SAU 6 Board, FY26 Budget Public Hearing — December 12, 2024 | A fifty-five-minute hearing at which no total, no increase and no percentage was ever said out loud

Participants

Every seat on the agenda masthead, marked present or absent from the recording's own roll call, plus the central-office administrators the masthead names. **There are no minutes of this meeting, so nothing corroborates the roll, the movers, the seconders or the vote counts printed here** — every one of them is the recording's. Segment counts are from the dialogue CSV. Name spellings follow the posted agenda; the automatic transcript's rendering is given where it differs.
Name	Role	Participation
Arlene Hawkins	SAU 6 Board Chair (re-elected 4/11/2024); chair of the SAU 6 policy subcommittee; Claremont School Board member	Present, and the dominant voice at 137 of 489 segments. Called the meeting to order, moved the agenda amendment adding the Unity update and the auditors' date, moved the nonpublic session, moved both of the salary motions herself — the superintendent's 3 percent and two-year renewal, and the assistant superintendent's parity adjustment — opened and closed the public hearing, asked the two sharpest questions in it, and seconded the budget motion. The transcript renders her roll answer And Arlene Hawkins here. She is addressed as Madam Chair at 0:36:22.
Mary Henry	Business Administrator, SAU 6	Present, 87 segments — 18 percent of the meeting. Presented version 3 of the FY26 budget, explained the indirect-cost mechanism at length, produced the adopted figure aloud at 1:03:14, and told the board that the fund-balance draw "really needs to be its own motion" (1:03:41). Twice qualified a figure because the years behind it are unaudited. Could not give the board a percentage when the chair asked for one.
Candace Crawford	SAU 6 Board member; Claremont School Board member; SAU 6 policy subcommittee; Claremont Finance Committee	Present, 54 segments. Moved the FY26 budget, in two goes — once in words (1:02:03) and then, after Frank Sprague objected that "We have to make a motion on a number", again with the figure in it (1:03:48). Supplied the correction that turned the chair's "salary bonus" into a parity adjustment, established the curriculum director's exact 0.4/0.6 split, and asked the point of order at 0:59:55 about whether the public hearing had ever been opened. The transcript renders her name Andy Crawford elsewhere in this corpus; here the roll has Candace Crawford here.
Christopher Pratt	Superintendent of Schools, SAU 6	Present, 48 segments. Proposed and defended the deletion of the curriculum director's position and the reduction of the finance director's, framed as taking the first cut in his own office: "we do want to keep the cuts as far away from we can from the from the classrooms" (0:10:42). Told the board he had no proposals for the fund balance. Received a 3 percent increase and a two-year contract renewal by a motion of this board twenty-eight days after the same board delegated everyone else's raises to him.
Heather Whitney	SAU 6 Board member; Chair of the Claremont School Board; Claremont Finance Committee	Present, 44 segments, and the first to break with the administration: "I support the reduction of the finance director to a part time position. However, I disagree with the reduction of, the curriculum director" (0:12:59). Seconded the nonpublic motion, both salary motions and the fund-balance motion. Hers is the argument the board adopted. Roll: Heather Whitney here.
Frank Sprague	SAU 6 Board member; chair of the SAU 6 superintendent-evaluation subcommittee; Vice Chair of the Claremont School Board; chair of the Claremont Finance Committee	Present, 39 segments. Supported the administration's proposal on both counts, then produced the only line-item challenge of the evening — that a wage line was budgeted at 65,000 where the board had approved 47,000 (0:39:53) — and pressed it through four answers. Also the member who stopped the budget motion for want of a figure. Roll: Frank Sprague here.
Michael Koski	Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum, Instruction, Assessment and Innovation, SAU 6	Present, 27 segments — the only substantive account anywhere in this record of what the curriculum director actually does (0:26:00). Asked the clerk to widen the fund-balance motion from title one funds to title funds. His own salary was adjusted for parity by a motion of this board at 0:05:07 that names no amount. Attribution here is medium confidence: no one speaks his name to his face. The chair says Mike. at 1:05:10 and the superintendent names the assistant superintendent as his curriculum co-lead twice, which the transcript renders Assistant Superintendent Kosky.
Michael Petrin	SAU 6 Board member; Claremont School Board member	Present, 17 segments. Read the packet's budget summary memo back to the room, which is how the $50,000 of Title I revenue got onto the record (0:31:51); asked whether the SAU's fund balance could absorb the restored position, which is the idea the board adopted; and put the size of it at 160 rather than 150. His roll-call answer is transcribed Michael. Patron. Yes., the standing garble of his surname in this corpus. The chair calls him Mr. Petra. and Mr. Patron.
Whitney Skillen	SAU 6 Board member; Claremont School Board member; chair of the Claremont policy subcommittee as read into the record on 4 October 2023	Present, 8 segments, and the mover of two of the evening's four motions — the $160,000 fund-balance draw (1:04:17) and the adoption of policy KE with a proof-reading correction (1:06:33). Also asked what the $67,000 human-resources salary increase was for. Roll: the transcript has Whitney. Skilling here. Medium-high confidence, by elimination: the other three women at the table are separately anchored by name, and her voice cluster overlaps Heather Whitney's in time, so it is not the second Heather Whitney cluster this diarizer produces at SAU 6 meetings.
Noelle Kronberg	SAU 6 School Board Clerk	Present, and read both rolls — unlike 14 November, when she was absent and the superintendent read them. Five attributed segments. She is the only person at the table who asks for a figure to be repeated: "Yes, but I couldn't. It was 100." (1:04:57). The transcript renders her surname Kronborg and Grunberg. The minutes she wrote of this meeting were approved four months later and have never been published.
Rocco Ruggeri	SAU 6 Board Vice Chair; Unity School Board member; Unity's voice on the withdrawal study at every previous SAU 6 meeting in this corpus	Present and unheard. The transcript's Rockford Ruggieri here opens the roll and no segment anywhere in the file is attributed to him. Two consequences. He is the leading candidate for the unnamed voice away from the microphone that twice asks which meeting the auditors will attend, and for the Unity withdrawal report at 1:07:16, which the dialogue file places in Michael Petrin's voice cluster. Neither is settled, and no minutes exist to settle either.
Marjorie Erickson	SAU 6 Board member; chair of the Unity School Board	No answer in the roll. She speaks nowhere in the 2024 SAU 6 recordings.
Shannon Popescu	SAU 6 Board member (Unity)	No answer in the roll.
Kelly Simpson	SAU 6 Board member (Unity)	No answer in the roll — the member who cast the only recorded No of 14 November, on the raise delegation, is not in the room when the budget that carries it is adopted.
Atonya Hart	SAU 6 Board member (Unity); superintendent-evaluation subcommittee	No answer in the roll. The transcript renders the clerk's call A tiny hurt.
Bonnie Miles	SAU 6 Board member; Claremont School Board member; elected SAU 6 treasurer 17 August 2023	No answer in the roll. See flag 3: by 10 April 2025 the chair tells the board's auditor that the SAU board has no treasurer at all.
Michael McCosker	Director of Student Services, SAU 6 (masthead)	Named on the agenda masthead. No attributed segment. The special-education administration function he heads carries a $1,250 mileage line that had spent $1,439.07 five months into FY25 and a $600 supplies line that had spent $3,301.48.
Patrick O'Hearn	Director of Human Resources, SAU 6 (masthead)	Named on the agenda masthead. Does not speak. His function is the largest single driver of the FY26 increase — up $77,499.33, of which $67,629.93 is salary, a 48 percent rise on one line. The superintendent explains the mechanism at 0:23:27.
Jeff Small	Director of Technology, SAU 6 (masthead)	Named on the agenda masthead. Does not speak, but is named from the chair — "I'm going to use Jeff's line I'm sorry, Jeff, but you're on page one" (0:54:10) — as she works out why a dental line said to be up 10 percent is up 5. See flag 12.
Citizens	Citizens’ comments and the public hearing	Nobody appeared, at either. The hearing ran about fifty-five minutes with no member of the public in the room; the chair nonetheless closed it with "Thank you for the members of the public for for watching and being a part of this" (1:01:22). The separate citizens' comment item was reached twenty seconds later: "Seeing no citizens in our audience". Nobody was turned away. See flag 20.

Agenda

Item numbering, wording and scheduled clock times from the posted agenda (SAU6 Budget Public Hearing agenda 12.12.24.docx.pdf), with dispositions from the recording. There are no minutes, so every disposition below is the recording's alone. The posted agenda is two meetings — a budget hearing from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m., then a separate SAU 6 School Board Meeting called to order at 8:00 with its own roll call, agenda approval and minutes approval. The board ran them as one, taking the second meeting's general business first and reaching the budget vote long before the 8:25 PM the agenda set for it. Clock times below are the agenda's; recording position is not a clock time after the nonpublic session (see flag 5), so no hour is inferred from the tape anywhere on this page. Hover over (or Tab to) a clipped entry for the full text.

Taken up	Item	Agenda text / disposition
0:00:03	I. Call to Order and Pledge of Allegiance	Scheduled 6:30 PM, and called to order on the minute. The chair reads the standing cell-phone reminder from the agenda itself at 0:00:30.
0:00:41	II.a. General Business — Secretary Roll Call of Attendance	Scheduled 6:35 PM. The agenda calls the clerk the Secretary; the board has no secretary, and the clerk read it. Seven of twelve answer. The transcript garbles most of the names — Rockford Ruggieri, A tiny hurt, Whitney. Skilling — and drops Michael Petrin's name entirely, leaving a bare Here. in his place in masthead order. With no minutes, this roll cannot be checked against anything.
0:01:13	II.b. Agenda — Amendments and Approval	The chair moved two additions of her own under Other Business: a Unity update, and confirmation of the auditors' date for the February meeting. The agenda has no Other Business item and no Future Dates item in either of its halves, so both additions created the item they sat in. A member moves acceptance "as amended" at 0:01:55; the second is inside the chair's own row. Voice vote, no count.
0:01:59	II. Minutes — 11/14/2024 and 11/21/2024	The posted agenda's minutes item names the wrong meeting. Item II.c reads "Minutes of the 9.12.24 meeting?" and then scripts, word for word, the amendment the chair had already made on 14 November: "I'd like to amend the minutes under Item 1 to include that the Board did not receive Global review of actual to budgeted 24-25 budget as listed in that agenda." The September minutes were approved four weeks earlier. What the board actually approved here was the 14 November and 21 November drafts, in forty-nine seconds, with no corrections and no discussion — both had reached the public share two hours before. See flag 8.
0:02:48	III. Non-public meeting session RSA 91-A:3	Scheduled 6:40 PM. The agenda gets the citation right — "RSA91-A:3.II (a)", with the full text of subparagraph (a) printed beneath it — which the SAU 6 paperwork did not manage in December 2023, January 2024 or February 2024. The chair's spoken motion is transcribed "under RSA 91. Dash a colon three a", which states a section and a letter but no paragraph. Roll call taken by the clerk, as RSA 91-A:3, I(b) requires. See flag 5.
0:03:57	III. (not on the agenda) Superintendent's salary and contract	The chair, eight hundredths of a second after her own announcement to viewers: "So I would like to propose the motion that we increase the superintendent's salary to approve the 3% salary increase for the superintendent." Heather Whitney seconded. Candace Crawford added the term — "You want to add that it's a two year" — and the chair restated it: "And for a two year contract? So for this year, it's 3% increase. And to renew your contract for two years." Voice vote, no count. No contract item appears on this agenda or on the 3 December agenda, and no executed contract exists in any share. See flag 6.
0:04:47	III. (not on the agenda) Assistant superintendent's salary	Moved first as "a $7,000 salary bonus for Assistant superintendent", corrected from the floor — "It is not a bonus. It's a parody" — withdrawn, and restated at 0:05:07 without any figure at all: "a motion to realign, readjust? Readjust the assistant superintendents salary to achieve parity with other districts, to be competitive based on the role and the size of our district." The $7,000 reappears only in the budget motion an hour later. See flag 7.
0:05:47	IV. Presentation of Fiscal Year 2026 Budget (Exhibit A) — and V. Public Hearing	Scheduled as two items, 7:00 PM and 7:30 PM. The chair opened the public hearing before the presentation and ran them as one, which is why Candace Crawford has to ask at 0:59:55 whether there is "a public hearing that you have to open". Fifty-five and a half minutes on version 3 of the FY26 budget. The agenda's hearing rules ask a citizen to "State your name, ward" — a city instruction on a board half of whose districts is a town without wards. Nobody came.
1:01:22	V. Closing of Public Hearing	Scheduled 8:00 PM. "So the public hearing is now closed. Thank you for the members of the public for for watching and being a part of this."
1:01:42	III. (second meeting) Citizens Comments	Scheduled 8:10 PM. "Say citizens comments is the next agenda item. Seeing no citizens in our audience, we'll move on to our next order of business". Fifteen minutes were scheduled for an item RSA 189:74 says "shall be for no less than 30 minutes"; nobody was present and nobody was cut off. See flag 20.
1:02:03	IV.A. Fiscal Year 2026 Budget Approval (Action)	Scheduled 8:25 PM. Candace Crawford's first motion has no number in it; Frank Sprague objects, "We have to make a motion on a number"; the business administrator supplies one aloud — "Are you ready. 2,755,000. Make it even $723." — and Crawford re-moves it at 1:03:48. The chair's own row carries the second. "Opposed? One." No aye count, no name, and no minutes. Then a separate motion, at the business administrator's request, for $160,000 of fund balance. See flag 2 and flag 15.
1:06:33	IV.B. Policy KE — Second read (Exhibit B)	The item the 14 November board pulled from a seven-policy slate and sent to a second read. Whitney Skillen moved adoption "as presented with a tiny revision to be made" — a stray full stop in the KE-R timeline — and the board adopted it. The adopted document's own history block still reads "First reading: 11.14.2024" with the second-reading line blank. See flag 19.
1:07:16	Other Business 1 (added by amendment) — Unity update	"So unity submitted its planning committee. Withdrawal document to the state for review. The state board reviewed it last month and approved it." No feedback, "really just a formality where they just make sure all the boxes are checked", and a town vote in March. An advance on 14 November, when the report had only been reviewed. The July 2026 effective date stated at that meeting is not repeated here. The dialogue file places this report in Michael Petrin's voice cluster; Rocco Ruggeri gave it on 12 September and 14 November and is present and otherwise silent. No name is spoken and no minutes exist.
1:08:10	Other Business 2 (added by amendment) — the auditors	"Just to confirm that our February meeting, the auditors will present either in person or through zoom." The date is given as February 13th and the slot as 6:45. That meeting did not take place: the next SAU 6 record of any kind is 10 April 2025, whose draft minutes have the chair saying that a report was received "but the meeting was cancelled". See flag 13.
1:08:49	V. Adjournment	Scheduled 8:45 PM. "Do we have a motion to adjourn? Second, Miss Crawford? Second, Mr. Sprague. All in favor?" The chair records a mover and a seconder in one breath. Voice vote; the recording ends seventeen seconds later. No clock time for the adjournment exists in any record.

