Participants
Everyone in the record. Attendance and the spelling of every board name come from the district’s approved minutes of 18 December 2024; roles come from the agenda masthead, the agenda’s own subcommittee list and the two sets of subcommittee minutes in the packet. Segment and word counts are from the dialogue file, which holds 366 rows and 12,872 words. The two largest speakers are not board members: the business administrator and a principal take 49.6 per cent of the words between them. Where the recording and the minutes disagree about who said something, this page reports both and says which is which.
| Name | Role | Participation |
|---|
| Mary Henry | Business Administrator, Claremont School District / SAU 6 | 75 segments, 3,542 words, 27.5 per cent — the largest share of the evening. She does four separate jobs in eighty-five minutes: she reads the roll in the clerk’s absence (inside the chair’s segment at 0:00:28, so it gets no row of its own), she amends the agenda to add the lease (0:01:40), she gives the twenty-nine-minute tax-rate tutorial and the default budget (0:37:25 to 0:58:26), and she writes and reads the lease motion at the chair’s request (1:16:17). She gives the FY26 default budget as $39,791,261 and the Eversource grant as $262,995. Her cluster is not pure: four short backchannels inside it are a seated member’s and are reassigned in the dialogue file, one of them a second to a motion a business administrator cannot make. |
| Michael Herrington | Principal, Stevens High School | 52 segments, 2,849 words, 22.1 per cent. Recognised by full name — “Next item on our agenda is high school schedule review. Doctor Michael Harrington, please” Harrington at 0.99 confidence is Herrington — and he holds the floor from 0:14:41 to 0:36:57, the longest single item. He presents seventeen qualitative interviews with his own staff about the block-to-period conversion and says the loss of planning time is not survivable: “I would very much argue that this these first stressors are untenable and cannot last.” DO NOT MERGE with Michelle Herrington, the SRVRTC assistant director, who does not speak here and who is the “Miss Harrington” of the subcommittee report — two Herringtons overlap in this district from August 2024 and both are Harrington to this recognizer. |
| Heather Whitney | Chair, Claremont School Board; member of the Finance Committee | 90 segments, 1,804 words, 14.0 per cent. She opens (0:00:01), disposes of the consent agenda by absence of objection (0:02:37), takes every recognition in the file, seconds the lease motion twice, and closes with the January calendar and the sentence this page is named for (1:21:03). She places herself inside the Finance Committee on the record — “the finance committee apologizes for that”. Surname collision: the SURNAME Whitney is the chair; the FIRST name Whitney is Whitney Skillen, called in the roll and absent. |
| Candace Crawford | Board member; chair of Capital Improvements and of the SRVRTC Visioning Sub-Committee; member of the Finance Committee | 37 segments, 1,408 words, 10.9 per cent. Four chair recognitions and one from the vice chair anchor her. She brings the Funding Fairness Project letter to Senator Ruth Ward (0:58:45) and asks the state to raise base adequacy “from 4100 to 7300 per pupil”; she then delivers both subcommittee reports, naming her own Capital Improvements membership aloud — “Mike patron and Bonnie Miles and I met with Mary Henry and Steve Holt” Mike patron is the standing garble for Michael Petrin She wrote both documents in the packet: each is signed Candace Crawford. |
| Mimi Rhines | School Counselor, Stevens High School, and summer school coordinator — and the evening’s only citizen speaker | 25 segments, 985 words, 7.7 per cent. She appears twice in two capacities and separates them herself at the podium: “Full disclosure I am the school counselor at the high school and I'm a summer school coordinator, but I making my comments in this segment as a citizen just so we can kind of have that separated. I'll be up here later for other school stuff.” Her comment (0:03:21) opposes a decision to stop funding summer school that she learned about by watching a television recording of a subcommittee that keeps no minutes (flag 13). She returns to present the Program of Studies (0:09:24). The district uses two first names for her in one document: the agenda and the minutes’ citizens’-comment entry say Mimi, the same minutes’ heading for her own agenda item says Amelia. |
| Frank Sprague | Vice chair, Claremont School Board; chair of the Finance Committee | 37 segments, 777 words, 6.0 per cent. He moves all three motions of the evening — the Program of Studies, the senator letter and the lease — and is named inside two of them, by the chair (“the motion made by Frank spray”) and by the business administrator mid-motion (“Frank, it's mc l I'm sorry”). His Finance Committee report runs about fifteen seconds: “Not much to really update after we've had the presentation… we have given the administrative team some homework to do”. He then announces a further Finance meeting “over the Christmas period” (flag 4). ASR renders him Frank Spriggs in the roll. |
| Michael Petrin | Board member; chair of the Ad Hoc Communications Committee; member of the SRVRTC and Capital Improvements committees | 16 segments, 573 words, 4.5 per cent. The chair recognises him twice by first name. He is the member who states the Right-to-Know point out loud, at 1:10:25: “I know you mentioned this wasn't an official meeting. I just asked that if we're having a subcommittee, we need to make sure that we're having a meeting.” He also presses on the criminal-justice programme Claremont gave up (flag 9) and closes the evening thanking the music staff. His diarizer label is shared with the vice chair and the two are separated by override in the dialogue file. ASR renders him Michael Patron, Mr. Patron, Mr. Peter and Mr. Peterson — never once correctly. |
| Chris Pratt | Superintendent of Schools, SAU 6 — permanent since June 2024, not interim | 14 segments, 560 words, 4.4 per cent. He gives a four-minute superintendent’s report that mostly points at the written one (0:05:22), plays a bus-driver recruitment video made with the Claremont Chamber of Commerce, and reports that principal self-assessments have been rebuilt around the strategic plan adopted the month before. He speaks once more, on how the high-school timetable is built: “the schedule is built on student requests”. He does not speak during the budget item at all. |
| Arlene Hawkins | Board member; chair of the SAU 6 joint board; Curriculum Committee representative; member of the Policy subcommittee | 10 segments, 294 words, 2.3 per cent — and her first audible word is 71 minutes in, at 1:10:59. Her name is called in the roll and the 2.04-second silence that follows is the longest in it; the chair tells the roll-reader “You can write down when she. When she comes in”, and the minutes supply the answer the recording cannot — “Arlene Hawkins (arrived 6:33)”. She questions the tech-centre report, commends the Finance Committee, and gives the Policy subcommittee report in the absent chair’s place: “The policy committee did meet. Subcommittee did me today.” The approved minutes credit her with seconding a motion the dialogue file places 572 seconds before she is first heard (flag 8). |
| Bonnie Miles | Board member; member of Capital Improvements and of the SRVRTC Committee | Recorded present in the approved minutes. No answer at the roll call, and not one attributed word in the whole recording. She is named twice by others — by Crawford as one of the three at the Capital Improvements meeting of 10 December, and in the Capital Improvements minutes themselves, which record her present at 3:30 p.m. that day. This page attributes no word to her (flag 15). |
| Whitney Skillen | Board member; chair of the Policy subcommittee | Absent, per the approved minutes, and no answer at the roll. Her subcommittee met that day and its report was given by another of its members. She is the fourth Claremont board meeting in a row at which the first name Whitney in a transcript means her and the surname means the chair. |
| Noelle Kronberg | School board clerk | Absent — and the minutes of this meeting are signed in her name. The chair opens by saying so: “Miss Cronenberg is not in attendance tonight. So do we. Mary, would you kindly do roll call for us?” Miss Cronenberg is Noelle Kronberg By-law 2.05 says “the clerk shall call the roll” and provides no substitute; the business administrator read it. The approved minutes record neither her absence nor who read the roll (flag 7). She was absent from this board on 21 August and 18 September 2024 as well, and a different person read the roll each time — the chair, then a member, now the business administrator. |
| Unidentified | Six segments of a played video; four backchannels from the table | 10 segments, 80 words, 0.6 per cent. Six of the ten are the soundtrack of the district’s bus-driver recruitment spot, played into the room at 0:06:41 — a script and two actors, not people at the table. The other four are short reactions, one of them the Sure. that seconds the Program of Studies motion; the approved minutes name Candace Crawford as that seconder and the recording cannot. Elimination is not available for any of the four, because two seated members are in the room without clusters of their own, so no name is printed. |
Named in the record but not present. Michelle Herrington, SRVRTC assistant director — called “Tech Director” in the subcommittee minutes, “Assistant Director” in the superintendent’s report and “Ms. Harringont” once in the approved board minutes, three titles and a misspelling for one person inside one packet. Steve Holt, Maintenance Director, who attended the 10 December Capital Improvements meeting by video. Eric Perry, Newport Tech Director — spoken on the recording at full confidence and, for the first time in this corpus, printed in a district document, the Visioning Sub-Committee minutes of 9 December. Senator Ruth Ward, the addressee of the letter the board voted to sign. Alyssa Brenner, Scott Pope and Career Counselor O’Neill, from those same minutes; the recording gives the last of these a first name, Jan, that no document carries. Ms. Trudeau and Mr. Smith-Knox, thanked for the music programme; a third name the recording renders Miss Kestner and the minutes render Ms. Gessner, and neither is corroborated.
