have an Saw board meeting. As we know, we did not have a quorum yesterday and we could not meet.” `an Saw board` is an SAU board Then: “We need to. We have legal deadlines we must follow. We have business that we must do. And I just want to know from this board, I’ve already reached out to a couple of people. People who are not here will be present, and it’s important that we have the quorum. So I’m asking each person here to be available and at that meeting and then we will have a quorum.” and “And there was illness. There were reasons and I understand, but we have legal deadlines and I’m trying to get it all done within that time frame.” These four sentences are the only public account of the 3 December 2024 SAU 6 meeting in existence (flag 6).	MEDIUM
1:24:59	Adjourned by consent at 7:55 p.m., thirty-five minutes early	“Is there any other thank you items that would like to be put on next meetings agenda, or is this this good? Okay. All right. If there’s no objection to a during the meeting, I’d like to adjourn the meeting seeing no objections. And.” The Future Dates item was never read. The board rose at 7:55 p.m. on a night when its budget did not exist, its default budget had not been presented, six subcommittees had reported nothing, and a motion had been made and disposed of without a vote.

Items flagged for review

Flags are a reviewer’s aid, produced by reading the recording and the district’s four-document packet against the New Hampshire and federal law in force on 4 December 2024 and against the board’s own by-laws and policies. 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 subcommittee writing the FY26 budget has left no minutes anywhere, and two of its December meetings — one of them noticed for the afternoon of this meeting — have no public trace at all

What the by-laws require of it. By-law 1.05(b): subcommittees “are meetings open to the public and are subject to New Hampshire’s Right to Know Law RSA 91-A: 2,I”. 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.” 1.05(d): “Minutes must be recorded and available for public inspection on the SAU 6 website within 5 days of the meeting.” 1.05(1): “The Finance Committee shall hold at least one regular monthly meeting and shall consist of three members… Shall report to the full Board monthly.” 1.11 puts all of that on the subcommittee chair personally: “Set and warn meeting times… Delegate or compile minutes and ensure they are posted within 5 days”.

What the law requires of it. RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d) reaches “any committee, subcommittee, or subordinate body thereof” of a school district. A three-member subcommittee of a seven-member board convenes a quorum of itself whenever two of its members meet, and RSA 91-A:2, II then requires 24 hours’ notice and minutes open to public inspection within five business days.

Two meetings with no trace.

4 December 2024, 1–3 p.m. — noticed twice. The approved minutes of 16 October 2024 print a list of four Finance Subcommittee dates — “i. November 12, 2024 ii. November 19, 2024 iii. December 4, 2024 iv. December 18, 2024” — and the 20 November agenda repeats it, as do the approved 20 November minutes: “Finance Subcommittee Budget Meeting dates: 1-3 PM at SRVRTC John Goodrich Community Room: i) December 4, 2024 ii) December 18, 2024”. The 4 December agenda silently drops that date, printing only 18 December. No minutes, no recording and no MAP section exist for it, and the evening’s own discussion reads as though nothing had happened that afternoon: the business administrator is still promising to get the budget “out to the finance committee by the end of the week” (1:06:00) and Crawford says “We got to get the copy of the budget, which.”
12 December 2024 — set on camera at 1:07:22, with its purpose stated at 1:09:11: “the first meeting on the 12th is just to do a pre meeting for, the 13th. So we can go over everything within the budget, make sure that we understand what we’re doing before we, come out in public”. The vice chair asks that it be noticed — “Can you let Chelsea know so she can get it out.” — the business administrator agrees, and a few minutes later confirms who will do it: “So Frank will deal with CCTV, so I don’t have to. Okay. Okay. But I’ll have Chelsea Warren.” So the direction to notice these meetings is on the record, twice, which is why this flag is about what the record does not contain rather than about anyone’s intention. No notice, agenda, minutes or recording of it has been found, it is not among the three meetings the board counts as televised, and the 13 December recording contains no reference back to it.

A third noticed date with no record. The first of the four dates on the 16 October list, 12 November 2024, has no minutes, no recording and no MAP section either, and the 19 November recording contains no reference back to it — every presenter treats 19 November as the committee’s first pass at the budget. Three of the five Finance Subcommittee dates noticed for this budget season left no public record of any kind.

And behind those, the whole committee. The Finance Committee met on 19 November, 13 December and 18 December 2024, all three on Cablecast and all three substantive: principals’ requests, a school-by-school walkthrough of the FY26 draft, and the convergence on a target. This project has found minutes for none of them. Input/SupportingDocuments/MAP.md records, for each, an independent two-stage search — the packets share, both candidate year folders of the district’s Meeting Minutes share, the following board meeting’s packet folder, and keyword searches — returning nothing. The by-laws’ own destination has now been checked too: the SAU 6 board page links a Finance subcommittee folder, and reading it on 2026-08-29 returns two sub-folders, Purpose Statement (created 2 June 2025) and 2025-2026 (created 2 July 2026). Nothing from 2024 is reachable from it.

Why this is the unmitigated limb. Public bodies met; no minutes exist in any district share; and nothing on the record explains it. The comparison inside the district’s own paperwork is what makes the absence unmistakable: the 18 December packet contains subcommittee minutes for two other December meetings — CSB Visioning Sub 12.9.24.docx.pdf and Cap Improvements Committee Meeting minutes 12.10.24.pdf. The district can and does file subcommittee minutes. It filed none for the committee assembling a thirty-six-million-dollar budget.

The honest limit. Two of these things this page cannot establish: whether the 4 December afternoon meeting and the 12 December meeting were held at all. The Google Drive interface under-reports on these shares — a folder enumeration of the 2024 packets share silently omits folders this project has recorded, and a title search misses files that read fine by identifier — so every negative here is written as not found and never as does not exist. The SAU 6 website as it stood in December 2024 cannot be inspected from here; the board itself conceded on 21 August 2024 that the venue was not operating.

Sources: Claremont School Board By-Laws, rules 1.05(b)–(d), 1.05(1) and 1.11; approved minutes 10.16.24, Future Dates, for the four noticed Finance Subcommittee dates; CSB Agenda 11.20.24 and approved minutes 11.20.24, Future Dates; CSB Agenda 12.4.24, Future Dates; packet 10. CSB 12.18.24, which holds the 9 and 10 December subcommittee minutes; SAU 6, Claremont School Board and its linked Finance subcommittee folder, read 2026-08-29; MAP.md §§58, 64 and 65; the companion page Finance Committee — 19 November 2024.

MEDIUM The only presentation by the administration exists nowhere the public can reach it — and a board member said on the record that she could not read it in the room

The rule, quoted rather than numbered. The by-laws contain two rules numbered 2.09, so the number alone is ambiguous. The one that applies is the agenda-and-publication rule, and its last paragraph reads: “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.”

What happened. The assistant superintendent presented for twenty-one minutes from a slide deck he ran himself — fall 2024 PSAT results for 37 students, the spring 2023 and 2024 SAT results, the 2022 whole-grade administrations, state and national comparison lines, and a breakdown by grade. The packet folder holds four documents: the agenda, the 20 November draft minutes, the 30 September joint draft minutes and (from 6 December) the students’ presentation. There is no PSAT deck, and the agenda names no exhibit for the item.

Why it matters more than a missing attachment usually would. At 0:06:44 a seated board member says she cannot distinguish the colours on the chart in front of her. A member of the public watching the recording is at a greater distance than she was, and has no original to fall back on. The approved minutes render the charts in prose — “Mr. Koski presented a chart of student scores that showed the percentage of students who met proficiency in both English and Math” — which satisfies RSA 91-A:2, II’s “brief description of the subject matter discussed” and does not put a single number in the public’s hands. The one figure that is checkable is the one the presenter spoke aloud: 37 students out of about 180.