Discussion timeline

Times are taken from the dialogue transcript (Output/Dialogue/16213 SAU6121224.mp4.CSV) and link into the recording. Quotations reproduce the transcript verbatim, ASR errors included, with editorial insertions in square brackets; quotations from the agenda, a packet document or a statute are attributed to that document in the sentence that carries them. Figures in the right-hand column are checked against version 3 of the FY26 budget and against the FY25 year-to-date ledger, both in the packet.

Time	Topic	What was said	Flags
0:00:41	Seven answers in a roll of twelve, and four of Unity's five seats are empty	"Rockford Ruggieri here. Marjorie. Erickson. Shannon. Kelly. Simpson. A tiny hurt. Frank Sprague here. Bonnie. Miles. Whitney. Skilling here. Candace Crawford here. Here. Heather Whitney here. And Arlene Hawkins here." Four of the twelve names draw an audible here in their own slot, two more are anchored by the roll-call vote a minute later, and the bare Here. after Candace Crawford's answer sits exactly where Michael Petrin's name belongs in masthead order. The four Unity members who do not answer — Erickson, Popescu, Simpson and Hart — are absent from the meeting that sets the bill their town will be sent.	OBSERVATION
0:01:59	Two sets of minutes approved in forty-nine seconds, both public for two hours	"We also have in our packet the minutes from November 14th and November 21st." Both were uploaded to the district's public share at about 4:02 p.m. that afternoon. No corrections were offered to either, against two the chair had supplied for the September minutes four weeks earlier — and the 14 November draft is the one that records the delegation of staff raises to the superintendent and the eight sets of nonpublic minutes unsealed that night.	MEDIUM
0:02:48	Into nonpublic session, and out of it eight hundredths of a second later	"At this time, I would like to present a motion that we move into a nonpublic meeting session under RSA 91. Dash a colon three a." Heather Whitney seconded; the clerk read the roll; the chair told viewers "For those watching, the regular meeting will continue after the nonpublic session." Her next words, 0.08 seconds later in the published file, are a motion on the superintendent's salary. There is no motion to return, no roll call out and no motion to seal on the recording, although the posted agenda scripts all three — "(upon return): Is there a motion to return to public session? … Motion to seal the minutes? Duration?" No minutes of the closed session exist anywhere.	MEDIUM
0:03:57	The superintendent's contract is renewed for two years, on no agenda item, in forty-three seconds	The chair: "So I would like to propose the motion that we increase the superintendent's salary to approve the 3% salary increase for the superintendent." Candace Crawford, at 0:04:23: "You want to add that it's a two year." The chair then restates the whole of it: "And for a two year contract? So for this year, it's 3% increase. And to renew your contract for two years." The only discussion offered is "Other than a big thank you for the work you're doing for us." Voice vote, no count. This is the item the 14 November board deferred, in the chair's own words on that meeting's recording — "We also have to go over the superintendent's contract, which we did not have a chance to discuss tonight." — and it appears on neither December agenda.	MEDIUM
0:04:47	A motion withdrawn for using the wrong word, and restated without its number	"I will initiate a second motion to approve a $7,000 salary bonus for Assistant superintendent." Two voices correct it at once; Candace Crawford supplies the word: "It is not a bonus. It's a parody" — the transcript's rendering of parity. The chair: "It's a oh, it's a parody. All right, I withdraw that motion. I'm going to restate it, I apologize. I'd like to propose a motion to realign, readjust? Readjust the assistant superintendents salary to achieve parity with other districts, to be competitive based on the role and the size of our district." The motion that passed contains no figure, no comparator district and no cap.	MEDIUM
0:06:40	The chair explains why the hearing will be short on questions	"So this year, the members of the board have been sending their questions about the post budget to the superintendent and the business administrator. And we've been having an interactive conversation about the budget upcoming. So I think we're feeling that we're knowledgeable about a lot of the aspects of it." A candid account of where the deliberation happened. None of that correspondence is in the packet or anywhere else in the public record; the chair refers to her own share of it again at 0:54:10 — "I had asked this question previously in some written correspondence".
0:07:17	The only number the presentation opens with is a change to a change	"So starters with that adjustment. The bottom line changes to still under budget of $8,201.55." Then, at 0:07:39: "we took away because originally I had a $16,000 decrease roughly. Well now we'll have it. It would be a $8,000. 8201, 50,000." Version 3's own last line prints "Total Budget Increase ($16,629.55)" and "Total Budget % Increase -0.67%", both net of $125,000 of revenue; live re-plugging of social security, Medicare and retirement moves that to −$8,201.55. The gross appropriation in the document is $2,597,521.45, which is $108,370.45 and 4.35 percent above FY25 — a figure nobody states.	HIGH
0:08:08	Why there is a version 3, and what came out of version 2	"we had version two and unfortunately we couldn't have a meeting for version two" — the 3 December meeting, which failed for want of a quorum and left no record of any kind. Then: "Superintendent Pratt was very adamant about that, that we are going to take out of our budget, roughly $197,000. And to do that, the finance director from my department will be part time, which cuts out a little around $50,000." The documents bear it out precisely: version 2 totals $2,793,874.48 and version 3 $2,597,521.45, a reduction of $196,353.03, of which $153,195.67 is the superintendent's office and $51,697.72 the business office, offset by $8,637.55 added to technology software.	POSITIVE
0:09:40	The administration proposes to cut its own office first	The superintendent: "We're trying to keep the, the cuts as far away from the classroom as we can… We feel if we reduce the line item for the curriculum director is that myself and Assistant Superintendent Kosky will divide and conquer in regards to with the curriculum." The division proposed: the assistant superintendent takes the elementary schools, the superintendent the technical centre, middle school and high school. "is it a perfect solution? No, but I think it was important to express that, you know, we do want to keep the cuts as far away from we can from the from the classrooms. And I think in a good faith effort, as an office, we should be part of those solutions".	POSITIVE
0:11:55	The finance director's post is a temporary post, and a member says so	Frank Sprague: "around the finance director is that, I'm still holding to the the fact that we sort of believe that once we got past us or once we got the audits cleaned up, the need for those that position would be would be certainly diminished." The business administrator confirms the trajectory at 0:37:03 — full time now, 0.8 next year, "The goal is once we get the audits caught up and we get everything else reconciled and in place, that that position would go away." Asked at 0:37:17 whether the audits will be caught up by June and the post could go to 0.5, she declines: she is training a successor and "for fiscal year 26, I would really like to stick with the point. Eight for that purpose".
0:12:59	The chair of the Claremont board breaks with the administration, and the meeting turns	Heather Whitney: "I support the reduction of the finance director to a part time position. However, I disagree with the reduction of, the curriculum director. And my reasoning is I believe that is taking, people out of the classroom. And I also, in my time on the board, my assessment of the failures of the district have been the failures of leadership almost exclusively." Then: "we also had a massive failure in our district of not even having a curriculum in place. And there was nobody watching that." And: "I would think in the next five years we would still need a curriculum director. So I'm opposed to reduction." This is the argument the board ends up adopting, forty-nine minutes later, on a motion.	POSITIVE
0:20:15	What the curriculum director actually is: 0.4 grant-funded coach, 0.6 budgeted director	The assistant superintendent: "She's point four as a coach and point six as a curriculum director." The 0.4 comes "out of the title grant". So the line the administration proposed to delete is the 0.6, and the person would remain as the elementary coach the district could not otherwise fill: "she's filling a spot that we couldn't we didn't fill." Heather Whitney puts the consequence at 0:32:35: "We've diminished her position because we couldn't find anybody to function as an instructional coach for our elementary schools, who are desperately need an instructional coach… So this has been a Band-Aid approach."
0:22:05	Three more members line up behind her, one by one, on the record	Candace Crawford, having established the split: "I would be uncomfortable giving up that point six director today." Whitney Skillen: "I don't really know what our savings would be by reducing this person, but I don't think whatever the number is, it's probably less than six figures. And. Yeah. And I and I just think that that that number is not worth it." Michael Petrin at 0:59:03, to the administrators: "I hope you don't see this as a pushback against your thoughts. This is a push back on, us respecting the jobs that you you everybody here is doing… But we don't want to see burnout and people doing more than what should be expected of them at this point."	POSITIVE
0:23:02	The $67,000 on the human-resources line, and where it comes from	Whitney Skillen: "I guess the question is there's a 67000 increase in the HR salaries. And just wondering, can you refresh me what that is?" The superintendent's answer at 0:23:27: "we really need to, reinstitute the assistant to the HR director. So we took that the money we needed from that and we took that from a curriculum director, put her in the title one, and that freed up the money for us to hire the HR assistant without additional costs to the district." The ledger: Human Resources Salaries $140,369.60 to $207,999.53, $67,629.93, a 48 percent rise, in a function that had no expenditure at all in FY23. The whole function rises $77,499.33, the largest increase in the budget.	OBSERVATION
0:31:51	A member reads the packet memo back to the room, and the $50,000 appears	Michael Petrin: "the document you have here for Mary says that an additional 50,000 will come from title one to cover a portion of the curricular coordinator position. And it says this position was entirely titled one a few years ago." He is reading the packet's budget summary memo, and it is the only time in the meeting anyone opens it aloud. The memo is dated 2 December and describes version 2; version 3, the document being adopted, deletes the position the $50,000 is said to fund and keeps the $50,000. Nobody reconciles it. See flag 11.	OBSERVATION
0:35:23	The chair counts the room and asks the price of reversing the administration	"I think what you're hearing loud and clear is that the majority of the board is in the position of liking the movement that we're making, wanting to continue to solidify where we are at with curriculum and having researching an opportunity to maintain that position. And then I heard the question of increasing the bottom line of the budget so that you will have that opportunity, should title one not be able to fund it?" The answer at 0:36:00: "I would say anywhere from 145,000 to 150,000, because that would include benefits." Version 3 reduced the superintendent's office salary line by $96,772.81 against version 2, so the figure is the right order.	POSITIVE
0:39:34	The chair asks for a percentage and does not get one	"Seeking to maintain that curriculum director position, how would that change the bottom line? I know what you said by numbers, but what about percent?" The answer: "I would have to figure that out because I don't know." The chair: "That's that's fine." No percentage is stated at any point in the fifty-five-minute public hearing, and none is given before the vote. Five minutes earlier the chair had told the room, at 0:39:04, "So right now the budget increase is actually a decrease" — true only of the net-of-revenue line on version 3's last page.	HIGH
0:39:53	The only line-item challenge of the evening, and it is never answered in dollars	Frank Sprague: "that would be the administrative assistant to the assistant superintendent. This the FY 25 wages is 65,000. It was actually 47,000 was the actual wage that we approved last year on that, not 65. And so the raise was based on 65,000, not the 47 that it was." Four answers follow. The superintendent, at 0:43:11: "So the so it's gone from 47 to say 65", the additional money "directly tied to grants". Candace Crawford ties it to the revenue line at 0:44:09: "18,000 for there could be part of the 75,000. That's indirect costs that's reimbursed into the, the the budget." The individual wage lines are not in any published document — the budget shows function totals — so no reader can check either figure.	OBSERVATION