Agenda
An official agenda was posted and is in the packet: CSB Agenda 12.18.24.pdf, uploaded to the district’s public share on 12 December 2024, six days before the meeting, and then modified in place on 13 December — the file’s modification time is nineteen hours after its creation time, so the posted document changed after it was posted and this page cannot say what changed. It names four exhibits, A to D, and all four are in the folder. Times in the left column are the agenda’s own; the links go to the moment the item was actually reached. Timestamps link to the same moment in the Cablecast recording. Hover or focus a cell to expand it.
| Taken up | Item | Agenda text / disposition |
|---|
6:30 p.m.
0:00:01 | I. Call to Order and Pledge of Allegiance | Agenda: “I. 6:30 PM Call to Order and Pledge of Allegiance”. On tape: “I'd like to call to order the Claremont School Board meeting of December 18th, 2024. With all in attendance, please rise until the Pledge of Allegiance.” The date is spoken correctly, which is worth recording in a corpus where the same chair’s opening on 16 October was transcribed as October 16th, 2021. By-law 2.05 asks the chair to “commence the meeting at the hour appointed”, and on the minutes’ single clock anchor she did. |
6:35 p.m.
0:00:28 | II. General Business — Secretary Roll Call of Attendance | Agenda: “Secretary Roll Call of Attendance of Board Members (Board Members who arrive after the meeting begins will be noted as ‘present’ at the point in the agenda at which they arrive)”. One thirty-four-second segment swallows the entire roll — the chair’s request, the reader’s seven names and the members’ answers — and it cannot be split without altering the transcript: “Miss Cronenberg is not in attendance tonight. So do we. Mary, would you kindly do roll call for us? Sure. You're it. Okay. Yay! Heather. Whitney. I'm here. Frank Spriggs here. Bonnie. Miles. Whitney. Skilling. Arlene. Hawkins. Candace. Crawford here. Michael. Patron. Here. She's okay. You can write down when she. When she comes in.” Spriggs is Sprague, Skilling is Skillen, Patron is Petrin Four names draw an audible answer; three do not. The minutes give six present and one absent (flags 7 and 15). |
| 0:01:25 | II.a.1 Consent Agenda (vote required) — Amendments and Final Approval of board agenda | Agenda: “a. Consent Agenda (vote required) 1. Amendments and Final Approval of board agenda”. The chair opens the floor and the business administrator, not a member, brings the amendment: “I need to add the lease agreement for the, lighting project… Now, I just need for you guys to approve the documents to be signed, to actually go.” Disposed by consent: “Make that item number six on the agenda. If there is no objections. No objections.” By-law 2.10 authorises that form expressly; by-law 2.09 asks for items requiring action fourteen days ahead with backup, and the fourteenth day before this meeting was 4 December (flag 1). Minutes: “Mary Henry requested an addition of the lease agreement approval for the lighting project with a dollar amount of $857,592”. |
| 0:02:00 | II.a.2 Minutes Approval — 11.20.24 & 12.4.24 | Agenda, verbatim: “2. Minutes Approval- 11.20.24 & 12.4.24”. On tape: “We also have minutes approval from 1120 and 12 for 24. Is there any objections to approval of those minutes as written?” and then “Seeing no objections, we will approve the minutes of 11, 20, 24 and 12 for 24.” This is the label the agenda got right — the previous two agendas in this sequence both misnamed the minutes they carried — and it is where the 20 November draft, which sat unapproved in the 4 December packet, is finally disposed of, twenty-eight days after the meeting it records and after sitting through a full meeting cycle unapproved. Minutes: “Consent approval”. No motion, no seconder, no vote; by-law 2.10 permits exactly that, while the agenda’s own heading says vote required. The 20 November minutes approved here print a budget hearing date the agenda in front of the board that night had already replaced (flag 3). |
| 0:02:37 | II.b Citizens Comments | Agenda: “b. Citizens Comments-Please reference CSB Policy BEDH- Public Comment & Participation at Board Meetings.” The chair recites the rule rather than skipping it, as she had on 4 December: “Public comments are an opportunity for the public to provide input to the board. Board members are without authority to answer spontaneously on behalf of the board… There is a policy policy BEED that is also available for viewing.” policy BEED is BEDH One speaker, two minutes sixteen seconds. Minutes: “Mimi Rhines, Ward 1 (school counselor, but speaking as citizen)”, with a four-line summary that is accurate. |
6:40 p.m.
0:05:19 | III. Superintendent’s Report | Agenda: “III. 6:40 PM Superintendent’s Report”, with no exhibit named — but December Superintendent’s Report .pdf is in the folder, 21 pages, 32 MB. Reached five minutes ahead of the 6:40 p.m. the agenda gave it. On tape it is largely a pointer to the written document — “rather spending a whole lot of time on what you already have” — plus a played video. The written report carries the monthly attendance and discipline data the superintendent committed to in September (flag 18) and, on its last page, a budget calendar that contradicts the agenda it is filed beside (flag 3). |
7:00 p.m.