The contrast inside this meeting is the point. The board asked for a student document to be published and it was published two days later. The administration’s document, which a by-law required to be online before or during the meeting, was never published at all.

Which limb, and why this is not HIGH. The mitigated limb. No vote turned on the deck; the presenter answered every question put to him from the floor; the minutes describe the material; and the underlying data is publicly checkable at the Department of Education’s iReport site, which the presenter himself named on the record. The 16 October page graded a comparable by-law breach HIGH because the missing document was the basis of a $350,000 vote. Nothing was voted here, and the divergence is stated rather than left silent.

Deliberately not cited. 28 CFR 35.200, the ADA Title II web-accessibility rule. Its compliance dates were amended by 91 FR 20912 on 20 April 2026 and now fall in 2027 and 2028, so no compliance date had arrived in December 2024 and neither the unpublished deck nor the image-only PDF that did arrive is a violation of it.

Sources: Claremont School Board By-Laws, the agenda-itemisation rule numbered 2.09; packet 9. CSB 12.4.24, all four documents read in full and each confirmed individually through the Drive metadata interface; approved minutes 12.4.24, item III.2; the companion page Claremont School Board — 16 October 2024 for the same rule applied to Exhibit B.

MEDIUM The consent agenda approved minutes the board had already approved seven weeks earlier — repeating, word for word, an error corrected aloud at the previous meeting

The sequence, and every step of it is in a district document.

16 October 2024 — the board approves the draft minutes of 2 October by consent. The draft is in that meeting’s packet and the approved minutes record the approval.
20 November 2024 — the printed agenda says “2. Minutes Approval- 10.2.24 & 11.14.24”. The assistant superintendent catches it on the record. The approved minutes of that meeting: “Assistant Superintendent Koski shared that the date for the October minutes was incorrect (read 10.2.24, should read 10.16.24)” — and the minutes then print the corrected heading.
4 December 2024 — the printed agenda says “2. Minutes Approval- 10.2.24 & 9.30.24 Joint City Council Meeting”. The same stale label, fourteen days after it was corrected out loud. Nobody catches it this time. The chair reads it (“Minutes approval from 10 to 24 and nine 3024 of the Joint City Council”), and the approved minutes of 4 December print it uncorrected as what the board approved.

What was actually in the packet, and what became of it. The 4 December packet holds two sets of draft minutes: the 20 November draft and the 30 September joint draft. The joint draft is genuinely disposed of — it is the second item on the consent list and this is its approval, on the forty-third business day after that meeting. The 20 November draft is not named at all, is not approved, and reappears in the 18 December packet, where the agenda finally reads “2. Minutes Approval- 11.20.24 & 12.4.24”. Twenty-eight days from meeting to approval, with one meeting’s worth of the delay caused by a heading nobody read.

What the statute reaches, and what it does not. RSA 91-A:2, II sets a five-business-day deadline for minutes to be open to public inspection, not for their approval, and it requires minutes to record “a brief description of the subject matter discussed and final decisions”. The defect here is in the description, not in a deadline: the district’s permanent record of 4 December 2024 states that the board approved minutes that were not before it, and does not state that it left in the packet a set that was.

Which limb. The mitigated one. Minutes exist for every meeting named; the 20 November set was approved a fortnight later; and the joint minutes named on the agenda were genuinely approved. What is not mitigated is that the error was identified aloud, by name, at the immediately preceding meeting, and reproduced anyway.

Sources: CSB Agenda 12.4.24, item II.a.2; approved minutes 12.4.24; CSB Agenda 11.20.24 and approved minutes 11.20.24, item II.a.2; CSB Agenda 12.18.24, item II.a.2; 11.20.24 DRAFT CSB meeting minutes as filed in this packet; the companion pages 16 October 2024 and the joint meeting of 30 September 2024.

MEDIUM A motion was made and, on the minutes, seconded — and the recording contains no vote, no seconder and no word of withdrawal

What the recording has. The mover: “I’ll make the motion.” and then the motion itself, “We we, endorse the letter. This Crawford has given us as the as the Claremont School Board.” A member interjects the procedure: “He needs a second. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to interrupt. Okay. Thank you. Made a motion. We need a second. So a second. Okay. Now, if you want to.” No other voice says the word. The point of order follows, the chair offers two ways out (“The option is lay on the table until next meeting. Or we can individually sign the the letter as school board members if we choose.”), the letter’s author asks for it to be carried over, and the mover adds “With the comment that I think that it’s very important that that this be communicated as a board.” Then the meeting moves on. There is no vote, and nobody says the motion is withdrawn.

What the minutes have. “Frank Sprague made a motion to endorse the letter presented by Candace Crawford as the Claremont School Board, Bonnie Miles seconded the motion”; then the point of order and the chair’s options; then “Frank Sprague withdrew his motion but that he believes the Board should collectively support the letter”.

The statutory duty is discharged, and that is the point. RSA 91-A:2, II — the mover-and-seconder clause, in force from 2018, 244:1, effective 1 January 2019 and binding on every meeting in this corpus — requires “The names of the members who made or seconded each motion” to be recorded. The minutes do record both. The difficulty is the other way round: the minutes carry a seconder and a disposition that a listener to the recording cannot verify, and the recording carries a seconded motion whose disposal exists only in the minutes.

The board’s own rule on what happens next. By-law 2.07: “When a motion is made and seconded, it shall be considered by the Board and not otherwise”, and “Another motion cannot be raised until all other motions are settled or adjourned”. A withdrawal is the ordinary way a mover settles his own motion, and the minutes say that is what happened; the recording preserves the substance of it (the mover assenting, with a comment) but not the word.

Which limb. The mitigated one, and it is a close call. The minutes are complete on their face and name both movers; the outcome is unambiguous, and the item returned two weeks later as a properly noticed vote (flag 15). What is left is that the public record of how a seconded motion left the floor rests entirely on one document, and the recording does not corroborate it.

Sources: the dialogue file at 1:20:07 to 1:21:52; approved minutes 12.4.24, item IV; RSA 91-A:2, II (2023 codification); by-law 2.07.

MEDIUM Two seated members hold no voice in the recording and five turns in the minutes — and one of those turns settles a question this project has carried since November

The arithmetic of the room. Six members were present. The dialogue file attributes segments to four of them — the chair, the vice chair, Crawford and Hawkins. Bonnie Miles and Michael Petrin have no attributed segment at all, and the file’s own notes say so and say why: the recognizer produced a single unbroken cluster where two men, and elsewhere two women, are the likelier reading. The approved minutes give those two members five turns between them.

What the minutes give to Bonnie Miles. “Bonnie Miles asked how the project originated” and “Bonnie Miles asked if these assessments are done across the state and if we can compare to other towns”. On the recording those are at 0:50:46 (“And I’d like to know.” / “How the idea came up to do this.”) and at 0:23:18 (“These these results. These test these test results. Does this mean being done in other essays across the state?” other essays is other SAUs), and both sit in the cluster this page files as Arlene Hawkins.

What the minutes give to Michael Petrin. “Michael Petrin asked about trends in higher education regarding SAT requirements”; “Michael Petrin said that it does still exist, but there seems to be less emphasis on SAT prep”; and “Michael Petrin asked a point of order question regarding if there can be an action item under other business”. On the recording those are at 0:17:25, 0:19:11 and 1:21:02, and all three sit in the cluster this page files as Frank Sprague.