0:47:37	The $75,000 revenue line rests on money the SAU has not been getting	The business administrator, closing a long explanation of indirect costs: "And we have not been getting indirect costs into the SA. You we have claimed them, but they either staying in Claremont or we don't claim them all the time. It's been inconsistent on the grants on whether it's written in or not." Asked whether the chair means historically, she agrees: "Historically, yes… Previously. Right." Version 3 subtracts $75,000 of indirect costs from the appropriation before printing its headline percentage. Asked at 0:48:02 how it works for Unity, she answers that Unity has never claimed them: "I don't think you've claimed indirect costs."	OBSERVATION
0:48:54	The fund balance: about $350,000, and three of the years behind it unaudited	Michael Petrin: "What's the chances of using some of the fund balance to offset." The business administrator: "there's no use of the fund balance here in your fund balance is a little over probably 350,000. Oh good. Again that's give or take because we haven't been audited on some of the years. But the last audit we had 210. So I can I'm confident in saying there's 350." Four weeks earlier the same officer had put it at a little over $300,000 and the board had resolved by consensus, with no motion, to apply $180,000 of it. She then gives the board the procedural point that matters: a purpose-restricted vote binds — "You say that you want to use it for one specific purpose and the board votes that way, you have to use it for that." The chair finishes the phrase for her and thanks her.	OBSERVATION
0:52:45	Benefits, and a retirement rate the transcript makes impossible	"It went from 3.53 to 12.75, which gave us a decrease of $15,841 to our budget." The sentence calls it a decrease and the transcript's first figure is smaller than its second. The packet's own budget summary memo settles it: "NHRS decreased from 13.53% to 12.75%." Insurance: "we have a very minimal increase for, insurance plans… Our A boss 20 plan is 7.7%. And that is our lowest plan that we have. The A, B 15 is 3.02%. And most people are on that… the OE 20, which went up 2.42%. Dental did increase by 10%." The employee shares, given at Frank Sprague's request "for the sake of the public hearing": 15 percent on the highest plan, 5 percent on the other two.	OBSERVATION
0:54:10	The chair finds a 10 percent increase applied at 5 percent, and is told the software did it	"you're on page one. The dental you said was up 10%. Yes. And in this year, the proposed amount was 100. I'm sorry, 1579, let's say. And then the proposal was up, but the increase was only 78, almost $79, but yet 10% of the budget amount for this year would be more than that." She is reading the technology director's dental line: FY25 $1,578.78, FY26 $1,657.71, an increase of $78.93 — 4.9994 percent, half the rate announced. The answers are "they had told us it was a 10% increase. I would have to go back and look", an account of how the payroll system computes benefit lines, and finally an exchange in which the chair says "So it's less than 10%." and gets "Overall. Yeah." The line was not revisited.	OBSERVATION
0:55:50	The proposal that carries: restore the position, pay for it out of the surplus	Michael Petrin: "the board is hoping to add back in about $150,000 in support of the curriculum to keep the curriculum director position where it is, and I would support using 160 of the fund balance to offset." Heather Whitney: "The level fund it." The chair, before letting it move, asks the superintendent whether he has any competing use for the money, and is answered "I don't have any proposals in regards to the. Fund balance." He adds, at 0:57:43: "it was definitely not an easy decision. But we said, you know, we'll do what we have to do to to move forward".	POSITIVE
0:58:25	The one exchange about what any of this costs the two towns	The chair: "And by doing this, there's still additional monies that can be returned to the districts, correct, to offset their tax burden for the contribution." The answer: "You would have money left in that… You still would have roughly 27." Heather Whitney: "So by retaining we would have a neutral tax act. And that's that's really the bottom line here." The chair: "It's the contribution that each of the local districts make to the essay, which would impact their bottom line dollar amount." No apportionment appears anywhere — no Claremont and Unity columns, no average membership in attendance, no equalized valuations, and no statement of how the $125,000 of revenue or the $160,000 of fund balance divides between the two towns.	OBSERVATION
0:59:55	A point of order: has the public hearing been opened at all?	Candace Crawford: "Do you have a public hearing that you have to open or." The chair: "I think we did open the public hearing. You did all part of the public hearing." Crawford: "Have to close the public hearing." Fifty-four minutes into a hearing on a $2.7 million appropriation, a member of the board is not sure whether it has begun — because the posted agenda made the presentation and the hearing two separate items and the chair opened the hearing first.
1:00:35	The $3,600 School Board Secretary line is the clerk's, and the officer is offered a relabel	The chair: "I have one, under school board line items… I'm not seeing the clerks. Is there anything that comes from the essay for Arctic?" The business administrator points her to it: "It's on the first page. Top line, $3,600." The chair: "That's our clerk." And the answer that closes a question this project has carried since December 2023: "That's your board clerk. Yes. Okay, I can change that from board side." *The line is captioned Wages School Board Secretary, and this board has no secretary*; it paid $0.00 in FY23 and FY24 and $3,600 was budgeted in FY25 and again in FY26, with the Medicare and FICA lines beside it at zero.	HIGH
1:02:03	The budget is moved in words, stopped for want of a number, and moved again	Candace Crawford: "a motion to approve the, fiscal year 26 proposed budget, as proposed in version three. With the changes already identified, the increase of to the superintendents pay the $7,000 adjustment adjustment, parity adjustment, and the re addition reinstatement of the curriculum person at at an approximate 100 and 000 level." And: "that increase will be offset by retained funds and so that we end up with a s a budget that is, revenue neutral, impact tax rate neutral." Frank Sprague: "We have to make a motion on a number." The business administrator produces one aloud: "Are you ready. 2,755,000. Make it even $723." $2,755,723 appears in none of the eight documents in the packet, no breakdown of it was given, and there are no minutes.	HIGH
1:04:06	One vote against, uncounted ayes, and no record anywhere	"I make a motion to approve the budget. For fiscal year 26 of $2,755,723." The chair's own row carries the second and the question. Then: "Opposed? One. And any abstentions. Okay." That single word is the only counted dissent in the whole of the 2024 SAU 6 record — every other vote across 12 September, 14 November, 21 November and this meeting was taken with no tally at all. No name is given, the ayes are not counted, and no minutes of this meeting have ever been published, so the dissenting member cannot be identified by anyone.	HIGH
1:04:17	$160,000 of the fund balance, as a separate and conditional motion	Whitney Skillen: "I'd like to make a motion to use $160,000 of the fund balance to cover the financial director position. If we if the administration finds that that that position cannot be covered. Oh, curriculum. Curriculum not financial director. No correction to this motion. Not financial director. Curriculum director with $160,000 from the fund balance for the SA six. If the administration finds that that position cannot be covered with title one funds." Heather Whitney seconded. The clerk stops the room to get the figure right — "Yes, but I couldn't. It was 100." — and the assistant superintendent widens it: "can you just make that title funds instead of title one funds? Okay. Just gives more flexibility."	POSITIVE
1:06:33	Policy KE comes back for the second read it was sent to, and someone has proof-read it	Whitney Skillen: "I'd like to make a motion to adopt policy k e as presented with a tiny revision to be made. There's like an extra period under the second bullet of number three. So this principal period for resolution, that period needs to be deleted. And then it's perfect. And then it should be adopted." The defect is real and is in the packet copy, in the KE-R timeline: the superintendent "may delegate the investigation back to the principal. for resolution." The chair puts it without discussion. The document adopted still records no adoption date: its own history block reads "First reading: 11.14.2024" and leaves "Second reading/adopted:" blank.	POSITIVE
1:07:16	Unity's withdrawal is approved by the state board, and goes to the town in March	"So unity submitted its planning committee. Withdrawal document to the state for review. The state board reviewed it last month and approved it." Then: "it's pretty much no feedback or, really. Yeah. Recommendation or anything from the state. It's it's really just a formality where they just make sure all the boxes are checked as my understanding. So, is that's just the the latest. So we're still waiting on the March meeting for discussion before any action, could be proposed and made." An advance on 14 November, when the state board had only reviewed it. Under RSA 194-C:2, IV withdrawal then needs three fifths of the votes cast in the withdrawing district. The town voted in favour in March 2025.	OBSERVATION
1:08:10	The auditors are booked for 13 February, and the meeting was cancelled	"Just to confirm that our February meeting, the auditors will present either in person or through zoom." The business administrator asks for a slot; the chair offers "Six. 45." The date is "February 13th." No SAU 6 meeting of any kind exists in this corpus between 12 December 2024 and 10 April 2025, and on 10 April the chair tells the board's auditor, per that meeting's draft minutes, that "there was a previous agenda item for 2020 and the report was received, but the meeting was cancelled." At the same April meeting the board resolved to meet "on an as-need basis".	OBSERVATION

Items flagged for review

Flags are a reviewer's aid produced by comparing what happened at this meeting against state and federal law as it stood on 12 December 2024. They are not findings of violation, they are not legal advice, and they may be incomplete or wrong. Every rule-based flag names and links the provision it rests on; where no verified rule reaches a concern it is labelled an observation and says so. Positives are included because an evenhanded record is the point, and this meeting earns several.

HIGH The minutes of this meeting were written and approved, and the public has never been allowed to see them — which is why the one member who voted against a $2.76 million budget cannot be named

No minutes of 12 December 2024 exist in the SAU 6 Schoolboard Packets share or in the Claremont Meeting Minutes share. The search behind that negative was two-stage, as this board's filing habit requires: this meeting's own folder, then every later SAU 6 packet folder by filename date. The next SAU 6 folder is 6. SAU6 6.12.25, six months on, and it carries the 10 April 2025 draft and nothing else.

They were not simply never written. The 10 April 2025 draft minutes record, under General Business, that "Heather Whitney made a motion to approve the minutes from 12.12.24 as presented, Michael Petrin seconded the motion", and on the next line that a voice vote was taken with all present voting in favour. A board cannot approve minutes it has not read. So a document exists, was circulated to members, and was adopted 119 days after the meeting — and it has still not reached any public share as this page is written.

What that costs a citizen, precisely. RSA 91-A:2, II requires minutes recording "the names of members who made or seconded each motion" and "a brief description of the subject matter discussed and final decisions", and provides that they "shall be promptly recorded and open to public inspection not more than 5 business days after the meeting" — here, 19 December 2024. Because they are not open to inspection:

The dissent has no owner. The chair declares the budget vote "Opposed? One." at 1:04:06. One of the seven members present voted against the SAU's entire annual appropriation and there is no document anywhere that says which. It is the only counted dissent in the 2024 SAU 6 record.
The attendance is uncorroborated. Five names draw no audible answer in the roll. Whether all five were absent, or one answered off-microphone, cannot be established.
Two salary decisions rest on the tape alone — a two-year contract renewal with a 3 percent increase, and an open-ended parity adjustment — with no mover, seconder or vote recorded in any document.
The nonpublic session has no record at all. See flag 5.

Graded HIGH on the unmitigated limb of this project's severity rule. Nothing on any record explains the absence; the minutes demonstrably exist; and the gap is not a few weeks but years. This is worse than the pattern the 14 November page describes, where minutes reached the share on the nineteenth business day because they wait for the next packet: here there was no next packet for six months and the minutes were never added to the one that eventually came.

Sources: RSA 91-A:2, II — mover/seconder clause 2018, 244:1, eff. Jan. 1, 2019; current paragraph 2023, 188:1, eff. Oct. 3, 2023; 4.10.25 DRAFT SAU6 Board Meeting Minutes (1).pdf, in 6. SAU6 6.12.25; RSA 288:1 (legal holidays, for the business-day arithmetic); companion page SAU 6 Board — November 14, 2024, flag 5.