0:09:11 | IV.1 SHS Program of Studies Presentation (Discussion/Possible Vote) — Exhibit A | Agenda: “1. SHS Program of Studies Presentation (Discussion/Possible Vote) (Exhibit A) Mimi Rhines, SHS School Counselor”. Exhibit A is present, 1.3 MB. Reached twenty minutes ahead of the 7:00 p.m. the agenda gave section IV. Moved by Sprague, seconded by an unattributed Sure. that the minutes credit to Crawford, carried on a voice vote. The document approved still contains the summer school programme the Finance Committee had decided not to fund, which Crawford raises and the presenter agrees to remove afterwards (flag 13). Minutes: “Frank Sprague made a motion to approve the Program of Studies, Candace Crawford seconded the motion; no discussion”. |
| 0:14:30 | IV.2 High School Schedule Review (Discussion) — Exhibit B | Agenda: “2. High School Schedule Review (Discussion) (Exhibit B) Dr. Michael Herrington, SHS Principal”. Twenty-two minutes, the longest item, and no vote was asked for or taken. Exhibit B is present: a seven-page coding of seventeen staff interviews, with sixty-odd verbatim statements and a comparison of six area schools’ timetables (flag 14). The principal’s conclusion is that next year’s fix is five teaching periods and two preps, and that this year’s staff voted against fixing it in the second semester because of the effect on students. |
| 0:37:05 | IV.3 Default Budget & Proposed FY26 Budget Summary and Tutorial (Discussion) — Exhibit D | Agenda, verbatim: “3. Default Budget & Proposed FY26 Budget Summary and Tutorial on School Budgeting, Funding, Tax Impact and Tax Rate Setting (Discussion) (Exhibit D) Mary Henry, Business Administrator”. The chair strikes half of it before it begins: “We are not going to review the budget summary today, but we're going to have to click on tax impact and tax rate setting.” So the noticed Proposed FY26 Budget Summary was not presented, and the default budget arrived only because the chair asked for it twenty minutes later: “Do we have a default budget number?” The approved minutes drop the exhibit reference from this item’s heading, the only one of the four they drop. |
| 0:58:37 | IV.4 NH Senator Letter (Vote) — Exhibit C | Agenda: “4. NH Senator Letter (Vote) (Exhibit C) Submitted and discussion to be led by Candace Crawford”. Exhibit C is present and is the letter itself, which asks the senator to sponsor a bill raising base adequacy “from $4,100 to $7,356.01 per pupil”. The figure on the recording is different from the figure in the document: Crawford says “to increase the adequacy aid payment from 4100 to 7300 per pupil”. Moved by Sprague, carried on a voice vote with no count. The minutes name Arlene Hawkins as seconder (flag 8). |
| 1:01:47 | IV.5 Sub-Committees (Discussion) | Agenda: six named subcommittees — “(a) Capital Improvement Committee… (b) Finance Sub-Committee… (c) Policy Sub-Committee… (d) Curriculum Committee Representative… (e) SRVRTC Committee Bonnie Miles, Candace Crawford, Mike Petrin (f) Ad Hoc Communications Committee Mike Petrin”. Three report; three do not. The chair frames it as optional — “Us there. Any, subcommittee reports that are imperative this evening” — against by-law 1.05, which requires Finance, Policy, Capital Improvements and any ad hoc committee to report to the full board monthly. Twelve minutes, more than the budget item got. |
| 1:16:10 | IV.6 Lighting Project Leasing Agreement (Vote) — added at the meeting | On no posted agenda. It exists only because the business administrator asked for it at 0:01:40 and the chair placed it “item number six” by consent. There is no exhibit, no contract, no term sheet and no lessor named in any document in the packet; the company’s name is established during the motion itself, from the business administrator’s email. Carried on a voice vote. The minutes give it its own numbered heading as though it had been noticed: “6. Lighting Project Leasing Agreement”. Flag 1. |
8:20 p.m.
1:20:35 | V. Other Business | Agenda: “V. 8:20 PM Other Business”. Reached nearly half an hour early, and it is where the budget calendar is set out: the emergency meeting of 7 January, the reason no figure can be given, and the hearing-then-decide sequence (flags 5 and 17). Also the school-board filing period, a transport problem with Newport, the music programme, and the Policy subcommittee’s four policies. |
| 8:25 p.m. | VI. Future Dates / Future Agenda Items | Agenda, verbatim: “a) Claremont School Board Meeting-1/2/2025 b) Claremont School Board FY26 Proposed Budget Public Hearing- 1/15/2025 c) Claremont School Board Deliberative Session- Saturday, February 1, 2025. Snow Date: Saturday, February 8, 2025”. The item is never reached aloud — no future date is read into the record — and the minutes reproduce the agenda’s list verbatim as though it had been. Of the three dates, the deliberative session happened, the hearing happened on 15 January, and the 2 January meeting never happened at all (flags 3 and 11). |
8:30 p.m.
1:24:32 | VII. Adjournment | Agenda: “VII. 8:30 PM Adjournment”. On tape: “Great. Thank you. All right. Any objections to joining? Seeing none. Meeting adjourned.” joining is adjourning By-law 2.07 lets the chair dispose of business by absence of objection and lists adjournment first among the motions that take precedence. Minutes: “Consent adjournment”, with no time — where the 20 November minutes gave 7:41pm, the 4 December minutes 7:55pm and the 7 January minutes 8:58pm. |
Discussion timeline
Chronological, from the dialogue file. Times are the transcript’s own start seconds, rendered from the same number the link seeks to, so the text and the link cannot disagree. Timestamps link to the same moment in the Cablecast recording. Hover or focus a cell to expand it. Transcript quotations are reproduced exactly as the automatic transcription produced them; quotations from the agenda, the minutes, a packet document, the by-laws, a board policy, a statute, or the separate Finance Committee recording of the same afternoon are labelled as such in the sentence that carries them.
| Time | Topic | What was said | Flags |
|---|
| 0:00:01 | The chair opens, and the date is right | “I'd like to call to order the Claremont School Board meeting of December 18th, 2024. With all in attendance, please rise until the Pledge of Allegiance.” The Pledge is then recited over her words and the two merge in the transcript. | |
| 0:00:28 | The clerk is not there, and a staff officer reads the roll | “Miss Cronenberg is not in attendance tonight. So do we. Mary, would you kindly do roll call for us? Sure.” By-law 2.05 says “The chair shall commence the meeting at the hour appointed and the clerk shall call the roll” and names no substitute. Three of the seven names draw no audible answer; the chair covers one of them at once — “She's okay. You can write down when she. When she comes in.” The approved minutes record none of this: not the clerk’s absence, not who read the roll, and not that anything was written down later. | MEDIUM OBSERVATION |
| 0:01:02 | The chair sets the tempo, and says why | “I just want to throw it out into the ether that we're going to try to be very judicious with our time because we have, a lot of, administration team members that have long drives, and the roads are getting pretty slick out there. So we're going to try to move the order of business on as quickly as we can.” Worth recording because the meeting then finishes thirty-five minutes early and the noticed budget summary is not presented. | |
| 0:01:40 | An eight-hundred-thousand-dollar lease joins the agenda | “Henry, do you have an amendment to the agenda? Yes. Sorry about that. I need to add the lease agreement for the, lighting project that we're doing that we had spoken out before, and you guys had approved for us to move forward with. Now, I just need for you guys to approve the documents to be signed, to actually go.” The item is brought by an employee, not a member, and the earlier approval it refers to is not identified by date and is in no document in this packet. | HIGH |
| 0:02:00 | The amount, as the recognizer heard it | “Is there a dollar amount that we need to use? It is. It's. And $57,592, 852,500 and 857,000 $357,592. Correct.” The recognizer produces four different numbers for one figure; the approved minutes and the mover’s own later motion both give $857,592 The chair then places it: “Make that item number six on the agenda. If there is no objections. No objections.” | HIGH |
| 0:02:37 | The 20 November minutes are approved — carrying a hearing date the board has already changed | “Seeing no objections, we will approve the minutes of 11, 20, 24 and 12 for 24.” The 20 November minutes, approved unamended here, print under Future Dates: “Claremont School Board FY26 Proposed Budget Public Hearing- 1/2/2025”. The agenda in front of the board that night prints 1/15/2025, and the superintendent’s report in the same packet prints 1/2/2025 for the hearing and 1/15/2025 for a board meeting — the two swapped. Nobody says the date has moved. | HIGH |
| 0:03:21 | A citizen explains how she found out | “Hi guys. Mimi Ryan's Ward one. Full disclosure I am the school counselor at the high school and I'm a summer school coordinator, but I making my comments in this segment as a citizen just so we can kind of have that separated. I'll be up here later for other school stuff. I was encouraged by another citizen to watch the CCTV recording of the Budget Finance Committee meeting that was recorded on December 13th.” Mimi Ryan's is Mimi Rhines; the minutes print “Mimi Rhines, Ward 1” The only public record of the 13 December meeting is the broadcast. There are no minutes for it in any share. | OBSERVATION MEDIUM |