One segment of the recording is the strongest evidence the minutes are right. At 1:21:02 a single transcript segment reads, in full: “That’s my motion. Good. Kind of a point of order question.” The first sentence is the mover confirming his own motion; the next two open an objection to it. A speaker raising a point of order against a motion he has just made in the same breath is possible and odd; two men sharing one recognizer cluster is the commonest failure this diarizer makes, and the district’s minutes name the second man.

Why this matters beyond one evening. At 0:19:38 the same cluster says “I’m not considered to have a higher degree because I only have an associate’s degree… both my my wife and I both have socialist degrees”, every word of it at recognizer confidence 1.00. That sentence cannot be squared with the same man’s description of himself elsewhere in this corpus as a principal of three high schools, and this project has carried the contradiction as an open question. The approved minutes of this meeting assign the answer that immediately precedes it — that the college-access programme still exists — to Michael Petrin, not to the vice chair. That does not close the question by itself: the minutes split one continuous run on the recording into a question and an answer, and this page will not re-label a dialogue file on a document’s say-so. It does mean the merge reading now has external support, and the contradiction has a plausible resolution.

What this page therefore does. It quotes only from the dialogue file, attributes each quotation to the cluster the file names, and says wherever the minutes name someone else. No word on this page is attributed to Bonnie Miles or to Michael Petrin, and no dialogue label is changed. The second hard rule of this project is that a wrong name is worse than no name, and here the two sources disagree in a way the recording alone cannot settle.

Which limb. The mitigated one: minutes exist, they are detailed, and their attributions are internally coherent. The defect is that the district’s record and the district’s recording cannot both be right about who spoke, and a reader has no way to tell from either document alone.

Sources: approved minutes 12.4.24, items III.1, III.2 and IV; the dialogue file’s own speaker notes, which set out the competing reading and record that a human should settle it; MAP.md §62.

MEDIUM The SAU 6 board failed for want of a quorum on 3 December, and four sentences at another body’s meeting are the only public account of it

What was said. At 1:23:54, from the chair of the SAU 6 board: “next Thursday we have an Saw board meeting. As we know, we did not have a quorum yesterday and we could not meet.” Then: “We have legal deadlines we must follow. We have business that we must do. And I just want to know from this board, I’ve already reached out to a couple of people. People who are not here will be present, and it’s important that we have the quorum. So I’m asking each person here to be available and at that meeting and then we will have a quorum.” And: “And there was illness. There were reasons and I understand, but we have legal deadlines and I’m trying to get it all done within that time frame.” The approved minutes carry it in one line.

What the SAU 6 record has. A packet folder, 4. SAU6 12.3.24, with four documents including an FY26 budget summary and a proposed FY26 budget. No minutes for 3 December 2024 exist in either share. The next SAU 6 packet folder carries the 14 November and 21 November drafts and nothing for 3 December; the Claremont Meeting Minutes share holds no SAU 6 files at all. There is no recording and no Cablecast show.

The deadline she is referring to is real. RSA 194-C:9, I: “At a meeting held before January 1, the school administrative unit board shall adopt a budget”, and the apportionment must be certified “prior to January 15 to the chairperson of each district school board”. With 3 December lost, the SAU 6 board had one scheduled meeting left in the year. It met on 12 December 2024 and adopted its FY26 budget that night, at a hearing at which no member of the public appeared.

What the canvassing is, and is not. Asking members individually whether they will attend a noticed meeting is not deliberation, and RSA 91-A:2-a, II — which bars communications outside a meeting, “including, but not limited to, sequential communications”, being used “to circumvent the spirit and purpose of this chapter” — is not engaged by securing attendance. No flag is raised on that, and the statute is cited here only to say that it is not being invoked. In force from 2008, 303:4, effective 1 July 2008; never amended.

Which limb, and why not HIGH. The mitigated one, on two grounds the severity rule names expressly: the body lacked a quorum and transacted nothing, and somebody on tape explains what happened and why. This meeting is the mitigation. Without these four sentences, the 3 December 2024 SAU 6 meeting would be a packet folder with no explanation anywhere.

Sources: the dialogue file; approved minutes 12.4.24, item IV; MAP.md §61, which records the two-stage minutes search, and §63; SAU 6 packet folder 4. SAU6 12.3.24; RSA 194-C:9 (2023 codification, three paragraphs); the companion page SAU 6 Board — 14 November 2024.

OBSERVATION The budget calendar, checked in days — what the two statutes actually required, and where the business administrator’s “January 14th” comes from

The two provisions, and which governs. RSA 32:5, I requires “at least one public hearing” on the budget “not later than 25 days before each annual or special meeting”, on “at least 7 days” notice. RSA 40:13, II-a then opens: “Notwithstanding any other provision of law, all local political subdivisions which adopt this subdivision… shall comply with the following schedule”. Claremont votes by official ballot, so the II-a schedule is the operative calendar and it displaces the general timing rule. Its four lettered subparagraphs are: (a) notice of budget hearings posted by the second Tuesday in January; (b) the RSA 273-A:1, III budget submission date and the deadline for petitioned articles, also the second Tuesday; (c) budget hearings held “on or before the third Tuesday in January”, with supplemental hearings available on seven days’ notice; (d) warrants and budgets posted “on or before the last Monday in January”.

The 2025 dates, computed. Second Tuesday in January 2025 = 14 January. Third Tuesday = 21 January. Last Monday = 27 January. Under ¶III the first session falls “between the first and second Saturdays following the last Monday in January, inclusive of those Saturdays” — 1 February to 8 February 2025. Under ¶VII the second session is the second Tuesday in March, 11 March 2025.

So the answer given on tape is a week conservative, and hedged. Asked “what does the DRA say about what’s our drop dead on a public hearing”, the business administrator answers “Budget January 14th, I’d have to go look at the schedule.” 14 January is II-a(a)’s notice-posting date, not II-a(c)’s hearing date. Erring a week early is the safe direction to err, and she flagged that she would check.

And the fallback stated from the floor is right. “January 2nd. Correct. But that hasn’t been warranted yet. So that if we don’t have that opportunity, we have until the middle of January. Is that correct?” It is correct, and it is what happened: the 18 December agenda moves the hearing from 2 January to 15 January 2025, six days inside II-a(c)’s deadline.

A trap this page deliberately does not fall into. Measured against a 1 February first session, RSA 32:5, I’s twenty-five days would put the last possible hearing at 7 January 2025, and a hearing on 15 January is only seventeen days out. That is not a violation. II-a’s “Notwithstanding any other provision of law” and its own express reference to “Budget hearings under RSA 32:5” make the third-Tuesday date the governing one for an official-ballot district, and the two rules are irreconcilable by design: a third-Tuesday hearing can never be twenty-five days before a first-Saturday-of-February session. No page in this project should flag an SB 2 district’s mid-January budget hearing as a breach of the twenty-five-day rule. The 2 January date the board aspired to on this night satisfied both readings, at thirty days.

What is not engaged here. RSA 32:5, ¶II bars only the insertion of a purpose or amount not disclosed at the final hearing, and ¶I expressly directs the body, “after the conclusion of public testimony”, to “finalize the budget to be submitted to the legislative body”. The exchange at 1:12:50 — “Recommend and bring it to the hearing. And then after the hearing, you’ll need to make.” / “The hearing. We can change it.” — states the law correctly.

Sources: RSA 40:13, II-a(a)–(d), III and VII, full text of II-a fetched 2026-08-29; the 2023 codification of RSA 40:13, whose source note ends 2019, 192:2, eff. 10 July 2019, so today’s text governs this date; RSA 32:5, I and II (2023 codification; source note ends 2021, 134:3, 4) — the 2025, 144:1 amendment, effective 30 August 2025, is deliberately not applied; RSA 288:1 for the January holiday; the agendas of 4 December and 18 December 2024.