HIGH A fifty-five-minute public hearing on the SAU budget closed without the total, the increase or any percentage being stated — and the appropriation adopted is 10.71 percent above FY25, against a sheet that printed minus 0.67

This is the same defect the 14 November page records, arrived at from the other direction. Then the sheet said 7.23% where the appropriation rose 12.25%, and the superintendent had to prise the real figure out of the presentation. Now the sheet says −0.67% — and the sign itself is wrong.

Version 3's own last block, printed on its final page:

Budget Totals — FY23 actual $1,771,416.90; FY24 actual $2,334,194.33; FY25 budget $2,489,151.00; FY26 proposed $2,597,521.45; increase $108,370.45.
Then three revenue lines, each a row of its own on the sheet: "Additional Revenues from Contracted Services" against ($50,000.00); "Indirect Costs" against ($75,000.00); and "Total Additional Revenues used to reduce Budget" against ($125,000.00).
Then two more: "Total Budget Increase" against ($16,629.55), and "Total Budget % Increase" against -0.67%.

The arithmetic on the sheet is right and the label is wrong. −$16,629.55 on $2,489,151.00 is −0.67 percent. But the line is captioned Total Budget % Increase and it is not the increase in the budget: $108,370.45 on $2,489,151.00 is +4.35 percent, and that is what the board was being asked to appropriate. Worse, the comparison is not like for like — the FY25 figure it is measured against, $2,489,151.00, is a gross appropriation with no revenue subtracted from it, the FY25 ledger filed in this same packet foots to that figure as a total of expenditure, with no revenue lines under it. A net FY26 is being set beside a gross FY25.

Then the board raised it, and no number followed. The motion added the superintendent's 3 percent, the $7,000 parity adjustment and about $150,000 for the curriculum director. The business administrator produced the result aloud — "Are you ready. 2,755,000. Make it even $723." — and the board voted $2,755,723. Against FY25's $2,489,151.00 that is $266,572.00, an increase of 10.71 percent. Against FY24's actual expenditure of $2,334,194.33 it is $421,528.67, an increase of 18.06 percent. Neither figure, nor any percentage at all, is spoken at any point in the meeting.

The chair asked. At 0:39:34: "I know what you said by numbers, but what about percent?" The answer: "I would have to figure that out because I don't know." Twenty-two minutes later the hearing was closed. That question is to the chair's credit and it belongs in this flag rather than in a separate positive, because the point of the flag is that a public body asked for the one number the public needed and adjourned the hearing without it.

What the room was told instead. The chair, at 0:39:04: "So right now the budget increase is actually a decrease." Candace Crawford, at 0:36:22: "how much I appreciate the administration making the effort to come in at a neutral, no increase budget." Heather Whitney, after the fund-balance figure lands: "So by retaining we would have a neutral tax act. And that's that's really the bottom line here." Every one of those is true of the net line and none is true of the appropriation. And the deliberation that produced the version 3 numbers happened where no citizen could see it: "the members of the board have been sending their questions about the post budget to the superintendent and the business administrator" (0:06:40). None of that correspondence is in the packet.

And the total cannot be taken apart from the public record. Version 3's gross is $2,597,521.45; the business administrator's live re-plug moved the net line by $8,428.00, which puts the adjusted gross at $2,605,949.45; and $2,755,723.00 less that is $149,773.55 — almost exactly the "just under" $150,000 she had costed for the curriculum director alone. On that reading the motion's two other named changes, the superintendent's 3 percent and the $7,000 parity adjustment, are either already inside version 3 or are not in the total at all. The record does not say which, no breakdown was given before the vote, and there are no minutes.

Graded HIGH rather than as an observation, unlike the same finding on 14 November, for three reasons. This is the statutory hearing, not a working session, and the hearing is the one occasion on which the public is invited. The sheet's headline now crosses zero, so a reader is told the budget is shrinking when the appropriation grows by more than a tenth. And the figure finally adopted, $2,755,723, appears in none of the eight documents in the packet and in no minutes — the board voted a number that exists only as a sentence on a recording, exactly as it did on 7 December 2023 with $2,497,924.

Sources: Exhibit A — SAU6 FY26 Proposed Budget V3 (every figure on this page is checked against it, and it foots exactly in all five columns — see flag 22); SAU FY26 Proposed Budget V2 ($2,793,874.48; "Total Budget % Increase 7.22%"); Financials FY25 12-2-24 (2) (FY25 grand total $2,489,151.00); RSA 194-C:9 (which prescribes no budget form); RSA 32:1 and RSA 32:5, III and IV (gross basis and comparative columns — chapter 32 names towns, districts, school districts and village districts, not school administrative units); companion pages SAU 6 Board — November 14, 2024, flag 11 and SAU 6 Board — December 7, 2023.

HIGH The board voted a $160,000 draw on its own fund balance while holding neither of the two offices RSA 194-C:5, I requires it to fill — and four months later its auditor told it so

RSA 194-C:5, I: "The school board of each school administrative unit shall meet between April 1 and June 1 in each year, at a time and place fixed by the chairpersons of the several boards, and shall organize by choosing a chairperson, a secretary, and a treasurer." Three offices, one verb, and it is shall. The annual organization for 2024 was held on 11 April 2024. It elected a chair and a vice chair — vice chair is not one of the three — and nothing else.

Eight months later the masthead on this meeting's agenda still reads "Arlene Hawkins-Chair, Rocco Ruggeri- Vice Chair" and "SAU#6 School Board Clerk- Noelle Kronberg". No secretary. No treasurer. The agenda line for the roll still says "Secretary Roll Call of Attendance of Board Members" and the clerk reads it. And the budget the board adopted carries a wage line captioned Wages School Board Secretary at $3,600 — which the business administrator confirms on the record at 1:01:08 is not a secretary's at all: "That's your board clerk. Yes. Okay, I can change that from board side."

The vacancy is confirmed by the board's own later record, and by its auditor. The 10 April 2025 draft minutes: "Arlene Hawkins noted that the SAU Board currently has no treasurer, so the Board will need one and asked how often that person should review the check register." The prompt came from Michael Campo of Plodzik & Sanderson, who had told the board "the treasurer should review the check register". The board then elected Candace Crawford treasurer and two members to review and sign vouchers — the first SAU 6 treasurer election this corpus records since Bonnie Miles was elected on 17 August 2023. Whether that treasurership was understood to continue is exactly what the record does not say; what it does say is that on 10 April 2025 the chair told the auditor there was none.

Why it matters on this night and not just in the abstract. At 1:04:17 the board voted to draw $160,000 from a fund balance the business administrator had described at 0:49:34 as "a little over probably 350,000" with the qualification "that's give or take because we haven't been audited on some of the years." A public body disposed of nearly half of an unaudited reserve with no treasurer in office, no secretary, and — as flag 1 records — no published minutes of the vote.

Graded HIGH on the unmitigated limb. The duty is express, the deadline for performing it (1 June 2024) had passed six months earlier, the board's own paperwork advertises the gap on its masthead every meeting, and the consequence is not formal: the officer the auditor says should be checking the money did not exist.

Sources: RSA 194-C:5, I and III — 1996, 298:3, eff. Aug. 9, 1996, never amended; SAU6 Budget Public Hearing agenda 12.12.24 (masthead); SAU6 FY26 Proposed Budget V3 (function 2310, Wages School Board Secretary $0.00 FY23, $0.00 FY24, $3,600.00 FY25, $3,600.00 FY26, with the Medicare and FICA lines beside it at $0.00 in every column); 4.10.25 DRAFT SAU6 Board Meeting Minutes; companion pages SAU 6 Board — April 11, 2024 (the organizational meeting) and SAU 6 Board — December 14, 2023, flag 2, where the same line and the same vacancy appear a year earlier.

MEDIUM The agenda, the budget the board adopted and every other packet document reached the public share on the afternoon of the meeting — and the same thing had happened nine days earlier

RSA 91-A:2, II requires notice of a meeting's time and place "posted in 2 appropriate places … at least 24 hours, excluding Sundays and legal holidays, prior to such meetings". Nothing in it requires a packet in advance at all, and the Drive creation time of a file is evidence of when the district's public share received it rather than of the statutory posting. With that caveat stated, the timeline is:

Packet folder 5. SAU6 12.12.24 created 3:59 p.m. Eastern, 12 December 2024.
Six files at 4:00 p.m. — the two sets of draft minutes, the FY25 financials, policy KE, version 2 of the budget and the budget summary memo.
The agenda at 4:01 p.m.
Version 3 of the budget — the document the board adopted — at 4:03 p.m., about two and a half hours before a 6:30 gavel.

It is a regression, and a measurable one. On 14 November this board's packet went up six days ahead, and the 14 November page credits that notice with making a member's policy comparison possible. On 14 December 2023, the FY25 budget hearing, the packet went up about thirty-one hours ahead. Here it is under three. And on 3 December, the meeting that failed for want of a quorum, the agenda went up at 11:13 a.m. on the day of the meeting. Two consecutive SAU 6 meetings, one of them the annual budget hearing, noticed on the day.

Three things cut the other way and belong here. The date of this meeting had weeks of notice: it is printed on the 14 November agenda's future-dates list, in the 21 November minutes, and on the 3 December agenda. The chair's account at 0:06:40 is that members had the material by correspondence beforehand. And the 3 December failure was not the board's doing. What none of that reaches is the public: a citizen who wanted to read the budget before the hearing on it had from about 4:03 p.m. to about 6:36 p.m.

Graded MEDIUM on the mitigating limb — the meeting was noticed, the packet did go up, nothing was withheld, and the statute's 24-hour rule speaks to notice rather than to packets. It is a MEDIUM about the practical value of the notice, not about its existence.

Sources: RSA 91-A:2, II; Google Drive metadata for the folder 5. SAU6 12.12.24 and each of its eight files, and for SAU#6 School Board Agenda 12.3.24, retrieved 2026-08-29 and shown in Eastern Standard Time; companion pages SAU 6 Board — November 14, 2024, flag 22 and SAU 6 Board — December 14, 2023, flag 19.

MEDIUM The nonpublic session occupies eight hundredths of a second of the broadcast, three motions the agenda scripts are nowhere on it, and no minutes of the closed session exist anywhere

The board went into nonpublic session at 0:02:48. The chair's announcement to viewers — "For those watching, the regular meeting will continue after the nonpublic session. And also our public hearing for the sixth budget will begin on our return after the explanation" — ends, and her next sentence begins 0.08 seconds later. The largest gap between any two consecutive rows anywhere in the 489-row dialogue file is 1.44 seconds, so there is no silence in the published recording in which a closed session of any length could sit. The posted agenda had scheduled it from 6:40 to 7:00 p.m.

This project has settled how to read that, and it is not as a continuous feed. A zero-gap transcript across a closed session is evidence of an edit; frame-difference analysis cannot distinguish a splice from a multi-camera cut on these recordings; and the same pattern appears on the 7 December 2023 and 14 December 2023 SAU 6 broadcasts. So the true length of this closed session is not recoverable from any public record, and recording position stops being a clock time at this point. Nothing on this page infers an adjournment hour from the tape.

Three motions the agenda expects are not on the recording. The agenda scripts them in terms: "(upon return): Is there a motion to return to public session? Second? Ms. Kronberg would you please take the Roll Call vote? Thank you. Motion to seal the minutes? Duration?" The published file contains no motion to return, no roll call out, and no motion to seal. Because the file is spliced, this page cannot say they did not happen — only that neither of the two records that could show it does. There are no minutes at all (flag 1), and no minutes of the nonpublic session have ever been published.

The legal consequence runs the same way whichever answer is right. RSA 91-A:3, III: "Minutes and decisions reached in nonpublic session shall be publicly disclosed within 72 hours of the meeting, unless, by recorded vote of 2/3 of the members present taken in public session, it is determined" that one of three grounds applies. If no seal was voted, the minutes were disclosable by 15 December 2024 and were not disclosed. If a seal was voted, the vote itself is unrecorded and unrecoverable, and no entry for it appears on any sealed-minutes list, because — as the 14 November page establishes — the "Sealed Minutes List" the board's own policy BEDG orders the superintendent to publish does not exist.

What the session was for is, unusually, visible. The agenda notices RSA 91-A:3, II(a) and prints its text in full; the two motions that follow the return are the superintendent's compensation and the assistant superintendent's. Deliberating compensation in nonpublic under (a) and then acting on it in public is the sequence the statute contemplates, and it is to the board's credit. The agenda's citation is also correct, which is worth recording on an SAU 6 page: the phantom "RSA 92-A" that this board's paperwork carried on 14 December 2023, 11 January 2024 and 15 February 2024 has not reappeared.