| 0:04:03 | $30,000, and the word ESSER, spoken by a member of the public | “As a citizen, I can completely understand that the $30,000 cost, which was the quote given in the CCTV recording, is a cost of a lot, especially since it was previously funded by Esser funds, as the board has publicly said.” This is the first of only two occurrences of the word in the whole evening, and it is retrospective. She closes: “I'm hopeful that the high school administration at the Saw will find a way to fund this extremely important program”. the Saw is the SAU No board member answers her, then or later; by-law 2.04 and policy BEDH both contemplate that, and the item is never brought back. | OBSERVATION MEDIUM |
| 0:05:22 | The superintendent’s report points at itself | “So this month's report is similar to previous reports… some of the information you'll find in that report is, discipline data or attendance data… rather spending a whole lot of time on what you already have.” He also credits the assistant superintendent’s newsletter, which the ASR renders Assistant Superintendent Kosky for Michael Koski. The written report does carry the data he names, school by school, which is what he promised the board in September. | POSITIVE |
| 0:06:41 | A recruitment advertisement is played into a public meeting | “we have been working with the Claremont Chamber of Commerce in regards to promotional videos. So what I'd like to do now is, is queue up just the bus portion of it”. The soundtrack occupies six segments of the dialogue file — a narrator and two voices — and none of them is a person in the room. Afterwards: “we can use it for promotional. We can use it for recruiting.” The video is in no packet document, and by-law 2.09’s publication rule asks that “any and all presentations by the administration to the board… be contained in the agenda and made available to the public in its original format online”. | |
| 0:07:58 | The chair reads a figure out of the written report, correctly | “I do want to point out that in the superintendent's report is good news from bluff about their increase of Ela proficiency. They expect it to go from 18% to 27. And math precision proficiency, 22% by 33%.” math precision proficiency is math proficiency The report says exactly that: “ELA proficiency at Bluff School will increase from 18% to 27% and math proficiency will increase from 22% to 33% as measured by NHSAS.” These are goals, not results, and both speaker and document say so. | POSITIVE |
| 0:13:09 | A programme the board has stopped funding is still in the document it is about to approve | Crawford: “Just, so on page seven there is a reference. Stephen, high School does run a summer program.” The presenter: “That's because I was. Again, I was not made aware of any changes. And so that was put in there. And I mean, I I'll just take it out.” The superintendent: “anytime that, you know, the budget changes, anything may or may not.” The person who runs the programme learned it was cut from the same broadcast the public did, and the document is approved with the reference still in it, to be edited afterwards: “It's a Google doc, so I can take things out and put things back in pretty easily.” | OBSERVATION |
| 0:14:00 | The first vote, and a seconder the recording cannot name | Chair: “Would like to make a motion to approve Stephen's high school program of studies.” Sprague: “I'll make that motion.” Chair: “Do I have a second?” A voice: Sure. Then “All in favor of approval? Say I I any, Nays. Seeing no nays. The program of studies is approved.” No count is taken. The approved minutes supply the name the recording cannot: “Candace Crawford seconded the motion”. Stephen's high school is Stevens High School | OBSERVATION |
| 0:14:49 | The schedule review opens, and the numbers fuse | “the high school is going through a pretty radical schedule change from a block to a period. That means that the teachers were teaching 378 minute classes, and then they had a 178 minute prep period… So the teachers are teaching a 646 minute classes and have 146 minute prep.” These are fused digit pairs: the minutes read them out as “3, 78 minute classes with 1 prep, to 6, 46 minute classes with 1 prep”. Exhibit B calls the new periods 43 to 45 minutes. A reader taking the transcript at face value gets a 378-minute class | |
| 0:16:58 | The chair stops the presentation to explain it to the audience | “Before you get into the numbers, can you give just an overview? Forevers watching why the schedule change was made? What? The purpose of the change.” Forevers watching is for whoever’s watching It is the only moment all evening at which anyone at the table asks for a presentation to be made intelligible to the people watching it, and the principal answers it at length. | |
| 0:20:40 | The principal tells the board the position is not survivable | “There is some growing pains that you get used to. I would very much argue that this these first stressors are untenable and cannot last. They're prevalent and they're serious.” Exhibit B puts the count behind it: fourteen of seventeen teachers interviewed reported significant stress, in twenty-seven separate mentions, and twelve of seventeen also made positive statements about the new schedule. | |
| 0:25:34 | One number, three versions | “The other issue you've had about a third of the people surveyed, and out of that, it's 23 responses out of 34 teachers said, don't do anything right now.” The approved minutes render the same sentence as “Over 34% of teachers said to not do anything right now”, and Exhibit B contains no such tally at all — its counts are 14/17, 12/17, 7/17, 6/17, 3/17 and 11/17. The recording, the minutes and the exhibit give three different accounts of the vote the principal is describing, and this page reconciles none of them. | OBSERVATION |
| 0:27:42 | The staff decline a fix that would have helped them | “What would have to be dropped and who would it affect? It would affect negatively 57% of the students in the school. And I am more than pleased to say in a staff meeting every single teacher said, no way.” That figure is on the recording and in no document. | |
| 0:32:18 | Class sizes will rise, and nobody names the rule | Petrin asks what five teaching periods does to students; the principal: “the class sizes went down this year because you're teaching so many more classes. So you're going to have your classes go up… They will still be less than they were last year.” The vice chair, from experience: “there is going to be an impact on class size. It's unavoidable.” The State Board rule that fixes the ceiling — thirty students per educator at high school — had been renumbered from Ed 306.17 to Ed 306.14 five days before this meeting. No one cites it, and no number is put on the table. | OBSERVATION |
| 0:35:59 | The vice chair puts the decision’s origin on the record | “when we went to this, I was in the initial discussions as part of some subcommittee or whatever it was with, Mike Tempesta and, and Mike Kosky was there. You may remember some of my concerns over keep people teaching six, and I just presumed at that time that people would be teaching five… never in a million years thought they'd be teaching six.” Mike Kosky is Michael Koski; Michael Tempesta was superintendent until 11 January 2024 The subcommittee he cannot name is in no record this project has found. | |
| 0:37:05 | The chair strikes half of the noticed budget item | “Next item on our on our agenda is review of the default budget. We are not going to review the budget summary today, but we're going to have to click on tax impact and tax rate setting.” The agenda noticed three things and one of them — the Proposed FY26 Budget Summary — is dropped before it starts, without a motion, a reason on the record, or any mention in the minutes. | MEDIUM |
| 0:41:10 | The one large number that is not the budget, and the warning that comes with it | “The amount of the appropriations is the 39,000,962 to 66, where your total amount of your that includes your grants. That includes your food service. So don't panic on it and go, oh my gosh, why do we have so much money? Because you have to back out some of that information that wasn't in the general fund”. 39,000,962 to 66 is $39,962,266, which Exhibit D prints twice It is the FY25 total voted appropriations and it is not comparable with the default budget she gives thirteen minutes later, and she is the one who says so. | |
| 0:50:06 | Nearly two million dollars of extra state aid, and where it comes from | “This year it's going to be or 26 would be. 16 million is what they're estimating for our our adequacy aid. That's a $1.9 million jump that has to do specifically with the extraordinary grant… This is based on free and reduced. They increase the amount it used to be right around eight 8600 per kid to 11,500 a kid.” Exhibit D gives it exactly: FY25 actual $14,283,440.22, FY26 estimated $16,206,000.46, increase $1,922,560.24. This is the largest single favourable movement in the FY26 picture and it is stated before any expenditure figure is. | |
| 0:54:37 | The default budget arrives because the chair asks for it | The presenter has just closed — “So that's all I have for mine on this. And I know it's quick… any questions or.” The chair: “Do we have a default budget number? Hey what a default budget number.” It was on the agenda and it was not in the presentation. | MEDIUM |