OBSERVATION Not one dollar of this district’s own money is named in eighty-five minutes — the FY24 close is not reconciled here, and the word ESSER is never spoken

The count. Searching the whole dialogue file for currency, for every figure this project has been tracking, and for every spelling and mis-recognition of ESSER that this corpus attests returns nothing. No fund balance, no encumbrance, no retention, no tax rate, no FY26 total, no percentage. The only money figures spoken all evening are the State’s adequacy rates in the letter to a senator (flag 9) and the students’ graduation-rate percentages.

What is therefore still open at the end of this meeting. The FY24 close has three published figures and no bridge between them: $544,145.29 given to the board on 18 September 2024; $497,000 on 16 October; and a total encumbrance of $648,931.76 in the September packet against $583,931.76 of roofs voted on 20 June. The retention ceiling was stated as $466,664.43 and published in the approved minutes as $469,000 — $2,335.57 above the stated maximum. None of it is mentioned here. The business administrator’s item was noticed as the default budget and the FY26 summary, was replaced by the chair before it began, and what she gave was an audit report and a calendar.

ESSER, stated as silence. The board last asked for an accounting on 16 October 2024, when the Finance chair asked for the final disposition of the money — his words on that recording — and was told the office was still assembling the numbers. The approved minutes of that meeting record the same request in the Finance Subcommittee’s own line: “Frank Sprague shared that he would still like to see a presentation on ESSER”. No accounting, and no presentation, was ever given. ESSER is spoken in later recordings in this corpus only retrospectively — a position described on a later recording as previously ESSER-funded, equipment bought with the money — and at this meeting it is not spoken at all, six weeks after the federal obligation deadline of 30 September 2024 and seven weeks before the liquidation deadline of 28 January 2025. This page records the silence and asserts nothing about what the money did.

What was said about money instead. The audit backlog, with a date attached: FY21 being written up, FY22 begun, and “we should have all of these audits through 24 done by June”, with the FY21 auditors’ presentation to be made in January 2025 by video because the board has only one January meeting to spare. RSA 21-J:19 is permissive as to timing, so a four-year backlog is a control weakness and not a missed statutory deadline; 2 CFR 200.512(a)(1) is the provision that does bite where federal expenditure crosses the single-audit threshold, and no federal expenditure figure is given here either.

The honest limit. Silence at one meeting is not evidence that the reconciliation does not exist; the district’s finance office may hold it. What this page can say is that it is not on this recording, not in this packet, and not in these minutes, and that a member of the public following the FY24 close from the September and October meetings learns nothing further here.

Sources: the dialogue file, searched in full; packet 9. CSB 12.4.24, all four documents; approved minutes 10.16.24, Finance Subcommittee line; the companion pages 18 September 2024 and 16 October 2024, which carry the figures and the derivation; U.S. Department of Education grantee memorandum, 12 June 2024, for the 30 September 2024 and 28 January 2025 dates.

OBSERVATION The adequacy arithmetic in the letter: $4,100 against the $4,182 actually in force, and a court ruling that was under stay

What the letter asks for. The document, published as Exhibit C to the 18 December agenda, asks the senator to sponsor a bill to “Increase the State’s annual base adequacy aid payment from $4,100 to $7,356.01 per pupil.” On tape the figure is given as “a little over 7300” and then “the 7356 per student”, with “Right now, it’s 4100”.

$4,100 is the statute; $4,182 is the number in force. RSA 198:40-a, II sets “A cost of $4,100 per pupil in the ADMR”, from 2023, 79:150, effective 1 July 2023. RSA 198:40-d then requires the department, “Beginning July 1, 2024 and every year thereafter”, to adjust those rates by “an increase of 2 percent annually” — from 2023, 79:151, same effective date. $4,100 × 1.02 = $4,182, which is the figure this district’s own business administrator gave the deliberative session in February 2024 and the joint session on 30 September 2024. The letter’s baseline is the unadjusted statutory text, and its gap is therefore about eighty dollars wider than the true one. (Vintage note: 2025, 141:223 rewrites RSA 198:40-d effective 1 July 2026; that text is not applied here.)

The case, and what had and had not happened by this date. The letter says “The Claremont, Newport, and Charlestown school districts were plaintiffs in the ConVal v. State of New Hampshire case, where the Superior Court ruled that the state’s base adequacy funding is grossly inadequate”, and “This builds on the earlier Claremont lawsuits”. On tape the two are compressed into one sentence: “this is regarding the lawsuit, that, Claremont was a, coal plaintiff, and we were successful with the state Supreme Court.” Claremont was the lead plaintiff in the 1993 and 1997 Claremont cases and won both in the New Hampshire Supreme Court. The ConVal ruling is a different, later case: a Rockingham County Superior Court decision of November 2023 setting a conservative minimum threshold of $7,356.01 per pupil, which the New Hampshire Supreme Court stayed on 13 March 2024 and had not decided on appeal as at 4 December 2024. The publicly reported plaintiff districts at the outset were Contoocook Valley, Monadnock, Mascenic and Winchester, with Manchester joining later; this page has not established whether Claremont, Newport and Charlestown later joined, and does not assert that they did not.

Why it is an observation and not a flag against anyone. Nothing in law requires a board member to state a case’s procedural posture correctly when introducing a letter for signature, and the letter itself is careful to say “the Superior Court ruled”. The point is for a reader: the board was invited to endorse, as a body, a document whose central factual premise had been stayed by the state’s highest court eight months earlier, and no one in the room said so.

What the minutes get backwards. The approved minutes say the letter was one “regarding the ConVal lawsuit from Senator Ruth Ward, chairman of the education committee”. The letter is addressed to Senator Ward, not from her; it opens “Dear Senator Ward,” and asks her to sponsor a bill. The recording is unambiguous: “this is a letter asking as her constituents to have a bill to increase adequacy aid”.

Sources: Exhibit C- Dear Senator Ward, read in full from the 18 December packet; RSA 198:40-a, II and RSA 198:40-d (both 2023, 79:150 and 79:151, eff. 1 July 2023); New Hampshire Bulletin, 13 March 2024, on the Supreme Court’s stay and Education Law Center on the later Supreme Court decision — both secondary sources, reported as such; approved minutes 12.4.24, item IV.

OBSERVATION Citizens’ comments took twenty-two seconds, and the chair said on the record that she was skipping the recital of the rules

The statute. RSA 189:74: a school board shall “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 “The public comment period shall be for no less than 30 minutes”, excepting only emergency meetings and meetings whose sole purpose is nonpublic session. In force from 2022, 333:1, effective 6 September 2022; never amended. Whether the thirty minutes is a floor on the opportunity offered or on elapsed time is not settled by the text, and this project has never asserted a violation where nobody was turned away. Nobody was turned away here.

The board’s own policy, which answers the question for this board. Policy BEDH — first reading 17 May 2023, adopted 6 September 2023, per its own history block — says at B: “The Board will provide a minimum of thirty minutes in total to hear all public comments under RSA 189:74.” And at B.3: “The Board Chair will close the public comment period after there is no response to the Board Chair’s vocal invitation to the audience to make a public comment during the specified comment period.” The whole of the item on tape is one sentence: “Next order of business assistant comments. Seeing no citizens comments, I won’t go through the diatribe of what’s expected from citizens.”

Two things are different from the neighbouring meetings. First, the invitation and the close are the same sentence, and the chair states expressly that she is omitting the recital of the rules that policy BEDH sets out. Second, the step B.5 requires next did not happen: “After closing public comment, the Board Chair will open ‘Board Discussion Regarding Citizens Comments.’” The chair went straight to the student board members’ report. That step is small when nobody has spoken, and it is recorded because it is where a board would take up the written comments policy BEDH B.8 invites, and the record does not show whether any were received.