Graded MEDIUM rather than HIGH: the exemption was noticed correctly and stated on the agenda, a roll call was taken as RSA 91-A:3, I(b) requires, the subject is inferable from what followed, and the missing motions may be inside the cut rather than absent from the meeting. What is unmitigated is the absence of any minutes, and that is flag 1.

Sources: RSA 91-A:3 — I(b) (the motion must state the specific exemption; roll-call vote), II(a) (dismissal, promotion or compensation of a public employee), III (72-hour disclosure; sealing only by recorded 2/3 vote of the members present taken in public session), IV(a) (review procedures) — ¶IV added by 2023, 189:1, eff. Oct. 3, 2023; SAU6 Budget Public Hearing agenda 12.12.24; Output/Dialogue/16213 SAU6121224.mp4.CSV (489 rows; maximum inter-row gap 1.44 s, computed 2026-08-29); Cablecast show 16213 total run time 4,184 s, from the gallery's own API; companion pages SAU 6 Board — November 14, 2024, flag 7 and SAU 6 Board — December 14, 2023, flag 8.

MEDIUM The superintendent's contract was renewed for two years with a 3 percent increase, on a motion neither December agenda carries — and the instrument is still in no public share

The 14 November page's flag 8 recorded four people describing the terms of a contract nobody had produced; the chair's own deferral, on the 14 November recording, Cablecast show 16142, about thirty minutes in — "We also have to go over the superintendent's contract, which we did not have a chance to discuss tonight." — and the fact that neither December agenda carried a contract item. The item nonetheless happened, here, forty-three seconds after the nonpublic session.

The chair, at 0:03:57: "So I would like to propose the motion that we increase the superintendent's salary to approve the 3% salary increase for the superintendent." Heather Whitney seconded. Candace Crawford supplied the term the motion had left out — "You want to add that it's a two year" — and the chair restated the whole of it at 0:04:26: "And for a two year contract? So for this year, it's 3% increase. And to renew your contract for two years." The only discussion offered was "Other than a big thank you for the work you're doing for us." Voice vote, no count.

Three things are right about it and belong first. The board did it itself, in public, rather than leaving it to the chair: on 14 November this same board had delegated staff raises within a 2.5–3 percent band to the superintendent, and this vote confirms that the delegation as executed did not reach the person exercising it — which is what the 14 November page said and could not then prove. The percentage sits at the top of the band the board itself had set. And it was preceded by a nonpublic session properly noticed under RSA 91-A:3, II(a), which is the compensation exemption.

What is wrong with it is the paperwork around it. The item appears on no agenda: the 3 December agenda ran call to order, general business, a nonpublic session, budget discussion, future dates, other business, adjournment; this one runs the hearing, the budget approval and the second read of policy KE. Exhibit G of the 12 September packet — the proposed pre-populated calendar — had put "Review Superintendent Contract for renewal every 2 - 3 years(due next in 2025)" in December, and that is the only document in this corpus implying a contract with a term. No executed employment contract, and no vote approving one, has been located in any SAU 6 packet folder, so a two-year renewal was voted against an instrument the public has never seen, and there are no minutes recording that the vote happened at all.

Graded MEDIUM, as the 14 November page graded the same thread: nothing was concealed, the vote was taken in open session with a stated percentage and a stated term, and RSA 91-A:5, IV permits rather than requires a public body to withhold personnel records. What the record lacks is the document and the minutes.

Sources: RSA 194-C:5, III (the board fixes the salaries of all SAU personnel and may remove superintendents and other administrators); RSA 91-A:3, II(a); RSA 91-A:5, IV (permissive, not prohibitory; 2022, 122:3, eff. May 27, 2022); Exhibit G — SAU 6 School Board Agenda Proposed Recurring items 8.25.24; SAU#6 School Board Agenda 12.3.24; SAU6 Budget Public Hearing agenda 12.12.24; companion page SAU 6 Board — November 14, 2024, flag 8, whose open thread this closes.

MEDIUM The assistant superintendent's salary was adjusted by a motion that names no amount, no comparator and no cap — on a board whose one unshared statutory duty is to fix salaries

The chair moved it first with a figure and the wrong noun, at 0:04:47: "I will initiate a second motion to approve a $7,000 salary bonus for Assistant superintendent." Two voices object at once and Candace Crawford supplies the word: "It is not a bonus. It's a parody" — the transcript's rendering of parity. The chair withdrew and restated:

"It's a oh, it's a parody. All right, I withdraw that motion. I'm going to restate it, I apologize. I'd like to propose a motion to realign, readjust? Readjust the assistant superintendents salary to achieve parity with other districts, to be competitive based on the role and the size of our district."

The motion that passed contains no number. The $7,000 survives only in the withdrawn version and, an hour later, inside the budget motion, where Candace Crawford lists "the $7,000 adjustment adjustment, parity adjustment" among the changes. No comparator district is named, no salary schedule is cited, and no ceiling is stated. RSA 194-C:5, III puts the duty in one verb: the SAU board "shall fix the salaries of all school administrative unit personnel". A motion to move a salary toward parity with unnamed districts does not fix one.

The correction itself is to the board's credit — a bonus and a parity adjustment are different instruments, one member said so, and the chair withdrew rather than pressing on. And the amount does end up fixed, by the budget vote, an hour later. Graded MEDIUM on the mitigating limb for those reasons: the defect is in the drafting of a motion rather than in the substance, and the record contains a figure even though the operative motion does not.

Sources: RSA 194-C:5, III — 1996, 298:3, eff. Aug. 9, 1996, never amended; RSA 91-A:2, II (minutes must record final decisions and the names of mover and seconder — none exist here).

MEDIUM The posted agenda is two meetings the board ran as one, and its minutes item names a meeting whose minutes had been approved four weeks earlier

Two meetings. The document notices a Budget Public Hearing from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. — call to order, general business, nonpublic session, budget presentation at 7:00, hearing at 7:30, closing at 8:00 — and then, under a fresh heading, an "SAU6 School Board Meeting" with its own "I. 8:00 PM Call to order", its own roll call, its own agenda approval, its own minutes approval, citizens' comments at 8:10, the budget vote at 8:25 and adjournment at 8:45. The board held one meeting: one call to order, one roll, one agenda motion, and the second meeting's general business taken before the hearing rather than after it. A citizen reading the agenda would have arrived for the budget vote at 8:25 and found it long over.

The wrong minutes. Item II.c reads "Minutes of the 9.12.24 meeting? Are there any corrections/amendments to the minutes of 9.12.24?" and then scripts, in the first person and word for word, the amendment the chair had already moved on 14 November: "I'd like to amend the minutes under Item 1 to include that the Board did not receive Global review of actual to budgeted 24-25 budget as listed in that agenda." The September minutes were approved with that amendment four weeks earlier. What the board approved here was the 14 November and 21 November drafts — correctly listed in the second half of the same agenda — in forty-nine seconds, with no corrections and no discussion, two hours after both had reached the public share.

And the two additions the chair moved created the items they sat in. Neither half of the agenda has an Other Business item or a Future Dates item, yet the meeting transacted a Unity withdrawal report and set the auditors' presentation date under a heading the chair had to invent at 0:01:13. The board's own policy BEDB, adopted at first reading on 14 November, governs agenda preparation and dissemination.

Graded MEDIUM: the errors are in the notice document rather than in what was done, the correct minutes were listed elsewhere on the same page, and everything transacted was transacted in open session. It is on the page because the agenda is the only advance notice the public gets of an SAU 6 meeting, and this one described a schedule the board did not follow and an item the board did not take.

Sources: SAU6 Budget Public Hearing agenda 12.12.24.docx.pdf; 11.14.24 DRAFT SAU6 minutes (1).pdf, which records the September amendment; RSA 91-A:2, II; companion page SAU 6 Board — November 14, 2024, flag 4 (policy BEDB).

OBSERVATION The budget was adopted as one total with no apportionment and no basis stated — the first SAU 6 budget adopted since RSA 194-C:9, ¶IV came into force, and the last before Unity votes to leave

RSA 194-C:9, I does three things. It sets the deadline this meeting existed to meet. It prescribes how the cost divides: "the apportionment shall be based 1/2 on the average membership in attendance for the previous school year and 1/2 on the most recently available equalized valuation of each district as of June 30 of the preceding school year." And it imposes a second act with its own deadline: "Prior to January 15 in each year, the board shall certify to the chairperson of the school board of each constituent school district the amount so apportioned."

The board voted a total and nothing else. Version 3 is object-code detail footing to one grand total: no Claremont and Unity columns, no average-membership figures, no equalized valuations. Apportionment is never mentioned on the recording; the word does not occur anywhere in the 489-row transcript. The closest the meeting comes is the exchange at 0:58:25 — the chair's "there's still additional monies that can be returned to the districts, correct, to offset their tax burden for the contribution", and again at 1:05:27, "that does maintain additional funds that can be used to offset the contribution of both Unity and Claremont." How the $125,000 of revenue and the $160,000 of fund balance divide between two towns is never said.

Paragraph IV is new, and it is in force. Added by 2024, 329:1, effective 1 October 2024, it reads: "In addition to the method of apportionment set forth in paragraph I, the school administrative unit board may consider other methods. Any method of apportionment to be used shall have been approved by the constituent school districts pursuant to RSA 194-C:9 or RSA 194-C:9-a, except that the proposed method of apportionment shall be adopted only if there is a majority affirmative vote in each school district within the school administrative unit." This is the first SAU 6 budget adopted since that paragraph existed. Nothing in this record is a departure from ¶I's formula — but nothing in this record is ¶I's formula either, because no basis of any kind was stated, and a reader cannot tell which is being used.

Two certifications, and they are different. RSA 194-C:9, I certifies the apportioned amount to the chairperson of the school board of each constituent school district, before January 15. RSA 194-C:5, III separately requires the board to "certify the apportionment to their respective treasurers and to the state board of education". Different recipients, different deadlines. Neither appears in this record, and neither would be expected to: both are administrative acts falling after this meeting, and the absence of a document from a packet share is not evidence that the act was not performed.

Why it is sharper this year than last. The same observation appears on the 14 December 2023 page. Two things have changed. Unity's withdrawal report has been approved by the state board — reported at 1:07:16 — and goes to the town in March, under RSA 194-C:2, IV, which requires three fifths of the votes cast in the withdrawing district. And four of Unity's five board seats were empty when this total was voted (flag 17). A town about to decide whether to leave the unit was given no statement of what the unit's budget costs it.

Labelled an observation and not a violation. RSA 194-C:9 does not require the apportionment to be adopted at the same meeting as the budget, or to appear in the budget document, and the January 15 certification deadline falls a month after this meeting.

Sources: RSA 194-C:9 — ¶I (1996, 298:3; 2003, 279:1, eff. Sept. 16, 2003) and ¶IV (2024, 329:1, eff. Oct. 1, 2024); RSA 194-C:5, III; RSA 194-C:2, IV (withdrawal: planning committee, state board review, 3/5 of votes cast; note ends 2010, 5:1, eff. June 18, 2010); SAU6 FY26 Proposed Budget V3; companion page SAU 6 Board — December 14, 2023, flag 13.

OBSERVATION The $75,000 of indirect costs subtracted before the headline percentage is money the business administrator says the SAU has not been receiving — and the wage lines the board argued about are in no published document

The revenue. Version 3 subtracts $125,000 before printing its bottom line, on two rows captioned "Additional Revenues from Contracted Services" and "Indirect Costs". The packet's budget summary memo explains the second: "Indirect costs are the portion of the grants that cover the management of the grants. The SAU manages the grants for Claremont and Unity. The indirect cost rate for Claremont for FY25 is 3.1%, and for the remaining grants is FY24 2.7%. The total amount that we can claim is a little more than $75,000."

Then, at 0:47:37: "And we have not been getting indirect costs into the SA. You we have claimed them, but they either staying in Claremont or we don't claim them all the time. It's been inconsistent on the grants on whether it's written in or not." The chair checks the tense — "Speaking historically" — and gets "Historically, yes… Previously. Right." Asked about the other constituent district at 0:48:10: "I don't think you've claimed indirect costs. Usually they don't do that but it could be done." A revenue line that a district has historically not collected is a reasonable budget assumption; a revenue line that a district has historically not collected, subtracted from an appropriation before the appropriation's percentage change is printed, is a different thing. Nobody on the record connects the two.