| 0:54:50 | $39,791,261 — and a statutory definition with a clause missing | “The default budget. Again I might make some minor changes to it, but it's $39,791,261. Just to give everybody a brief description of what that the default budget is, this is the definition. Default budget means the amount of the same appropriations as contained in the operating budget authorized in the previous year. We use to increase, as the case may be, by jet services. Contracts and other obligations previously incurred are mandated by law and reduced by one time expenditures contained in the operating budget. One time expenditures are appropriations not likely to reappear in the succeeding budget.” jet services is debt service; We use to increase is reduced and increased She is reading RSA 40:13, IX(b) nearly word for word — and she stops one clause short. The statute ends “and by salaries and benefits of positions that have been eliminated in the proposed budget.” | MEDIUM |
| 0:57:44 | ESSER, the second and last time, in a sentence about what will not be funded | The chair asks whether summer school would be in the default budget. “And it wouldn't be in your budget going into this year because it's not contractually obligated… Because it wasn't in last year's budget and it was in Esser if it will not show up on the street?” The tail of that sentence is garbled; the approved minutes give the sense: “it was not in the previous budget because it was paid by ESSER, so for that reason and that it is not a required service, it will not be in the default budget” That is the whole of ESSER in this meeting. No balance, no disposition, no accounting — and the last time this board asked for one was 16 October. | MEDIUM |
| 0:58:11 | A prediction that turns out to be wrong | “the default budget will be high this year because we have a lot of out of district placements that are being added into it. So actually, I think your default would be higher than your budget.” Crawford, and then the chair: “Well, we'll wait and see.” They waited twenty-eight days. The approved minutes of the 15 January public hearing record a default budget of $42,772,778 and a proposed budget of $42,933,564 — the proposed budget $160,786 above the default, not below it. | OBSERVATION |
| 1:00:28 | The board asks the State for money, and the ask on tape is not the ask in the letter | “this is just asking the state senator to consider that and, to increase the adequacy aid payment from 4100 to 7300 per pupil.” Exhibit C, the letter itself, asks for $7,356.01: “Increase the State’s annual base adequacy aid payment from $4,100 to $7,356.01 per pupil.” The $4,100 is right: RSA 198:40-a, II fixed base adequacy at that figure from 1 July 2023. The letter also asserts that Claremont, Newport and Charlestown “were plaintiffs” in the ConVal case; this page has not verified that. | |
| 1:01:27 | The second vote, and a seconder the recording places nowhere near it | “I'll second. Second. Is there any discussion from the board? Okay. We're ready for a vote. All in favor of the motion made by Frank spray? Say, I, I, I, I not oppose motion passes.” Frank spray is Frank Sprague The dialogue file files this whole row to the chair. The approved minutes say “Arlene Hawkins seconded the motion” — and the same file places Hawkins’s first audible word 572 seconds later. | MEDIUM |
| 1:01:53 | A subcommittee reports a quorate meeting the public was not told about | “the capital improvements committee. I just wanted to report that we did. Mike patron and Bonnie Miles and I met with Mary Henry and Steve Holt, and we talked about the items on the, the improvements list.” Mike patron is Michael Petrin That is all three members of a three-member subcommittee, and its own minutes confirm it: “Chair Crawford called the meeting to order at 3:30 with all present”. She points the board at the document — “there was a a summary minutes from the, meeting that we're in your packet” — and the chair endorses it: “These are great minutes by the way.” | MEDIUM MEDIUM |
| 1:03:31 | A programme is given up, and the board hears about it afterwards | “it's important to know that, Superintendent Pratt and Miss Harrington met with Eric Perry from Newport, talked about mutual programs for Claremont and, Newport and the s report, that we the the independent evaluation independent Committee, looked and said that there had to be better, communications between the two schools.” Miss Harrington here is Michelle Herrington, not the principal presenting earlier; the s report is the SREB report The Visioning Sub-Committee minutes of 9 December, in the packet, are blunter: “After a lengthy discussion, it was agreed that Claremont would not proceed with this offering since Newport is considering offering a fire safety program.” No board vote precedes it. Those minutes are also the first district document in this corpus to print the Newport director’s full name, which the recording gives at full confidence. | MEDIUM |
| 1:09:24 | A member objects to the loss, and then to how it happened | “giving up the criminal justice program, just not a big fan of giving that up, but I, I see there's been at least twice that. It feels like Newport has beat us to the punch and claim the program… It feels like it doesn't feel like a cooperation. It feels like competition.” The chair, dryly: “I think you kind of do, Mike”, and “Shots being fired.” Three other members audibly back him — “I think you've got agreement”, “I think you're well supported by the other board members”, “This board as well.” | |
| 1:10:25 | A board member states the Right-to-Know point out loud | “The other is that I know you mentioned this wasn't an official meeting. I just asked that if we're having a subcommittee, we need to make sure that we're having a meeting.” And, cut across: “To invite and.” The reply: “Right. I just wanted to meet with her and but and I wanted to document it. But I agree with you. Yes, we will do that in the future.” The document he is objecting to is headed “Claremont School Board Visioning Sub-Committee Dec. 9, 2024” and is written in the language of minutes — “Ms. Herrington began the meeting by reporting” — for a gathering of one board member and one member of staff. | MEDIUM |
| 1:10:59 | The sixth member is heard for the first time, seventy-one minutes in | “My question goes along with what Mr. Patron was referring to the criminal justice program. It said that since Newport is considering offering aspire safety, how do they conflict with each other?” aspire safety is a fire safety [programme] The vice chair answers with the reason: “The the career cluster is called protective services.” The approved minutes place this member in the room from 6:33 p.m.; the recording carries no word from her until 1:10:59. | OBSERVATION |
| 1:13:05 | The Finance Committee’s monthly report to the board, in full | Chair: “Is that the you have more, Miss Crawford anything from. I know, the finance committee, but. Okay. Mr. Sprague. Speaks committee. Little teeny bit of an update.” The chair of the committee that is writing the budget: “Not much to really update after we've had the presentation. Sniper. We have had several meetings and, we have given the administrative team some homework to do over, over between now and January.” By-law 1.05(1) requires the Finance Committee to “report to the full Board monthly”. This is that report. It contains no figure, no date and no decision. | MEDIUM |
| 1:13:34 | A subcommittee meeting is set for Christmas week, on camera, with no date | “We are going to get together as a group over the Christmas period to come up with some salient points around the public hearing to defend the budget and such as? We'll see how it turns out. But, I'm not sure what to say and what not to say, so I'll let you take over.” That is at least the fifth Finance Committee gathering set since 20 November — after 4, 12, 13 and 18 December — and no notice, agenda, minutes or recording of it has been found. It is the same plan the chair had put to the committee that afternoon — on the separate Finance recording, show 16226 at 1:46:10, “I don't know if anybody who's willing to give up a Saturday”. | MEDIUM |
| 1:13:55 | The board tells the public to watch television instead | “We would strongly recommend that every board member and member of the community is curious about what's going on with the budget. Watch the CCTV, videos… we just really strongly recommend that people take the time to watch those deliberative sessions that we have gone through.” the vice chair supplies the word — “Deliberation, deliberations” — and neither speaker means an SB 2 deliberative session, which is on 1 February A member agrees: “I've watched a couple of them… kudos to you guys for all the work that you've been doing.” Two of the four meetings they are pointing at have a broadcast and nothing else; two have neither. | MEDIUM |
| 1:15:39 | The vice chair states the principle the flags are measured against | “Well, that's the whole purpose is that, to do things out in the open and make make decisions and make directives publicly.” The chair: “So it's no gotchas, no surprises.” Eight minutes earlier the board had approved a set of minutes it had not read aloud; thirty seconds later it began voting on a lease no member of the public had seen. | |
| 1:16:17 | The motion is written at the table, and a grant is disclosed | Chair: “Mary, would you like to did you write a motion by any chance?” “Well, what I need is it's a simple motion. A motion to allow the superintendent, Chris Pratt, to sign the lease agreement. Lease and purchase agreement? For the lighting project that we're doing. I do want to let the taxpayers know that out of this project, we did receive $262,995 and a grant from, It's not an H anymore.” Then: “yes, Eversource has given us that money as well… This project should cut our lighting expenses or electrical in half… it's a seven year lease.” The board is being told the terms of a seven-year obligation for the first time, orally, minutes before voting on it. | HIGH |