By-law 2.04 and 4.03(c). The by-laws require a public comment session at each regular meeting and make timing it the clerk’s duty. The clerk was present, and there was no time to keep.

Consistency. This project has recorded the identical pattern at the meetings of 18 September and 2 October 2024, graded OBSERVATION both times. It is graded the same here, and no violation of the statute is asserted.

Sources: RSA 189:74 (2022, 333:1, eff. 6 September 2022); board policy BEDH, Public Comment & Participation at Board Meetings, read in full through the Drive interface on 2026-08-29 with the adoption dates taken from its own District Policy History block; by-laws 2.04 and 4.03(c); the companion pages 18 September 2024 and 2 October 2024.

OBSERVATION Six subcommittee headings, one sentence, no report — and the Policy Committee’s work is sitting in a shared drive nobody has read

The rule. By-law 1.05 gives four of the six an express reporting duty: the Finance Committee “Shall report to the full Board monthly”; the Policy Committee “shall hold at least one regular monthly meeting… Shall report to the full Board monthly and shall confirm the receipt of suggested policies brought to the committee by a Board member in a timely fashion”; Capital Improvement “shall… meet at least quarterly… Shall report to the full Board monthly”; and Ad Hoc Committees “Shall report to the full Board monthly”. The Curriculum representative “should report to the full Board quarterly or as dictated by curriculum review cycle”.

What happened. The whole item, at 1:16:59: “Subcommittees, we’ve kind of discussed that there’s nobody needs to present for that or has anything to add. We’ve already talked about what’s going on with the finance committee.” The minutes print all six headings and then “No updates”. The Finance Committee’s report is real — it was delivered inside the business administrator’s item, which is where the whole December schedule was set. The other five gave nothing.

The Policy Committee is the one with a substantive gap, and it is visible in the record. Its chair was absent. The business administrator has drafted policies arising from the audits, and describes where they are: “I think I’ve dumped them into the file that you guys have or Whitney has out there… So I just don’t know if they’ve been reviewed yet”. The Curriculum representative — who chairs the SAU 6 policy committee, not the district’s — asks for an email saying where in the shared drive they are, “rather than trying to search for it”. By-law 1.05(2) makes confirming receipt of suggested policies the committee’s own duty, and the committee did not report on 20 November either.

Why this is an observation and not a breach. The by-law’s reporting cycle is monthly, and December had two meetings: this one and 18 December. Two subcommittees demonstrably met within six days of this meeting — the SRVRTC Visioning subcommittee on 9 December and Capital Improvements on 10 December, both with minutes filed in the 18 December packet. A single silent meeting is not a missed monthly report, and this page does not treat it as one. What it records is that on the night the FY26 budget season opened, five of six standing bodies of this board had nothing to tell it.

The by-laws’ publication destination, checked. Rules 1.05(c), 1.05(d) and 1.11 send every subcommittee notice and every set of subcommittee minutes to the SAU 6 website. The board page links five subcommittee folders; read on 2026-08-29 they were created in February and April 2026, four are empty and one holds a purpose statement of June 2025. Nothing from 2024 is reachable from any of them, and there is no folder at all for the Ad Hoc Communications subcommittee. The honest limit: the site as it stood in December 2024 cannot be inspected from here, so this is not published where the by-laws require, and not recoverable, not never existed.

Sources: Claremont School Board By-Laws, rules 1.05, 1.05(1)–(5) and 1.11; approved minutes 12.4.24, item III.4; approved minutes 11.20.24, item IV.6; packet 10. CSB 12.18.24; SAU 6, Claremont School Board and its five linked subcommittee folders, read 2026-08-29.

OBSERVATION The noticed budget item was replaced by the chair before it began, and there is no superintendent’s report on the agenda at all

What was noticed. Agenda item III.3, in full: “3. Default Budget & Proposed FY26 Budget Summary and Tutorial on School Budgeting, Funding, Tax Impact and Tax Rate Setting (Discussion) Mary Henry, Business Administrator”. Three things: the default budget, the FY26 proposal, and a public tutorial on how a school budget and a tax rate are actually set.

What replaced it, and when. At 0:01:04, inside the consent agenda: “I myself would like to change one of the items on the on the action items, which is the discussion regarding the finances. We’ll be shifting to, a brief discussion about where we are at in the budgeting process, where we are at with audits currently, and updates on how we’re going to move forward with the Finance Committee in the next few weeks.” There was no objection, which by-law 2.10 permits, and the minutes record the amendment. The chair later introduces the item as “the revised, presentation from Miss Henry”.

No rule was broken. RSA 40:13, XI(a) requires that “The default budget shall be disclosed and presented for questions and discussion at the first budget hearing held pursuant to RSA 32:5 or RSA 197:6” — at the hearing, not at a regular board meeting, and the hearing was still five to seven weeks away. Amending an agenda by consent is what by-law 2.10 is for.

What it cost the public, which is why it is here. This was the last regular board meeting before a Finance Committee run of three meetings in six days, and the item the public had been told to expect — a tutorial on how the tax rate is set, in the month the tax bills land — did not happen. A board member said at the same meeting what the compression costs: “I know last year we spent several meetings going over the budget. And then I thought it was a very clear process. And I think the public responded to that clarity and to have it compacted. I think is unfortunate.” The item was carried, not abandoned: it appears verbatim as III.3 on the 18 December agenda, this time with an Exhibit D, and the same packet carries a school tax-rate presentation dated 11 December 2024.

And the other absence on this agenda. There is no Superintendent’s Report item. The 20 November agenda has one at 6:40 p.m. and the 18 December agenda has one at 6:40 p.m.; this one has none, and the superintendent is not heard on the recording, being referred to in the third person three times. This page does not assert he was absent — the minutes record attendance for board members only. What can be said is that the district’s Appendix A, reproducing the State Board’s duties of school boards, requires the board to “require the attendance of the superintendent or his designee”, and the assistant superintendent was in the room and presented.

Sources: CSB Agenda 12.4.24, item III.3 and the absence of a Superintendent’s Report; CSB Agenda 11.20.24 and CSB Agenda 12.18.24, both of which carry one; RSA 40:13, XI(a); by-law 2.10 and Appendix A.

OBSERVATION The draft minutes of this meeting reached the public on the sixth business day — and why that is graded differently here from its neighbours

The duty. RSA 91-A:2, II, in the 2023 codification in force on this date: minutes “shall be promptly recorded and open to public inspection not more than 5 business days after the meeting”. Deliberately not applied: the start-time, end-time and minutes-producer clauses added by 2025, 112:1, effective 22 August 2025.

The arithmetic, in business days, excluding weekends and the legal holidays enumerated in RSA 288:1. The meeting was Wednesday 4 December 2024. There is no RSA 288:1 holiday between that date and the middle of the month, so the five business days are 5, 6, 9, 10 and 11 December — the deadline was Wednesday 11 December 2024.

11 December 2024, 16:09 UTC — the fifth business day. The draft’s own modifiedTime. On this reading the document was finished inside the window.
12 December 2024, 21:03 UTC — the sixth business day. The draft’s createdTime, twenty-two seconds after the creation of the packet folder for the 18 December meeting. This is the date the public could see it.
18 December 2024 — approved, on the tenth business day.
7 January 2025 — the approved PDF reaches the district’s 2024 Meeting Minutes folder, the twenty-second business day.

Which reading the finding rests on. The statutory duty is that minutes be open to public inspection, which is the createdTime measure: one business day late. The gap between the two timestamps is about twenty-nine hours — long enough to mean something about when the document was finished, and short of the multi-day gaps this project has treated as decisive evidence elsewhere. Both are reported and the finding rests on the later one.