The wage lines. Frank Sprague's challenge at 0:39:53 — that a post budgeted at $65,000 had been approved at $47,000, "And so the raise was based on 65,000, not the 47 that it was" — ran for five minutes and four answers and was never resolved in dollars, because the individual wage lines are not published. Version 3 shows function totals: Supt Office Salaries is one line of $430,950.14. The same is true of the $67,629.93 on the human-resources salary line, of the $150,000 the board voted to restore, and of the superintendent's own 3 percent. A reader of the public record cannot check any individual salary in this budget, and the answer given — that the difference is "directly tied to grants" and reappears as indirect-cost revenue — is checkable only against documents that do not exist publicly.

Labelled an observation. RSA 194-C:9 prescribes no budget form at all, and RSA 32:5's gross-basis and comparative-column requirements run to towns, districts, school districts and village districts — RSA 32:1 does not name school administrative units. Version 3 in fact does what RSA 32:5, III and IV would ask of a district budget: two years of actuals, the current appropriation and the proposal, side by side. Nothing here is required of it.

Sources: SAU6 FY26 Proposed Budget V3; SAU FY26 Budget Summary 12-2-24 (1); RSA 194-C:9; RSA 32:1 and RSA 32:5, III and IV.

OBSERVATION The only narrative document in the packet explains a version of the budget the board did not adopt, and its central explanation stops working in the version the board did

The packet's SAU FY26 Budget Summary 12-2-24 (1).pdf is a two-page memo from the business administrator to the board, dated 2 December 2024. It is the same memo that was in the 3 December packet, re-uploaded, and it describes version 2. Version 2 is also in this packet; so is version 3, which is the document the board adopted and about which the packet contains no narrative at all.

The memo's own headline is version 2's. Under "Additional Information" it asks and answers: "Why does the overall increase still show 7.2%? This is due to a change in health insurance benefits in the Superintendent and HR office lines." Version 3's sheet says −0.67%. A citizen reading the packet in the order it is filed meets an explanation of a 7.2 percent increase attached to a budget that advertises a decrease.

And its explanation of the human-resources post depends on the position version 3 deletes. The memo: "The Human Resource Coordinator position is funded with additional money received from Title I. This money is from moving a portion of our Curriculum Director into the Title I grant." And under Revenues: "An additional $50,000 will come from Title I to cover a portion of the Curriculum Coordinator position. This position was entirely in Title I until a few years ago when it moved to the SAU budget." Version 3 removes the curriculum coordinator, keeps the $67,629.93 human-resources salary increase, and keeps the $50,000 revenue line — which the sheet labels "Additional Revenues from Contracted Services", not Title I. Michael Petrin read the memo's revenue sentence into the record at 0:31:51, which is the only time in the meeting it was opened, and the question he asked was answered about the past rather than about version 3.

This page does not assert that the $50,000 is wrong; it asserts that the two documents in front of the board cannot both be describing version 3, and that nobody reconciled them on the record. The board's own resolution — restore the position, and pay for it from fund balance if Title I will not — is a sensible response to exactly this uncertainty, and it is flag 15.

Sources: SAU FY26 Budget Summary 12-2-24 (1).pdf; SAU FY26 Proposed Budget V2; SAU6 FY26 Proposed Budget V3; the 3 December packet folder 4. SAU6 12.3.24.

OBSERVATION A dental increase announced at 10 percent is applied at exactly 5, the chair found it, and the answer she was given does not explain it

The business administrator's benefit summary at 0:52:21 ends "Dental did increase by 10%." The packet memo says the same: "Dental increase by 10%." The chair went looking for it on the page, at 0:54:10:

"I'm going to use Jeff's line I'm sorry, Jeff, but you're on page one. The dental you said was up 10%. Yes. And in this year, the proposed amount was 100. I'm sorry, 1579, let's say. And then the proposal was up, but the increase was only 78, almost $79, but yet 10% of the budget amount for this year would be more than that."

She is exactly right, and the line is the cleanest test in the document. Info Mgt Svcs. Dental covers one person, so headcount cannot muddy it: FY25 $1,578.78, FY26 proposed $1,657.71, an increase of $78.93. That is 4.9994 percent — half the announced rate. Ten percent would have been $157.88. The answers were "they had told us it was a 10% increase. I would have to go back and look", then an account of how the payroll system computes benefit lines from uploaded rates, and finally an exchange in which the chair says "So it's less than 10%." and the business administrator answers "Overall. Yeah." The chair accepted it — "No I'm confident was confusing to me" — and the line was not revisited. Whether the rate or the budget is wrong is not established by anything in the record; what is established is that the two disagree by a factor of two on a line the board was told to rely on.

A second benefit figure is unrecoverable from the tape alone and is settled by the packet. At 0:52:45 the transcript has "It went from 3.53 to 12.75, which gave us a decrease of $15,841 to our budget" — a sentence that calls a rise a decrease. The memo settles it: "NHRS decreased from 13.53% to 12.75%." The quotation is left as the transcript has it, because supplying the missing digit inside quotation marks would be inventing a number; the correction is stated here instead.

Labelled an observation. Nothing requires an SAU to publish its benefit-rate workings, and the amounts are small. It is on the page because it is the one place in the meeting where a member tested a stated figure against the document and the document lost.

Sources: SAU6 FY26 Proposed Budget V3, account 100.41.2225.212.5.00000; SAU FY26 Budget Summary 12-2-24 (1).

OBSERVATION Three fiscal years remain unaudited, the audit line spent nothing at all in two consecutive closed years, the fund balance the board drew on is therefore unverified — and the February meeting booked for the auditors was cancelled

The ledger. Version 3, Business Office Auditors: FY23 actual $0.00; FY24 actual $0.00; FY25 budget $10,000.00; FY26 proposed $10,000.00. Two consecutive closed fiscal years in which the SAU paid nothing whatever for an audit. The FY25 year-to-date ledger in the same packet shows $2,600.00 spent against the $10,000 five months into the year, so the work has now begun.

The consequence, said aloud twice. At 0:49:34, giving the board its surplus: "your fund balance is a little over probably 350,000. Oh good. Again that's give or take because we haven't been audited on some of the years. But the last audit we had 210. So I can I'm confident in saying there's 350. There may be more, but I don't want to say that until we've been fully." Fourteen minutes later the board voted to spend $160,000 of it. Four weeks earlier the same officer had put the same balance at a little over $300,000 and the board had resolved by consensus to apply $180,000 of it; the figure has moved by about $50,000 and the number voted has moved by $20,000, and no document reconciles either movement.

The remedy the board set, and what became of it. The chair added an agenda item at 0:01:13 for exactly this and closed the meeting on it at 1:08:10: "our February meeting, the auditors will present either in person or through zoom", on "February 13th", in a slot the chair offered to put first. No SAU 6 meeting of any kind exists in this corpus between this one and 10 April 2025 — no recording, no packet folder, no minutes, no map section. On 10 April the chair tells auditor Michael Campo, per that meeting's draft minutes, "that there was a previous agenda item for 2020 and the report was received, but the meeting was cancelled", and the board then heard the 2021 audit recommendations and resolved to meet "on an as-need basis". At the same meeting the chair asked the auditor to have the audits completed by 30 June 2026 and he said that was the plan.

Labelled an observation and not a violation, deliberately. No located New Hampshire statute requires a school administrative unit to be audited. RSA 21-J:19 is permissive and names towns, school districts and village districts, not school administrative units; RSA 197:25 is a district fallback; the only located SAU audit duty is RSA 194-C:4, II(a), which lists audits among the services each SAU must provide. This is a control weakness, and a material one where a board spends an unaudited balance, rather than a missed statutory deadline.

Sources: SAU6 FY26 Proposed Budget V3, account 100.41.2520.383.5.00000; Financials FY25 12-2-24 (2); 4.10.25 DRAFT SAU6 Board Meeting Minutes; RSA 21-J:19 (1985, 204:1; 2008, 174:1, eff. Aug. 10, 2008); RSA 197:25; RSA 194-C:4, II(a); companion page SAU 6 Board — November 14, 2024, flag 12.

POSITIVE The budget was adopted twenty days inside the statutory deadline, after a public hearing RSA 194-C:9 does not require and that ran about fifty-five minutes — fifty times the FY25 hearing

RSA 194-C:9, I requires only this: "At a meeting held before January 1, the school administrative unit board shall adopt a budget required for the expenses of the school administrative unit for the next fiscal year". It requires no public hearing on an SAU budget at any point, and RSA ch. 32, which does impose budget hearings, states its application in terms of towns, districts, school districts and village districts and does not name school administrative units. This board held a hearing anyway, noticed it on its own agenda as a hearing with published rules of participation, opened it, and closed it before taking the vote. That is a step beyond the statutory minimum and it should be recorded as one.

The deadline was met with room. December 12 is twenty days before January 1 — and it was reached the hard way. The board's scheduled budget meeting of 3 December failed for want of a quorum. The chair explained it to the Claremont School Board the following evening — on the recording of that meeting, Cablecast show 16192, about eighty-four minutes in — and set about fixing it: "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." Nine days later the board sat with seven of twelve and adopted a budget.

And the hearing was a real one. Opened at 0:05:47 and closed at 1:01:22: about fifty-five and a half minutes, against about sixty-seven seconds at the FY25 hearing on 14 December 2023 — a hearing at which the whole of the deliberative record was one member's arithmetic. Here five of the seven members present spoke to the substance, the administration was questioned on the curriculum director, the finance director, the human-resources line, the indirect-cost rate, a wage discrepancy, the dental rate and the fund balance, and the board changed the budget as a result. On the year-on-year comparison this project exists to make, that is the largest single improvement in a public hearing anywhere in the SAU 6 record.

The counterweight is flag 2, and the two belong side by side: a much better hearing that never told the public what the budget was.

Sources: RSA 194-C:9, I — 1996, 298:3; 2003, 279:1, eff. Sept. 16, 2003; RSA 32:1 (application of the municipal budget law — SAUs not named); SAU6 Budget Public Hearing agenda 12.12.24; companion page SAU 6 Board — December 14, 2023, flag 16, where the same board adopted the FY25 budget eighteen days inside the same deadline after a sixty-seven-second hearing.

POSITIVE The board overruled its own administration in open session, on a recorded motion, and paid for it out of its own reserve rather than deferring the question

The administration came to this hearing proposing to remove a position. The superintendent put it as a cut taken in his own office to protect classrooms, and two of the seven members present agreed with him. The board then spent thirty-seven minutes taking the proposal apart in public and reversed it.

The dissent was argued, not asserted. Heather Whitney, at 0:12:59: "I support the reduction of the finance director to a part time position. However, I disagree with the reduction of, the curriculum director." She grounded it — "we also had a massive failure in our district of not even having a curriculum in place. And there was nobody watching that" — and left herself a condition: "If the administrative team is telling me that that is not valuable and that their proposal is an improvement on the current system, then I may walk back on my position."
The facts were established before the vote. Candace Crawford got the position's actual shape onto the record — 0.4 as a coach out of the title grant, 0.6 budgeted — and the assistant superintendent gave the only account this corpus contains of what the post does: implementation of two new curricula, professional-development committees, vendor quotes, monthly grade-level meetings, benchmark and Sass testing.
The chair counted the room out loud and asked the price. At 0:35:23, then "What would that be, Mary?"; answer, "anywhere from 145,000 to 150,000, because that would include benefits."
And she gave the administration the last word before the motion. At 0:56:38 she stopped a member who was ready to move — "I would ask before we move to do that on my opposition to it, if the superintendent had any proposals that he was thinking for the fund balance" — and got, across a segment break the transcript puts in the middle of the sentence, "I don't have any proposals in regards to the. Fund balance."

Michael Petrin then framed it so that nobody's position had to be a rebuke: "I hope you don't see this as a pushback against your thoughts. This is a push back on, us respecting the jobs that you you everybody here is doing… But we don't want to see burnout and people doing more than what should be expected of them at this point." The superintendent's answer — "no, no, I didn't I didn't take it that way at all" — is on the same recording.

Boards in this corpus routinely defer, refer to committee or accept an administration's number. This one heard a recommendation, disagreed with it in public with reasons, put a price on the disagreement, funded it, and left the door open to the administration's version by conditioning the money on Title I not covering the post. That is what a budget hearing is for.

Sources: Output/Dialogue/16213 SAU6121224.mp4.CSV; SAU6 FY26 Proposed Budget V3.

POSITIVE The administration proposed its own office for the first cut, said why on the record, and the $196,353.03 it took out reconciles to the dollar between the two published versions

The superintendent, at 0:10:42: "I think it was important to express that, you know, we do want to keep the cuts as far away from we can from the from the classrooms. And I think in a good faith effort, as an office, we should be part of those solutions and not expect all of, you know, if we do make cuts that the coming from the classroom." And at 0:57:43, asked whether it had been an easy call: "it was definitely not an easy decision. But we said, you know, we'll do what we have to do to to move forward".