| 1:18:40 | Nobody in the room knows who the lease is with | A minute and a half passes while the officer looks: “I'm looking looking at school district. These projects… Apologize to…” The mover offers to avoid the problem — “Can just make a generic” — and is refused: “I would rather have you say the name. Yes, I think that's important.” Then “Okay. LSD leasing”; the motion is made in that name; and it is corrected mid-motion: “Frank, it's mc l I'm sorry. LSD was before they changed it to MCL.” The counterparty’s identity was established from the business administrator’s email during the motion. | HIGH |
| 1:19:07 | The motion, restated and carried | “Okay. All right, I'm going to start over. I'd like to authorize the superintendent to enter into a lease agreement with MC l leasing in the amount of $857,592.” The chair seconds. Discussion is the mover’s own reassurance: “It's very similar to those of you. Of you who remember the agreement we entered with Johnson Controls at the high school where the, the savings actually pay for the payment… So it really is cost neutral.” The chair then nearly moves on — “Oh I'm sorry. We have to vote… We're a little toasty right now” — and takes it: “All in favor of the motion, say I, I I none opposed.” No count, no roll call, and no member asks what happens if a future meeting does not appropriate the payment. | HIGH |
| 1:20:35 | The chair sets January, and says the board cannot be told its own number | “We've all been involved. We've all been in the same room a lot today. A lot today. Just for the board to know, we are going to have to have an emergency meeting on January 7th, to ratify two collective bargaining agreements. And at that time, the finance committee will present to the board the proposed budget until all of our collective bargaining agreements are ratified.” This is the afternoon’s decision, restated to the full board. On the separate Finance recording, show 16226 at 1:27:18, the same chair had said: “We can't really have a full throated or open discussion about the budget because we can't speak about the, what the N costs for our two contracts are going to be without violating the ground rules.” | MEDIUM MEDIUM |
| 1:21:03 | “we have to be pretty mum on what our bottom line is going to be” | “It is we would be breaking ground rules, ground rules, if we discussed what the final dollar amount impact would be on the budget. So unfortunately, we have to be pretty mum on what our bottom line is going to be. We may also have to have a meeting in between the, January 15th meeting. Which is the meeting which the board will move the move the budget potentially to the public hearing”. The ground rules are the parties’ own, not a statute — but RSA 91-A:2, I does place “strategy or negotiations with respect to collective bargaining” outside the definition of a meeting, so there is a lawful basis for the reticence. What follows from it is that a school board reaches 18 December with no budget number of any kind on the public record. | MEDIUM POSITIVE |
| 1:21:46 | The chair describes, correctly, what RSA 32:5 expects of her | “After hearing what the public has to say at the public hearing. It's it is not wise for the vote to move the budget to the deliberative to happen at the same meeting that the public hearing occurs. It gives the board members time to digest it, go home, think, talk about it, come back, discuss it again, and then make our decision before we put it forward to the deliberative.” RSA 32:5, I says the body “after the conclusion of public testimony shall finalize the budget to be submitted to the legislative body”, and ¶II’s bar afterwards runs only against insertions. She is describing the statute, and the board did it: the hearing was on 15 January and the vote to move the budget to the deliberative on 21 January. | POSITIVE |
| 1:24:00 | A third subcommittee met that day, and its four policies are promised to a meeting that never happens | “And I just for a future agenda item. The policy committee did meet. Subcommittee did me today. And we will be bringing forth for policies at the January 2nd meeting.” did me is did meet; for policies is four policies The chair asks for them by Friday because the executive assistant “is taking time off”. There was no meeting on 2 January 2025. Four policies — KCD, JRA, GBEAA and JFABD — were taken up on 7 January instead, which corroborates the count exactly. No notice, agenda, minutes or recording exists for the Policy subcommittee meeting of 18 December either. | OBSERVATION MEDIUM |
| 1:24:32 | Adjourned by consent, with no hour recorded | “Great. Thank you. All right. Any objections to joining? Seeing none. Meeting adjourned.” joining is adjourning The minutes print “Consent adjournment” with no time, where the three meetings on either side of this one all carry one. Nothing on the agenda’s Future Dates list was read into the record, and the last words of the last Claremont board meeting of 2024 are about the threshold at which a donation needs a public hearing. | |
Items flagged for review
Flags are a reviewer’s aid, produced by reading the recording and the district’s ten-document packet against the New Hampshire and federal law in force on 18 December 2024 and against the board’s own by-laws and policies. Every statute was re-fetched in the codification that governed that date, and where a provision has since been amended the page says so and names the session law it is not applying. HIGH marks an unmitigated failure of a duty owed to the public; MEDIUM marks a defect the record itself mitigates or a rule breach with a lesser consequence; OBSERVATION records something a reader needs and no rule reaches; POSITIVE records something done well. A flag is not a legal conclusion, and nothing here is a finding of fact against any person.
HIGH An $857,592 seven-year lease was put on the agenda at the meeting, moved under the wrong company name, and authorised the same night — and the contract is in no public document
What happened. At 0:01:40 the business administrator asked to add “the lease agreement for the, lighting project”; the chair made it item six by absence of objection. Seventy-five minutes later she wrote the motion at the table, disclosed a $262,995 Eversource grant and a seven year lease orally, could not name the lessor, searched her email for a minute and a half, produced “LSD leasing”, and corrected it mid-motion to MCL. The motion carried on an uncounted voice vote at 1:20:26.
What the board’s own rules require. The by-laws adopted 5 June 2024 contain two rules numbered 2.09; the operative one here is the agenda rule. It says the superintendent “with consultation of the board Chair shall itemize any and all items to be presented in the agenda to ensure members of the public and board are aware, in advance, of any items that may require or result in board action”, and that “Items of business requiring board discussion and/or action shall be submitted as agenda items to the Executive Assistant to the superintendent no later than noon fourteen days prior to the meeting, with all backup information”. The fourteenth day before 18 December was 4 December. The same rule allows an unnoticed item only on a condition nobody invoked: “If an item requiring action is brought up under new business the item must be deemed emergency or time sensitive that cannot be put off until an upcoming meeting.” Rule 4.03(d) makes it a clerk’s duty, delegated to the executive assistant, to “Post online any and all agenda materials not-exempt from public dissemination by RSA 91-A in conjunction with the posting of any board or committee agendas.”
What the law adds. RSA 32:8, Limitation on Expenditures, provides that no “school board… shall pay or agree to pay any money, or incur any liability involving the expenditure of any money, for any purpose in excess of the amount appropriated by the legislative body for that purpose, or for any purpose for which no appropriation has been made, except as provided in RSA 32:9-11.” 1993, 332:1, eff. 28 August 1993; it binds the whole corpus. A multi-year municipal lease is normally reconciled with that section by a non-appropriation clause, and such a clause may well be in this agreement. The point of this flag is that nothing in the public record says so. The board was told the payment schedule (“the first two payments are due next year”), the savings case (“it really is cost neutral”) and the term; it was not told, and did not ask, what happens in year three if a future district meeting does not appropriate. New Hampshire law does not require a school board to publish an agenda at all, so this is a governance finding under the district’s own rules plus a documentary gap — not an assertion that the lease is unlawful.
Why HIGH. Applying §5’s unmitigated limb: the record mitigates nothing. This is the largest single obligation this board incurred in 2024, it reached the public agenda after the public had read it, the instrument is in neither the packet nor the minutes nor the district’s minutes share, and the approved minutes give it a numbered heading that makes it look noticed. A citizen reading the posted agenda on 17 December had no way to know an $857,592 vote was coming.
What would settle it. The executed lease, or the minutes of the earlier meeting at which the board “approved for us to move forward” — neither of which this page has found.
HIGH The minutes of this meeting were not open to public inspection until the fifteenth business day
RSA 91-A:2, II requires minutes recording the names of members, persons appearing before the body, a brief description of the subject matter discussed and final decisions, with the mover and seconder of each motion recorded, and they “shall be open to public inspection not more than 5 business days after the meeting”. 2023 codification; source note ends 2023, 188:1, eff. 3 October 2023. Deliberately not applied: 2025, 112:1, which added the start time, the end time and the name of the person who produced the minutes, effective 22 August 2025.