Why OBSERVATION and not MEDIUM. This corpus grades minutes-lateness findings MEDIUM, including a five-business-day overrun on 18 September 2024 and a twenty-five-business-day overrun on the joint meeting of 30 September. This page diverges, and says so rather than leaving it silent: the overrun is one business day, the document demonstrably existed on the last day of the window, and the pattern the metadata shows is publication-on-packet-assembly rather than late drafting. Grading a one-day slip the same as a five-week one would make the scale meaningless.

The honest limit. These dates are Google Drive metadata for the district’s public share. If the draft was posted somewhere else first — the SAU 6 website, a physical posting at the SAU office — this page cannot see it, and the finding is about the share this project can inspect.

Sources: Drive file metadata for 12.4.24 DRAFT CSB meeting minutes.pdf and its parent folder 10. CSB 12.18.24, and for the approved copy, all read 2026-08-29; RSA 91-A:2, II (2023 codification); RSA 288:1 — chapter 288 is Title XXV; the companion pages 18 September 2024 and 30 September 2024 for the grading this one diverges from.

OBSERVATION The 6 November 2024 meeting appears on no consent agenda in this sequence, and this is the third one it has been left off

What exists. A packet folder, 7. CSB 11.6.24, recorded in this project’s map, and a scheduled date: the approved minutes of 16 October 2024 print “a. Claremont Board Meeting 11/6/2024” at the head of their Future Dates. No minutes were ever created for it. Cablecast shows 16140 and 16141 are both dated 3 November and 16142 is the SAU 6 meeting of 14 November, with other programming carried on 1, 3 and 4 November, so it is not a recording outage.

The three consent agendas that follow it. 20 November approved “10.16.24 & 11.14.24”. 4 December approved “10.2.24 & 9.30.24 Joint City Council Meeting”. 18 December approved “11.20.24 & 12.4.24”. 6 November is on none of them, and no line in any of the three minutes says why.

Why it belongs on this page. The 4 December consent agenda is the one that reached back furthest — to 2 October and 30 September — and it still did not reach 6 November. A board disposing of a nine-week-old set of joint minutes on the same list is a board that was working through a backlog, and 6 November was not in the pile. Under RSA 91-A:2, II a meeting of a public body owes minutes within five business days whether or not anyone later approves them; if the 6 November meeting was cancelled, nothing in any district document says so.

The honest limit. The Drive interface will not return the contents of 7. CSB 11.6.24, and a folder enumeration of the 2024 packets share silently omits it. This is written as not found, never as does not exist, and the existence of the folder itself is taken from this project’s own browser enumeration recorded in the map.

Sources: the three agendas and three sets of approved minutes named above; approved minutes 10.16.24, Future Dates; MAP.md; RSA 91-A:2, II (2023 codification).

POSITIVE A point of order stopped the board acting on an item nobody outside the room had seen — and fourteen days later it came back properly noticed, with the document published

What the by-law says, quoted rather than numbered (the by-laws contain two rules numbered 2.09). The agenda-and-publication rule: “Items of business requiring board discussion and/or action shall be submitted as agenda items to the Executive Assistant to the superintendent no later than noon fourteen days prior to the meeting, with all backup information, where applicable, being provided by the board member”. And: “Items brought up under new business should be informational, requests for future meetings or agenda items. If an item requiring action is brought up under new business the item must be deemed emergency or time sensitive that cannot be put off until an upcoming meeting.”

What happened. The letter was added to Other Business at the agenda amendments, having been given to the board on paper. A motion to endorse it as a board was made. Then, at 1:21:02: “Kind of a point of order question.” and “And I, you know, I have for this letter, but this is not on our agenda. It’s not under the discussion reaction items. So technically, I’m not sure we can take action in the motion on this item.” A second member states the rule from the floor: “Right. Other business should be non decisive. Not not not making a decision.” And the reason the rule exists is given too: “There may be members that are here that this was not on the agenda… That was coming up tonight.”

Every element of the by-law is satisfied by that analysis. The item was not submitted fourteen days ahead; no backup information was provided to anyone but the seven members in the room; and nobody suggested it was emergency or time sensitive. The board applied its own rule against a motion its own vice chair had made and which every member appeared to favour.

And the follow-through is complete. The chair asked for the document: “And if you, if you wouldn’t mind sending this to Chelsea so it could go in the record. Yep. And be added as an exhibit, that would be great.” It was. Exhibit C- Dear Senator Ward.docx.pdf is in the 18 December packet, and item IV.4 of that agenda reads “NH Senator Letter (Vote) (Exhibit C) Submitted and discussion to be led by Candace Crawford”. An out-of-order motion on 4 December became a noticed, exhibited, voted item on 18 December, with fourteen days for the public to read the document first. That is the rule working exactly as written.

Recorded even though the attribution is contested. The approved minutes credit the point of order to Michael Petrin and the recording places it in the vice chair’s cluster (flag 5). The credit here goes to the board, and this page names no individual for it.

Sources: Claremont School Board By-Laws, the agenda-itemisation rule numbered 2.09; approved minutes 12.4.24, item IV; CSB Agenda 12.18.24, item IV.4; Exhibit C- Dear Senator Ward.

POSITIVE The students’ presentation was published two days later, and their finding became an agenda item in a fortnight

The request. The room could not get the slideshow onto the screen, and the students handed out paper. At 0:32:29 the chair asked: “Well, is there any way this could somehow be given to Chelsea to be incorporated in the minutes so that everybody has an opportunity to have the public access?” and at the end of the item told them “And this will be available to the public. Just so you know, it’s on the website”.

The delivery, dated. SHS ECH Psychology Class Presentation_0001.pdf was created in the packet folder on 6 December 2024 — two days after the meeting, and three days after the folder and its other three files. The chair had been told before the meeting that there would be no exhibit (“Chelsea said there were no, exhibits to be attached and that they were just going to come up and present”), so this is a document that was added because the board asked for it. The approved minutes carry the commitment too: “Presentation will be included in the minutes on the website”.

The substance was acted on as well. The presentation’s conclusion is that the new seven-period schedule is driving stress among students and staff. Item IV.2 of the 18 December agenda is “High School Schedule Review (Discussion) (Exhibit B) Dr. Michael Herrington, SHS Principal”, and Exhibit B- 2024-2025 SHS Schedule Review.pdf is in that packet. Two students presented on 4 December and the principal presented on the same subject on 18 December.

A note on what the document is. Six megabytes, a scan of the printed deck, image-only. That raises no compliance question on this date — see flag 2 on why 28 CFR 35.200 is not cited — and it is materially better than the alternative, which was nothing. The deck names no student and no member of staff: the survey responses it reproduces are anonymous, and this page reproduces no identifying detail from it either.

Sources: Drive file metadata for SHS ECH Psychology Class Presentation_0001.pdf and its parent folder, read 2026-08-29; the document itself, read in full; approved minutes 12.4.24, item III.1; CSB Agenda 12.18.24, item IV.2.

POSITIVE The deliberative session and its snow date are the two ends of the statutory window, and the hearing date announced here satisfied both statutes

What the agenda announced. “Claremont School Board Deliberative Session- Saturday, February 1, 2025. Snow Date: Saturday, February 8, 2025”.

What RSA 40:13, III allows. The first session of the annual meeting “shall be held between the first and second Saturdays following the last Monday in January, inclusive of those Saturdays”. The last Monday in January 2025 was 27 January; the first Saturday following it was 1 February and the second 8 February. The district picked the first day of the window and set its snow date on the last — the widest lawful spread available, and both dates inside the statute without an amendment or a court date.