The business administrator's figure checks exactly. She told the board at 0:08:35 that "we are going to take out of our budget, roughly $197,000." Version 2 totals $2,793,874.48; version 3 totals $2,597,521.45; the difference is $196,353.03. Where it came from:

Superintendent's office −$153,195.67, of which −$96,772.81 is salary — the curriculum director's 0.6.
Business office −$51,697.72, of which −$36,000.00 is salary — the finance director from full time to 0.8. Frank Sprague put the whole-function effect at "About 50,000" at 0:51:02 and the ledger says $51,697.72.
Technology +$8,637.55, all of it software; special education, human resources, the school board and maintenance essentially unchanged.

Two other things in the same class belong here. The finance director's post was presented as temporary and tied to a milestone rather than to a preference — "once we get the audits caught up and we get everything else reconciled and in place, that that position would go away" — and when a member pushed for 0.5 rather than 0.8 in FY26 the answer was a training and succession reason, not a refusal. And the correction of the school-board wage line at 1:01:08 was offered without being asked for: "I can change that from board side."

Sources: SAU FY26 Proposed Budget V2 and SAU6 FY26 Proposed Budget V3, function totals compared line by line 2026-08-29.

OBSERVATION Four of Unity's five seats were empty when the joint board voted the budget both towns pay for, and no one asked for the weighted vote the statute provides

The roll at 0:00:41 draws no answer for Marjorie Erickson, Shannon Popescu, Kelly Simpson or Atonya Hart. All four sit for Unity; the fifth Unity seat, the vice chair's, answers and then says nothing all evening. Six of Claremont's seven are present and every attributed word from a board member is a Claremont member's. The meeting was quorate under the board's own policy BBBH-S, which requires more than half the seats and at least one member from each district.

RSA 194-C:8 makes district voting strength available and nobody invoked it. "In all votes regarding school administrative unit affairs, including the organization of such unit's school board and selection of officers, each district shall be entitled to one vote for each 16 pupils residing in that district and enrolled in schools under the administrative unit" — but weighted votes "shall only be used upon the demand of a majority of the members of any board present and voting." No demand was made, so the uncounted voice votes are not irregular. On enrolment the mechanism would have favoured Claremont in any event; the point is that the statute contemplates the two districts' interests diverging on exactly this question and the tool sat unused.

It is the same pattern as 14 November, inverted. That meeting had the strongest Unity turnout of 2024 — three of five, with the vice chair and two members present — and it was Kelly Simpson, from Unity, who cast the only recorded No. Four weeks later she is not in the room, and the one counted dissent of the year is anonymous.

Labelled an observation: attendance is not a legal defect, no statute sets a district-composition quorum for an SAU board beyond the board's own policy, and Unity's members were entitled to be absent. It is recorded because this is the budget of a unit one of whose two districts had a withdrawal report approved by the state board that same autumn.

Sources: RSA 194-C:8 — 1996, 298:3, eff. Aug. 9, 1996; SAU6 Budget Public Hearing agenda 12.12.24 (masthead); 11.14.24 DRAFT SAU6 minutes (1).pdf; companion page SAU 6 Board — November 14, 2024, flag 1.

POSITIVE The fund-balance draw was taken as its own motion, at the business administrator's insistence, restricted to a purpose and conditioned on a contingency

Four weeks earlier this board had resolved to apply $180,000 of the same surplus to the same budget by consensus, with no motion and no vote. Here the officer stopped it happening again. At 1:03:41, immediately after the budget motion: "And then what? I'd like if you can make a separate motion to use the fund balance, because that really needs to be its own motion."

She had already given the board the reason it mattered, at 0:50:19 and 0:50:40: a restricted vote binds. "You you can do that. But what I would recommend to you is to vote to help offset the bottom line of the budget"; and then, to the chair's direct question about whether restricted funds are locked in, "You say that you want to use it for one specific purpose and the board votes that way, you have to use it for that."

The motion that followed, from Whitney Skillen, is conditional in its own terms: $160,000 from the fund balance for the curriculum director "If the administration finds that that position cannot be covered with title one funds." The mover corrected herself mid-sentence when she named the wrong post, and said so; the clerk stopped the room to get the figure right — "Yes, but I couldn't. It was 100." — and was given it; and the assistant superintendent asked for one substantive change before the vote, at 1:05:10: "can you just make that title funds instead of title one funds? Okay. Just gives more flexibility." Heather Whitney seconded and the chair named her for the record.

A separate motion, a stated purpose, a stated condition, a mover who corrects herself on the record, a clerk who asks, and an administrator who improves the wording before the vote. That is a good four minutes of procedure, and it stands whatever flag 13 says about the reserve it draws on.

Sources: Output/Dialogue/16213 SAU6121224.mp4.CSV; companion page SAU 6 Board — November 14, 2024, flag 12 (the $180,000 consensus with no motion).

POSITIVE Policy KE came back for the second read the November board sent it to, someone had proof-read it — and the adopted copy still records no adoption date

On 14 November this board adopted six policies at a single first reading and pulled a seventh, KE, on Rocco Ruggeri's question about response timelines. Here it returns as item IV.B, listed on the agenda as a second read, in the packet as Second Read--Policy KE_ Public Complaints - Google Docs.pdf. The undertaking was kept, and the returned text carries the answer to the question that pulled it: a "Public Complaint Policy Timeline KE-R" with a total of 30 days and four steps — teacher 1–3 days, principal 4–10, superintendent 11–20, board 21–30.

Whitney Skillen moved adoption "as presented with a tiny revision to be made. There's like an extra period under the second bullet of number three. So this principal period for resolution, that period needs to be deleted. And then it's perfect. And then it should be adopted." The defect is real and is in the packet copy, in step 3 of KE-R: the superintendent "may delegate the investigation back to the principal. for resolution." Someone read the document.

Two things are still wrong with the instrument, and they are the November defects surviving. Its own "District Policy History" block reads "First reading: 11.14.2024" and leaves "Second reading/adopted:" blank, so the adopted policy records no date of adoption — the same blank the 14 November page found on all six policies passed that night. And KE-R, a regulation, is embedded inside KE as step 4 of the procedure for a complaint made to an individual board member, which is not where a regulation belongs. Neither was raised.

Sources: Second Read--Policy KE_ Public Complaints - Google Docs.pdf; companion page SAU 6 Board — November 14, 2024, flag 22, which is where the second read was ordered, and flag 4 on the same page for the blank history blocks.

OBSERVATION A fifty-five-minute hearing and a citizens' comment period, both to an empty room, and fifteen minutes scheduled for an item the statute puts at thirty

No member of the public appears anywhere in this recording. The chair closed the hearing with "Thank you for the members of the public for for watching and being a part of this" and reached the separate comment item twenty seconds later: "Say citizens comments is the next agenda item. Seeing no citizens in our audience, we'll move on to our next order of business". Nobody was turned away or cut off.

RSA 189:74 requires a school board to "provide the opportunity for the public to comment on school district matters at a meeting of the school board held under RSA 91-A:2" and provides that "The public comment period shall be for no less than 30 minutes." The posted agenda allots fifteen — 8:10 to 8:25 p.m. Two questions the text does not answer keep this an observation rather than a flag, and they are the same two the 14 November page states: whether the thirty minutes is a floor on elapsed time or on the opportunity offered is unsettled, and whether a section addressed to "the school board" reaches the joint board of a school administrative unit — a body RSA 194-C:5 calls "the school board of each school administrative unit" but which governs no schools — is a question no located authority answers. On the facts nobody wanted to speak, and the hearing that preceded it was open for fifty-five minutes.

What is worth recording alongside it is the audience the chair addressed: this meeting was broadcast on CCTV Channel 8 and is on the Cablecast archive, and the chair twice spoke directly to people watching rather than to the room. The absence of a physical audience at an SAU budget hearing is not the same as the absence of a public.

Sources: RSA 189:74 (2022, 333:1, eff. Sept. 6, 2022; never amended; the only exceptions are ¶II emergency meetings and ¶III meetings held solely for a nonpublic session); RSA 194-C:5, I; SAU6 Budget Public Hearing agenda 12.12.24; companion page SAU 6 Board — November 14, 2024, flag 16.

OBSERVATION What the ledger shows that nobody read out: two mileage lines paid exactly nothing in FY24 and re-budgeted in full, three cell-phone lines already overspent five months into FY25, one of them against a zero appropriation, and a telephone line that has been zero in every column for four years

These are controls a reader can check for themselves against the two documents in the packet. None was raised at the meeting.

Mileage. Info Mgt Svcs. Mileage Reimbursement: FY23 actual $2,500.00, FY24 actual $0.00, FY25 budget $2,500.00, FY26 proposed $2,500.00. Sped. Admin. Mileage Reimbursement: FY23 actual $2,500.00, FY24 actual $0.00, FY25 budget $1,250.00, FY26 proposed $1,250.00. Two lines that paid exactly $2,500.00 apiece in FY23, nothing whatever in FY24, and are carried into FY26 at their FY25 amounts. The FY25 ledger shows the first still at $0.00 five months in and the second already overspent at $1,439.07 against $1,250.00. On 10 April 2025 the business administrator told the board, per that meeting's draft minutes, that "the mileage reimbursement is over, but it should have been budgeted for $2500 rather than $1250.00" — a correction to the very line this board had just re-adopted at $1,250.
Cell-phone stipends. Human Resources Cell Phone Reimbursement: FY25 budget $0.00, FY25 spent to date $1,000.00 — an expenditure with no appropriation behind it — and $1,000.00 budgeted again for FY26. Business Office: $1,000.00 budgeted, $2,000.00 spent, doubled to $2,000.00 for FY26; the packet memo explains it, "Business office cell phone reimbursement increase. The Director of Finance also receives this benefit." Superintendent's office: $2,100.00 budgeted, $2,500.00 spent, raised to $3,500.00 for FY26. Three of the five cell-phone lines in the unit were over budget five months into the year, and the other two had already spent their whole year's allocation. The 14 November board had spent several minutes on why these are paid as stipends rather than against receipts and reached no conclusion; on 10 April 2025 the chair reported that "legal counsel recommended district/SAU issued cell phones rather than cell phone reimbursement for safety and security/legal purposes."
Telephone. Maintenance Telephone and Supt Office Telephone are $0.00 in all five columns of version 3 — FY23 actual, FY24 actual, FY25 budget, FY26 proposed and the change. They do not appear at all in the FY25 ledger, whose header excludes inactive accounts with zero balance. The $4,000 maintenance telephone line whose disappearance the 14 December 2023 board was told about — because the technology director had changed the systems over — has now been carried as an empty row for two full budget cycles.
Two negative actuals, and one year that overran the next year's budget. Supt Office TSA FY24 actual is ($5,907.78) and Sped. Admin. Supplies FY24 actual is ($241.95) — reversals booked as expenditure. And Supt Office Salaries ran $570,258.79 in FY24 against an FY25 budget of $475,229.15 and an FY23 actual of $324,051.66: the year of the superintendent's termination and replacement cost 76 percent more in that one line than the year before it, and $95,029.64 more than the following year's whole appropriation for it.
And two lines with a full year's money still unspent five months in: Business Office Software, $75,000.00 budgeted and $0.00 spent, raised to $78,750.00 for FY26; and School Board Contracted Services, $10,000.00 budgeted and $0.00 spent, which version 3 halves to $5,000.00.

Labelled an observation throughout. Every figure here is the district's own, printed in the two documents it put in the packet, and none of it is a legal defect: budgeting a line that went unspent is not unlawful, and an overspent line inside a lump-sum budget that finishes in balance is a management question. What it is, is the material a public hearing exists to surface, in a hearing at which nobody asked.

Sources: SAU6 FY26 Proposed Budget V3 and Financials FY25 12-2-24 (2), both in this meeting's packet; SAU FY26 Budget Summary 12-2-24 (1); 4.10.25 DRAFT SAU6 Board Meeting Minutes; companion pages SAU 6 Board — November 14, 2024 and SAU 6 Board — December 14, 2023, flag 21.