The arithmetic. The meeting was Wednesday 18 December 2024. Counting business days and excluding Christmas Day, which RSA 288:1 makes a legal holiday: 19, 20, 23, 24 and 26 December. The deadline was Thursday 26 December 2024.
What the record shows. 12.18.24 DRAFT CSB minutes (1).pdf was created in the district’s public share on 10 January 2025 — the fifteenth business day — inside the packet folder for the 15 January budget hearing. Its modification time is 8 January 2025, two days earlier and a genuine gap rather than an upload artefact, so on the most favourable reading the document existed on the thirteenth business day. Either figure is more than twice the statutory limit. The approved copy reached the Meeting Minutes share on 21 January 2025.
Why HIGH, and why the neighbouring page is graded differently. This corpus grades a one-day overrun an OBSERVATION on the 4 December page, and a five-day overrun MEDIUM on the 18 September page. This is a different order of thing: ten business days past the limit, on the meeting at which the board authorised $857,592 and disclosed its default budget for the first time, and over the period in which the public had to decide whether to attend a budget hearing. Nothing on the record explains it. That is §5’s unmitigated limb.
The Drive timestamp measures publication, not authorship, and this page says so: it establishes when the public could see the document, which is exactly what RSA 91-A:2, II is about.
HIGH The packet gives two different dates for the statutory budget hearing, and the minutes approved that night give a third position — and nobody says the date has moved
Three documents, in one folder, on one subject.
- The agenda of 18 December, under Future Dates: “a) Claremont School Board Meeting-1/2/2025 b) Claremont School Board FY26 Proposed Budget Public Hearing- 1/15/2025”.
- The December Superintendent’s Report, final page: “January 2- Claremont School Board FY26 Budget Public Hearing… January 15-Claremont School Board Meeting”. The two dates are swapped.
- The 20 November draft minutes, approved unamended on the consent agenda of this meeting: “e) Claremont School Board FY26 Proposed Budget Public Hearing- 1/2/2025”.
The recording contains no announcement of a change. The Future Dates item was never reached aloud, and no speaker mentions either date except the chair’s reference to “the, January 15th meeting” at 1:21:03 and a board member’s reference to “the January 2nd meeting” at 1:24:00. A member of the public reading the packet on 17 December could reasonably have concluded that the budget hearing was on 2 January.
Why this is not a small thing. The budget hearing is the statutory event of the season. RSA 40:13, II-a(a) requires notice of budget hearings by the second Tuesday in January — 14 January 2025 — and RSA 32:5, I requires at least seven days’ notice of the hearing itself. It is the only occasion on which a voter can speak to the budget before the deliberative session, and under RSA 40:13, XI(a) it is where the default budget must be disclosed. Publishing two dates for it, in two documents released together, defeats the purpose of noticing it.
Correctly, this page does NOT flag the 15 January date itself. RSA 32:5, ¶I’s requirement that the hearing be “not later than 25 days before” the annual meeting would put a 1 February deliberative session’s hearing in early January — but RSA 40:13, II-a opens “Notwithstanding any other provision of law” and expressly governs “Budget hearings under RSA 32:5” in official-ballot districts, putting them “on or before the third Tuesday in January”, which in 2025 was 21 January. A 15 January hearing is inside the statute, and treating it as a 25-day breach would be wrong.
Why HIGH. Unmitigated: the contradiction is in the district’s own simultaneously published documents, nothing on the record corrects it, and the hearing is a statutory event with a statutory notice duty attached.
MEDIUM The subcommittee writing the budget met four hours earlier in the same room and left no minutes — and nothing it decided reached the board as a figure
The two meetings of 18 December 2024. The Cablecast archive stamps show 16226 with an event time of 12:50 p.m. and a run time of 7,045 seconds, so the Finance Committee ran from about 12:50 to about 2:48 p.m. — against the “1-3 PM at SRVRTC John Goodrich Community Room” the approved 20 November minutes had noticed. The board convened at 6:30. Four of the six members present that evening — the chair, the vice chair, Crawford and, from the administration, the business administrator and the superintendent — had spent the afternoon on the FY26 budget in the same building. The chair says so: “We've all been in the same room a lot today. A lot today.”
What moved between the two, and what did not. Three things crossed intact, and all three are procedural:
- The rule of silence. On the afternoon recording (show 16226, 1:27:18) the chair said the committee could not have “a full throated or open discussion about the budget… without violating the ground rules”. At 1:21:03 that becomes the board’s instruction: “we have to be pretty mum on what our bottom line is going to be.”
- The 7 January emergency meeting, settled in the afternoon and announced to the board in the evening.
- The Christmas-week working session, proposed in the afternoon (“anybody who's willing to give up a Saturday”) and reported to the board as “We are going to get together as a group over the Christmas period”.
No figure crossed. None of the afternoon’s numbers is spoken at the board: not the overage after revenues, not the percentage increase, not the target. One figure moved in the opposite direction and is worth stating precisely. At about 2:24 p.m. the chair asked the committee “what is our default budget” and was told “I'm working on that tonight… I will get you a rough estimated number” (show 16226, 1:33:11–1:33:17). At about 7:25 p.m. the same officer gave the board $39,791,261, to the dollar. The figure was produced in the five hours between the two meetings, and neither meeting produced a document containing it.
The record duties, and what exists. RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d) makes a subcommittee a public body; RSA 91-A:2, II then requires 24 hours’ notice and minutes open to inspection within five business days. By-law 1.05(c): “Notice of the meeting including place and time must be posted at least 24 hours in advance on the SAU 6 website.” 1.05(d): “Minutes must be recorded and available for public inspection on the SAU 6 website within 5 days of the meeting.” 1.11 puts both on the subcommittee chair personally.
| Finance Committee, autumn 2024 | Notice | Minutes | Recording |
|---|
| 19 November | 16 October approved minutes | none found | show 16155 |
| 4 December, 1–3 p.m. | 16 October and 20 November minutes; dropped from the 4 December agenda | none found | none |
| 12 December (pre-meeting) | set on camera 4 December | none found | none |
| 13 December | none found | none found | show 16215 |
| 18 December, 1–3 p.m. | 16 October and 20 November minutes | none found | show 16226 |
| Christmas week | none found | none found | none |
And two more subcommittees met inside this window. Capital Improvements on 10 December (flag 10) and the Policy subcommittee on 18 December itself — “The policy committee did meet. Subcommittee did me today” — for which no notice, agenda, minutes or recording exists anywhere.
Why MEDIUM and not HIGH. §5’s mitigating limb applies to the two televised Finance sessions and only to them: those meetings were broadcast live and are archived, so the public can watch what happened even though no minutes exist. That is real mitigation and this page gives it. It does not extend to 4 December, 12 December, the Christmas session or the Policy subcommittee, which have neither minutes nor a recording; on those, the mitigation is that the corpus has flagged the same defect on the pages of 16 October, 20 November and 4 December and the district has been consistent rather than concealing. The honest statement of the limit: by-laws 1.05(c)–(d) send these notices and minutes to the SAU 6 website, whose 2024 state cannot be inspected from here. Its five linked subcommittee folders were read for this project on 2026-08-29 and nothing from 2024 is reachable from any of them. So this is not published where the by-laws require, and not recoverable, rather than never existed.
MEDIUM The default budget was disclosed as a bare number, its statutory definition was read to the public with the operative clause missing, and the form the statute requires is in no packet
What was said. At 0:54:50: “Again I might make some minor changes to it, but it's $39,791,261.” Then the definition, read aloud almost verbatim from the statute — and stopped one clause early.