And the hearing date announced with them worked too. 2 January 2025 is thirty days before 1 February, which satisfies RSA 32:5, I’s twenty-five days on any reading, and is nineteen days inside RSA 40:13, II-a(c)’s third-Tuesday deadline. The board also knew, on the record, that it had room to move: “that hasn’t been warranted yet. So that if we don’t have that opportunity, we have until the middle of January.” It used that room a fortnight later and stayed inside the statute (flag 7).

Recorded because it is not automatic. This corpus contains a deliberative session whose presiding officer held an office New Hampshire law does not create, and a district budget calendar that has been argued over in this project’s pages for two years. Getting the statutory window right, six weeks ahead, and printing it on a public agenda, is the ordinary competence a reader should be told about when it happens.

Sources: CSB Agenda 12.4.24, Future Dates; RSA 40:13, II-a and III; the 2023 codification; RSA 32:5, I (2023 codification).

POSITIVE The clerk was present, read the roll, and was thanked for her minutes on the record

Why it is worth a flag. By-law 2.05: “The chair shall commence the meeting at the hour appointed and the clerk shall call the roll.” Through the autumn of 2024 the second half of that sentence kept failing. The clerk was absent on 21 August (the chair read the roll herself), on 18 September (a board member read it at the chair’s request), and on 14 November (the superintendent read three rolls at the SAU 6 meeting) — four different substitute readers across five months. She was present on 20 November and she is present here, and she reads the roll at 0:00:28.

And the minutes were praised, by name, in open session. “I just want to say thank you for you do great minutes and yes, yes, it’s it’s really appreciated and we can actually use them.” and “when I was reading them over I just was like these are awesome. So thank you very much.” These minutes are, on content, among the fullest this district produces — they name every questioner, summarise every survey figure correctly, and reproduce the audit timetable and the budget schedule. Two of this page’s flags turn on places where they and the recording disagree, and neither is a complaint that the minutes are thin.

The duty they discharge. RSA 91-A:2, II requires the names of members present, the names of persons appearing before the body, a brief description of the subject matter discussed, final decisions, and the mover and seconder of each motion. All five are present in this set, including the names of the two student presenters, one of whose surname is spoken nowhere on the recording.

Sources: by-law 2.05; approved minutes 12.4.24; RSA 91-A:2, II (2023 codification); the companion pages 21 August 2024, 18 September 2024 and SAU 6 — 14 November 2024.

Appendix — source files

Official and public sources

Recording: Claremont Community Television, Cablecast show 16192 — “School Board Meeting 12/4/24”. Event date 4 December 2024; total run time 5,150 seconds (1:25:50) on a single reel, per the Cablecast API, read 2026-08-29. The reel record carries no user file name.
Minutes of this meeting: 10. Approved CSB meeting minutes 12.4.24 — seven pages, read in full, signed “Respectfully submitted by Noelle Kronberg, board clerk”. Approved on the consent agenda of 18 December 2024; the approved copy reached the district’s 2024 Meeting Minutes folder on 7 January 2025. The draft, 12.4.24 DRAFT CSB meeting minutes.pdf, is in the 18 December packet, created there 12 December 2024 with a modification time of 11 December (flag 13).
Packet: 9. CSB 12.4.24 — 4 documents, all four read in full for this page. Folder created 3 December 2024 at 16:14 UTC; three files created at 16:14 UTC, ten to eleven seconds after the folder, with modification times inside the same minute — an upload-session artefact that says nothing about when the documents were written. The fourth file was created 6 December 2024 at 13:48 UTC, two days after the meeting.
- _CSB Agenda 12.4.24.pdf — the official agenda; six numbered sections, no exhibits named anywhere. Carries the board and central-office mastheads, the core value and mission statement, the CCTV watch link and the link to policy BEDH.
- 11.20.24 DRAFT CSB meeting minutes.pdf — in the packet, and not on the consent list (flag 3). A second copy reaches the 18 December packet, where it is finally approved.
- draft minutes for Joint CSB_City Council meeting 9.30.24.pdf — approved by consent at this meeting, on the forty-third business day after that meeting. A first copy had reached the public share on 14 November 2024 in the 20 November packet.
- SHS ECH Psychology Class Presentation_0001.pdf — added after the meeting, on 6 December, at the chair’s request. 6.3 MB, a scan of the printed deck, image-only. Nineteen slides covering the survey design, the physiology, five survey questions with their distributions, four verbatim written responses and the conclusion. It names no student and no member of staff. The source for every figure this page attributes to the deck, and for the two written responses the recording renders with a dropped negation.
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(b)–(d) and 1.05(1)–(5) (subcommittees, notice, minutes, reporting frequency), 1.09 (documentation with the agenda), 1.11 (subcommittee chairs’ duties), 2.01 (meeting dates and quorum), 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, the fourteen-day submission deadline, action under new business, and publication of administration presentations, 2.10 (consent agenda), 2.16 (student members), 4.01 (chair), 4.02 (vice chair, including “calling points of order when appropriate”), 4.03 (clerk) and Appendix A (the State Board’s duties of school boards). The two rules numbered 2.09 are a defect of the governing document, so this page quotes the text of the rule it relies on and never the number alone.
Board policy. BEDH, Public Comment & Participation at Board Meetings — read in full on 2026-08-29, with adoption dates taken from its own District Policy History block: first reading 17 May 2023, second reading and adopted 6 September 2023. Sections B, B.3, B.4, B.5 and B.8 are relied on at flag 10. The agenda links this document directly.
Neighbouring district documents this page relies on: 7. Approved CSB meeting minutes 10.16.24, read in full (the consent approval of the 2 October minutes, the four noticed Finance Subcommittee dates, the 6 November meeting date, the $469,000 retention ceiling, and the Finance chair’s request for an ESSER presentation); CSB Agenda 11.20.24 (the mislabelled minutes item, and the Finance Subcommittee date of 4 December); 9. Approved CSB meeting minutes 11.20.24 (the correction read into the record, and the same Finance date); CSB Agenda 12.18.24 (the schedule review, the senator letter as Exhibit C, the default-budget item as Exhibit D, and the hearing moved to 15 January 2025); Exhibit C- Dear Senator Ward.docx.pdf, read in full; and the contents list of packet 10. CSB 12.18.24, which carries subcommittee minutes for 9 and 10 December and none for 12 or 13 December.
The SAU 6 website. SAU 6, Claremont School Board — the destination by-laws 1.05(c), 1.05(d) and 1.11 name for every subcommittee notice and every set of subcommittee minutes. Its five linked subcommittee folders were read for this project on 2026-08-29; the Finance folder holds exactly two sub-folders, Purpose Statement (created 2 June 2025) and 2025-2026 (created 2 July 2026), re-verified for this page. Nothing from 2024 is reachable from any of them. The site as it stood in December 2024 cannot be inspected from here.
Explicit negatives, from reading all four packet documents in full rather than from a search: the packet contains no PSAT or SAT presentation, no superintendent’s report, no default budget worksheet or FY26 summary, no copy of the letter to Senator Ward, and no notice or minutes for any subcommittee. The words ESSER, default budget and tax rate appear in no packet document other than the agenda’s own item heading.
Negatives that rest on the Drive interface and are therefore weaker, flagged as such: that no minutes exist for the Finance Committee meetings of 4 December, 12 December, 13 December or 18 December 2024; that no minutes exist for the SAU 6 meeting of 3 December 2024; and that no minutes were created for 6 November 2024. The interface returns nothing for several folders whose files read perfectly by identifier, omits folders this project has recorded, and misses files whose names contain the exact search string. Any negative derived from it alone is unsafe and is written here as not found, never as does not exist.