POSITIVE Version 3 foots exactly — all seven functions, in all five columns, to the cent

Checked line by line on 2026-08-29. The seven function subtotals sum to the printed grand total in every column of the document:

FY23 actual: $277,187.48 + $0.00 + $523,412.26 + $259,184.66 + $679,597.53 + $0.00 + $32,034.97 = $1,771,416.90.
FY24 actual: $309,665.19 + $7,100.00 + $821,454.90 + $384,187.80 + $577,189.73 + $207,298.19 + $27,298.52 = $2,334,194.33.
FY25 budget: $2,489,151.00, which is also the grand total of the FY25 ledger printed on 2 December 2024 and filed in the same packet.
FY26 proposed: $389,538.52 + $10,600.00 + $701,519.38 + $420,608.96 + $733,834.37 + $301,610.22 + $39,810.00 = $2,597,521.45.
Increase/decrease column: $108,370.45, and the revenue block subtracts to −$16,629.55, which is −0.67 percent of the FY25 total exactly as printed.

The document also carries three years of comparatives against the proposal — two of actuals and one of appropriation — which is more than RSA 194-C:9 asks of an SAU budget, and is what RSA 32:5, IV would require of a district one. The version 2 to version 3 reduction reconciles to the dollar as well (flag 16). The arithmetic in this budget is sound; what flag 2 is about is the one line that is labelled wrongly, and the fact that neither the total nor the change was said out loud.

One correction to the comparative columns is worth recording as a positive too. Version 2 showed the $3,600 school-board stipend under object 321 with object 112 at zero for FY25; version 3 moves it to object 112 and zeroes 321, which is where the FY25 ledger actually carries it. The comparative column was wrong in version 2 and is right in version 3.

Sources: SAU6 FY26 Proposed Budget V3; SAU FY26 Proposed Budget V2; Financials FY25 12-2-24 (2); RSA 32:5, IV.

Appendix — source files

Official and public sources

Remote video: SAU #6 Board Meeting - 12/12/24 (Cablecast show 16213), in the Claremont Community TV gallery CLAREMONT SCHOOLS. The Cablecast API reports a total run time of 4,184 seconds and an event date of 12 December 2024. There is one nonpublic session and no gap longer than 1.44 seconds anywhere in the recording; see flag 5 for what that does and does not establish. Every timestamp on this page links into this recording with &seekto= plus the second.
Packet folder: 5. SAU6 12.12.24 — 8 documents, in the separate SAU 6 Schoolboard Packets share, not the Claremont School Board packet share. The folder was created in the public share at 3:59 p.m. Eastern on 12 December 2024 and its eight files followed between 4:00 and 4:03 p.m., the afternoon of the meeting; three of the eight — the budget summary memo, the FY25 financials and version 2 of the budget — are re-uploads of documents that had been in the 3 December packet. Drive timestamps are given because they are evidence in flag 4, and are shown in Eastern Standard Time.
Minutes: none, and the search behind that. No minutes of this meeting exist in the SAU 6 packets share or the Claremont Meeting Minutes share. The search was the two-stage one this board's filing habit requires: this meeting's own packet folder, which carries the November drafts rather than any of its own; then every later SAU 6 packet folder by filename date, of which the next is 6. SAU6 6.12.25, six months on and carrying only the 10 April 2025 draft; then the packets share's root; then the Claremont Meeting Minutes share, which has never held an SAU 6 file. The minutes nonetheless exist — the 10 April 2025 draft records their approval — and have never been published. See flag 1. Folder listings were read from the shares themselves. The Drive API's own search index returns nothing at all for the obvious queries here and its negatives are not reliable, so every negative on this page is written as not found rather than as proof of non-existence.
The document that proves the minutes exist: 4.10.25 DRAFT SAU6 Board Meeting Minutes (1).pdf, filed in 6. SAU6 6.12.25. It is also the source on this page for the treasurer vacancy (flag 3), the cancelled February meeting and the 2021 audit presentation (flag 13), and the mileage and cell-phone follow-ups (flag 21).
Other explicit negatives. No minutes of this meeting's nonpublic session exist anywhere, and no motion to seal them appears on the recording. No executed superintendent's employment contract, and no vote approving one, appears in any SAU 6 packet folder, although a two-year renewal was voted here. No apportionment schedule dividing this budget between Claremont and Unity, and no certification to either district's board chair, appears in any packet document, on the recording, or anywhere else located. No record of any kind — agenda outcome, attendance, minutes or recording — exists for the 3 December 2024 meeting that failed for want of a quorum. No SAU 6 meeting of any kind exists in this corpus between 12 December 2024 and 10 April 2025, and the 13 February 2025 date fixed at this meeting was cancelled. No Sealed Minutes List, of the kind the board's policy BEDG requires, has been located, and the 11 April 2024 six-month seal — whose stated term ran out on 11 October 2024, sixty-two days before this meeting — was not on the list of eight sets unsealed on 14 November and is not mentioned here. The honest limit on all of these: the board's own by-laws send subcommittee notices and minutes to the SAU 6 website, and the site as it stood in 2024 cannot be inspected from here.

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

SAU6 Budget Public Hearing agenda 12.12.24.docx.pdf — created 12 December 2024 at about 4:01 p.m.; 204,471 bytes. Two meetings in one document; twelve board members on the masthead with a chair, a vice chair and a clerk and no secretary or treasurer; the nonpublic session noticed at "RSA91-A:3.II (a)" with the full text of that subparagraph printed beneath it; hearing rules asking a speaker to state a name and ward. See flag 3, flag 4, flag 5 and flag 8
SAU6 FY26 Proposed Budget V3.pdf — the document the board adopted, created in the public share at about 4:03 p.m. on the day of the meeting; 490,666 bytes. Seven functions (2225 Information Management, 2310 School Board, 2321 School Administrative Unit, 2490 Special Education Administration, 2520 Business Office, 2521 Human Resources, 2600 Maintenance) with FY23 and FY24 actuals, the FY25 budget, the FY26 proposal and the change. Grand total $2,597,521.45 against FY25's $2,489,151.00, +$108,370.45; then $125,000 of revenue subtracted, and two final rows captioned "Total Budget Increase" and "Total Budget % Increase" carrying ($16,629.55) and -0.67%. Every budget figure on this page is checked against it. See flag 2, flag 13, flag 21 and flag 22
SAU FY26 Proposed Budget V2.pdf — the superseded version, first posted for the 3 December meeting that never happened; grand total $2,793,874.48, +$304,723.48, "Total Budget % Increase 7.22%". Used here only for the version-to-version comparison in flag 16
SAU FY26 Budget Summary 12-2-24 (1).pdf the (1) is the district's — the business administrator's two-page memo of 2 December 2024, describing version 2. Source for the health and dental rates, the $167,194.35 total wage increase, the $96,703 health-insurance increase, the NHRS rate correction and the indirect-cost explanation. See flag 11 and flag 12
Financials FY25 12-2-24 (2).pdf — the FY25 year-to-date ledger, printed 2 December 2024, grand total $2,489,151.00 with $1,090,501.88 spent and $1,183,420.63 encumbered. It was in the packet and was not presented: the business administrator says at 0:51:39 that "when we look at our budget, which we will do at our next meeting, you'll see that we're overspent in those lines" — and the next meeting was cancelled. See flag 13 and flag 21
Second Read--Policy KE_ Public Complaints - Google Docs.pdf — adopted at this meeting with one punctuation correction; its own history block records no adoption date. See flag 19
11.14.24 DRAFT SAU6 minutes (1).pdf — approved here without correction; the source for the raise delegation, the eight unsealed sets and the deferred contract discussion
11.21.24 DRAFT SAU6 meeting minutes.pdf — approved here without correction. Its own agenda heading is dated November 14, 2024, on the page after a cover dated November 21; the meeting it records had no quorum at 6:30, took the strategic-plan presentation before the call to order, and adjourned at 7:27 p.m.

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

Dialogue transcript: Output/Dialogue/16213 SAU6121224.mp4.CSV — 489 rows, about 9,970 words, 10 named speakers, 17 rows left Unidentified (3.5 percent)
Diarized transcript: Input/Transcripts/16213 SAU6121224.mp4.json
Video: Input/Videos/16213 SAU6121224.mp4
Meeting/document map: Input/SupportingDocuments/MAP.md (§63)
Companion pages: SAU 6 Board, FY25 Budget Public Hearing — December 14, 2023, this meeting's direct counterpart; SAU 6 Board — November 14, 2024, where version 1 of this budget was presented and the raises were delegated; SAU 6 Board — September 12, 2024; SAU 6 Board — April 11, 2024, the organizational meeting that elected no secretary and no treasurer; SAU 6 Board — December 7, 2023, the last time this board voted a figure that appears in no document; and Claremont School Board Finance Committee — November 19, 2024

Laws and rules cited on this page

School administrative units: RSA 194-C:9 — I (budget adopted "At a meeting held before January 1"; apportionment "based 1/2 on the average membership in attendance for the previous school year and 1/2 on the most recently available equalized valuation of each district as of June 30 of the preceding school year"; "Prior to January 15 in each year, the board shall certify to the chairperson of the school board of each constituent school district the amount so apportioned"; no new service without a majority of districts representing not less than 60 percent of pupils; and no public hearing is required by this section at any point) and IV (the board "may consider other methods" of apportionment, but any method "shall have been approved by the constituent school districts" and is adopted "only if there is a majority affirmative vote in each school district within the school administrative unit") — ¶I from 1996, 298:3 and 2003, 279:1, eff. Sept. 16, 2003; ¶IV added by 2024, 329:1, eff. Oct. 1, 2024, and therefore in force on this meeting's date; RSA 194-C:5 — I (the board "shall meet between April 1 and June 1 in each year" and "shall organize by choosing a chairperson, a secretary, and a treasurer"), II (superintendent services per RSA 194-C:4), III (the board "shall fix the salaries of all school administrative unit personnel", apportions the expense of salaries and benefits, certifies to the district treasurers and the state board of education — a different certification from ¶I's, which runs to the district board chairpersons — and has "the authority to remove superintendents and other administrators") — 1996, 298:3, eff. Aug. 9, 1996, never amended; RSA 194-C:8 (weighted voting, one vote per 16 resident pupils, usable "only … upon the demand of a majority of the members of any board present and voting" — not demanded here); RSA 194-C:4, II(a) (audits among the services each SAU must provide); RSA 194-C:2, IV (withdrawal: planning committee, state board review within 60 days, 3/5 of the votes cast in the withdrawing district)
New Hampshire Right-to-Know Law: RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d) ("public body" expressly includes a school administrative unit "or any committee, subcommittee, or subordinate body thereof, or advisory committee thereto"); RSA 91-A:2 — I (definition of a meeting), II (24 hours' notice excluding Sundays and legal holidays; minutes to record the names of members who made or seconded each motion, a brief description of the subject matter discussed and final decisions, and to be open to public inspection within 5 business days) — mover/seconder clause 2018, 244:1, eff. Jan. 1, 2019; current paragraph 2023, 188:1, eff. Oct. 3, 2023; the start-time and end-time additions are 2025, 112:1, eff. Aug. 22, 2025 and are not applied to this 2024 meeting; RSA 91-A:3 — I(b) (the motion must state the specific exemption; roll-call vote), II(a) (dismissal, promotion or compensation of a public employee), III (disclosure within 72 hours unless sealed "by recorded vote of 2/3 of the members present taken in public session"), IV(a) (review of sealed minutes; added by 2023, 189:1, eff. Oct. 3, 2023); RSA 91-A:5, IV (permits, and does not require, withholding personnel records; 2022, 122:3, eff. May 27, 2022)
School boards, budgets and audits: RSA 189:74 (public comment period of no less than 30 minutes; 2022, 333:1, eff. Sept. 6, 2022, never amended); RSA 32:1 and RSA 32:5, III and IV (appropriations on a gross basis; comparative columns — chapter 32 applies to towns, districts, school districts and village districts and does not name school administrative units, so neither requirement binds this budget); RSA 21-J:19 (permissive municipal audit; names towns, school districts and village districts, not school administrative units; 1985, 204:1; 2008, 174:1, eff. Aug. 10, 2008); RSA 197:25 (district fallback where no auditor is hired under RSA 21-J:19); RSA 288:1 (legal holidays, used for the business-day arithmetic; no New Hampshire legal holiday falls between 12 and 19 December)
Not cited against this board, and named here so that a reader knows it was considered. RSA 32:5, I's requirement of a public hearing not later than 25 days before the meeting, and RSA 40:13, II-a's budget-hearing calendar, are district provisions and reach neither an SAU budget nor this meeting. No located New Hampshire statute requires a school administrative unit to be audited, so the unaudited years at flag 13 are a control weakness and not a missed deadline. And the phantom RSA chapter 92-A that this board's paperwork carried on 14 December 2023, 11 January 2024 and 15 February 2024 does not appear on this agenda, which cites the Right-to-Know Law correctly.