Project files

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

Dialogue: ../Dialogue/16192 SchoolBoard120424.mp4.CSV — 529 rows, 12,624 words; eleven speakers named, thirty-one rows left unattributed and one filed as the room together.
Video: ../../Input/Videos/16192 SchoolBoard120424.mp4
Diarized transcript: ../../Input/Transcripts/16192 SchoolBoard120424.mp4.json
Map: ../../Input/SupportingDocuments/MAP.md §62, with §§58–61 and §§63–66 for the meetings on either side.
Companion pages: Finance Committee — 19 November 2024, the last Finance meeting before this one and the only one in the season with a page; 16 October 2024, which carries the FY24 retention vote, the $466,664.43 ceiling and the last time the board asked for an ESSER accounting; the joint meeting of 30 September 2024, whose minutes are approved here; 2 October 2024, whose minutes the agenda wrongly names; 18 September 2024, the source of the $544,145.29 balance; SAU 6 — 14 November 2024, the SAU board’s last completed meeting before the quorum failure of 3 December; and 5 June 2024, at which the by-laws were adopted.

Laws and rules cited on this page

New Hampshire statutes, in the text in force on 4 December 2024. RSA 91-A:2, I and II — a meeting is the convening of a quorum of a public body able to communicate contemporaneously to discuss or act on matters within its jurisdiction; 24 hours’ notice; minutes to include the names of members present, persons appearing before the body, a brief description of the subject matter discussed and final decisions, with the mover and seconder of each motion recorded, open to public inspection “not more than 5 business days after the meeting”. 2023 codification; source note ends 2023, 188:1, eff. 3 October 2023, so the current text governs. Deliberately not applied: 2025, 112:1, which added the start time, the end time and the name of the person who produced the minutes, effective 22 August 2025. The mover-and-seconder clause is 2018, 244:1, effective 1 January 2019, and binds every meeting in this corpus.
RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d) — “public body” reaches any board of a school district “or any committee, subcommittee, or subordinate body thereof, or advisory committee thereto”. The clause that makes the Finance Subcommittee a public body at flag 1.
RSA 91-A:2-a, II — communications outside a meeting, “including, but not limited to, sequential communications”, may not be used to circumvent the chapter. 2008, 303:4, eff. 1 July 2008; never amended. Cited at flag 6 only to say that it is not engaged by a chair asking members whether they can attend a noticed meeting.
RSA 40:13 — the official-ballot statute. ¶II-a, opening “Notwithstanding any other provision of law”, with four lettered subparagraphs: (a) notice of budget hearings by the second Tuesday in January; (b) the RSA 273-A:1, III budget submission date and petitioned articles, also the second Tuesday; (c) budget hearings on or before the third Tuesday, with supplemental hearings on 7 days’ notice; (d) warrants and budgets posted on or before the last Monday. ¶III — the first session “between the first and second Saturdays following the last Monday in January, inclusive of those Saturdays”. ¶VII — the second session on the second Tuesday in March. ¶XI(a) — “The default budget shall be disclosed and presented for questions and discussion at the first budget hearing held pursuant to RSA 32:5 or RSA 197:6.” Durable: last amended 2019, 192:2, eff. 10 July 2019, so today’s text is the text in force here. Full text of ¶II-a fetched for this page on 2026-08-29 and checked against the 2023 codification.
RSA 32:5, I, II, III and IV — at least one public hearing “not later than 25 days before each annual or special meeting”, on at least 7 days’ notice, “and after the conclusion of public testimony shall finalize the budget to be submitted to the legislative body” (¶I); appropriations disclosed or discussed at the final hearing, with no insertion afterwards without a supplemental hearing (¶II); appropriations stipulated on a gross basis (¶III); comparative columns on the budget form (¶IV). 2023 codification; source note ends 2021, 134:3, 4, eff. 21 September 2021. Deliberately not applied: 2025, 144:1, eff. 30 August 2025. Negative anchor recorded for the pages that follow this one: because RSA 40:13, II-a opens “Notwithstanding any other provision of law” and expressly governs “Budget hearings under RSA 32:5”, a mid-January hearing in an official-ballot district is not a breach of ¶I’s twenty-five-day interval, and should not be flagged as one (flag 7).
RSA 194-C:9, I — “At a meeting held before January 1, the school administrative unit board shall adopt a budget”, with the apportionment certified prior to 15 January to the chairperson of each district school board. The 2023 codification runs to three paragraphs; ¶IV, alternative apportionment, was added by 2024, 329:1, effective 1 October 2024 and is therefore in force on this date, though nothing here turns on it. The deadline behind the quorum problem at flag 6. The section requires no public hearing on an SAU budget, so a district that holds one exceeds the statutory minimum.
RSA 198:40-a, II — “A cost of $4,100 per pupil in the ADMR”, plus the free-and-reduced, special-education and English-learner differentials. 2023, 79:150, eff. 1 July 2023. RSA 198:40-d — “Beginning July 1, 2024 and every year thereafter”, an adjustment of “an increase of 2 percent annually”. 2023, 79:151, same effective date; 2025, 141:223 rewrites the section effective 1 July 2026 and is not applied. Together they give $4,182 for FY25 (flag 9). URL trap: chapter 198 is under Title XV, not Title IX.
RSA 189:74 — the school board public comment period of no less than 30 minutes, with exactly two exceptions (emergency meetings; meetings whose sole purpose is nonpublic session). 2022, 333:1, eff. 6 September 2022; never amended. Whether the 30 minutes binds the opportunity or the elapsed time is not settled by the text, and no violation of it is asserted here.
RSA 21-J:19 — the municipal audit provision, permissive as to timing, so the FY21-to-FY24 backlog described at 0:59:01 is a control weakness rather than a missed statutory deadline. The holding is cited, not a quotation: an earlier note in this project’s files attributed a phrase to this section that is not in it. URL trap: chapter 21-J is under Title I, not Title III.
RSA 288:1 — the eleven legal holidays, used for the business-day arithmetic at flags 3 and 13 and for the January meeting count at 1:01:41. Source note ends 1999, 105:2 / 106:2. URL trap: chapter 288 is under Title XXV.
Federal. 2 CFR 200.512(a)(1) (2023 annual edition) — the single-audit reporting deadline, the earlier of 30 days after receipt of the auditor’s report or nine months after period end; cited at flag 8 as the provision that would bite, on facts this record does not supply. U.S. Department of Education, grantee memorandum of 12 June 2024 — ARP ESSER funds “must be obligated by September 30, 2024” and liquidated “within 120 calendar days after the close of the obligation period, or by January 28, 2025”. The 2023 annual edition is the right vintage: the 2024 Uniform Guidance revision at 89 FR 30046 applies to awards issued on or after 1 October 2024.
Board rules. The Claremont School Board By-Laws adopted 5 June 2024, and board policy BEDH. 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-law 1.05(c) and (d) do.
Deliberately not cited. 28 CFR 35.200, the ADA Title II web and mobile accessibility rule: its compliance dates were amended by 91 FR 20912 on 20 April 2026 and now fall in 2027 and 2028, so no compliance date had arrived in December 2024, and neither the unpublished PSAT deck nor the image-only PDF that did arrive is a violation of it. RSA 91-A:3 is not cited, because no nonpublic session was held or proposed — though the by-laws’ Appendix D, which says that section “sets forth eight grounds” and then lists nine where the statute has twelve live ones, remains a defect of the governing document and is recorded on the pages of 18 September and 16 October 2024. RSA 32:10 and RSA 198:4-b are not cited, because no money was moved, retained or spent at this meeting.