The statute. RSA 40:13, IX(b): “‘Default budget’ as used in this subdivision means the amount of the same appropriations as contained in the operating budget authorized for the previous year, reduced and increased, as the case may be, by debt service, contracts, and other obligations previously incurred or mandated by law, and reduced by one-time expenditures contained in the operating budget and by salaries and benefits of positions that have been eliminated in the proposed budget.” RSA 40:13 is durable: last amended 2019, 192:2, eff. 10 July 2019, so today’s text is the text in force here. The spoken version ends at “not likely to reappear in the succeeding budget”. The clause left off is the one that mattered most in this particular budget year, because the FY26 proposed budget eliminated the district’s entire pre-kindergarten programme — a decision the 7 January 2025 approved minutes describe as “nearly $500,000 to provide services to 23 identified students”.
This is a documented pattern, not a one-off. This project has previously recorded that Claremont’s published default-budget worksheets quote IX(b) with the same clause cut off. Two independent renderings of the same truncation is a characteristic of the district’s source material rather than of one evening’s speech.
The form. RSA 40:13, XI(a) provides that “The default budget shall be disclosed and presented for questions and discussion at the first budget hearing held pursuant to RSA 32:5 or RSA 197:6”, and requires the governing body to complete a form showing the calculation — prior-year appropriations, the reductions and increases by account code, one-time expenditures and eliminated positions. No such form is in the 18 December packet, whose ten documents were read in full for this page, and none is listed among the four documents of the 15 January budget-hearing packet. The figure was given orally and alone.
What this flag does NOT say. It does not say the default budget was calculated wrongly. Without the worksheet nobody can know, and that is the point. It also does not treat the disclosure itself as premature or improper — disclosing it on 18 December was a month earlier than XI(a) required, and that is recorded as a positive at flag 17.
Related, and part of the same item. The agenda noticed three things under item IV.3 and the chair struck one of them before it began: “We are not going to review the budget summary today”. No motion, no reason, and no mention in the minutes, which reproduce the item’s heading with the exhibit reference removed.
MEDIUM Fourteen months on, the FY24 close is still unreconciled and the ESSER accounting the board asked for has never arrived — and this meeting does not advance either
The state of the FY24 close, as this corpus has it. On 18 September 2024 the board was given a general-fund balance of $544,145.29. On 16 October it worked from $497,000, with no bridge between the two. Behind both sits the September packet’s total encumbrance of $648,931.76, of which $583,931.76 is the two roofs voted on 20 June. The 16 October retention ceiling was stated aloud as $466,664.43; within four minutes the table was saying 469, and the approved minutes publish “$469,000” — $2,335.57 above the stated maximum. None of those five figures is spoken on 18 December.
What this meeting adds, and it is not nothing. The Capital Improvements minutes in this packet list “SHS Roof Replacement, final section $96,000” among the items for the FY26 budget, and two paragraphs later discuss “the third phase of the SHS Roof Repair at $98,000”. On the recording of 16 October a member had asked whether the fund-balance figures took the roofs into account and was told, on that recording, “Yes. They're all done.” Eight weeks later the district’s own maintenance director is asking the board to fund the last section of the same roof. This page does not assert that the October answer was wrong: “the roofs” voted in June may be complete while a further phase was always separate. It records that the two statements are unreconciled and that no document in this corpus reconciles them.
ESSER. The word occurs twice on 18 December and both are retrospective: a citizen saying summer school “was previously funded by Esser funds”, and the business administrator explaining that a programme paid from ESSER will not appear in the default budget. The board last asked for an accounting on 16 October — “Frank Sprague shared that he would still like to see a presentation on ESSER”, in the approved minutes of that meeting. No later recording in this corpus contains one. That is stated here as silence and nothing more: no member raises it, no document supplies it, and this page draws no inference from the absence.
The provision that would bite, on facts this record does not supply. 2 CFR 200.512(a)(1) (2023 annual edition, the correct vintage for a 2023–24 award) sets the single-audit reporting deadline at the earlier of 30 days after receipt of the auditor’s report or nine months after the end of the audit period. The U.S. Department of Education’s grantee memorandum of 12 June 2024 fixes the ARP ESSER obligation deadline at 30 September 2024 and liquidation at 28 January 2025 — so on 18 December the district was inside the liquidation window and a final accounting was not yet due. That is why this is MEDIUM and not HIGH.
MEDIUM The clerk was absent, a staff officer read the roll, and the minutes record neither fact — and are signed in the clerk’s name
By-law 2.05: “The chair shall commence the meeting at the hour appointed and the clerk shall call the roll.” It provides for the chair’s absence and the vice chair’s, and says nothing about the clerk’s. By-law 4.03(a) makes the clerk responsible to “Keep a complete, accurate record of all CSB proceedings”.
What the recording has. “Miss Cronenberg is not in attendance tonight. So do we. Mary, would you kindly do roll call for us? Sure.” The business administrator then read the seven names.
What the minutes have. A present/absent list, and then, on the last page, “Respectfully submitted by Noelle Kronberg, school board clerk”. They do not record that the clerk was absent, that someone else read the roll, or who that was.
The statutory position, stated carefully. RSA 91-A:2, II in the text in force on this date requires the names of members present, persons appearing, a brief description of subject matter, final decisions and the mover and seconder of each motion. It does not require the minutes to name the person who produced them — that clause arrived with 2025, 112:1, effective 22 August 2025, and is deliberately not applied here. So the defect is a by-law defect and a candour defect, not a statutory one, and it is graded accordingly.
Why it still matters. A reader of the minutes alone cannot tell that the officer whose signature attests them was not in the room, and this is the fourth different substitute roll-reader in this board’s autumn — the chair on 21 August, a member on 18 September, the superintendent at the SAU board on 14 November, and the business administrator here.
MEDIUM The minutes name a seconder the recording places nowhere near the motion
RSA 91-A:2, II has required minutes to record “the names of the members who made or seconded each motion” since 2018, 244:1, eff. 1 January 2019, which binds every meeting in this corpus. These minutes discharge that duty for all three motions, which is more than several sets in this corpus do.
The conflict. For the senator letter the approved minutes read: “Frank Sprague made a motion to accept the recommendation and to send the letter from the Claremont School Board; Arlene Hawkins seconded the motion”. The dialogue file files the entire second-and-vote row at 1:01:27 to the chair — “I'll second. Second. Is there any discussion from the board?” — and places Hawkins’s first audible word 572 seconds later, at 1:10:59.
How to read it. The row’s opening words are two short sentences that could be two voices, and this diarizer demonstrably merges a second speaker into a chair’s segment elsewhere in this same file — the roll call is one thirty-four-second segment containing three people. The likeliest explanation is a merge, and the minutes are then right and the file’s label incomplete. This page therefore names no seconder, reports both records, and does not treat the minutes as wrong. It is recorded because a reader comparing the two sources will find the discrepancy and should find it explained.
A second, smaller instance, in the other direction. For the Program of Studies the minutes name Candace Crawford as seconder; the recording carries only an unattributed Sure. There the minutes supply what the recording cannot, which is what minutes are for.
MEDIUM Two subcommittee documents reached the packet six days after the by-law’s deadline, and one of them minutes a meeting that was not one
The timing. Eight of the packet’s ten documents were uploaded on 12 December. Cap Improvements Committee Meeting minutes 12.10.24.pdf and CSB Visioning Sub 12.9.24.docx.pdf were uploaded on 17 December, about thirty-two hours before the meeting. By-law 1.09 asks that “The supporting documentation and background information for all items of business from standing or special committees which are to be considered by the CSB… be submitted in writing with the agenda… no later than the Wednesday prior to the regular scheduled meeting” — which was 11 December. The Drive timestamp measures publication to the public share, not delivery to members, so this page reports the publication fact against the rule’s date and does not assert that members went without them.
The Capital Improvements minutes are within RSA 91-A. The meeting was Tuesday 10 December; 17 December is the fifth business day, so the statutory five-business-day window was met. By-law 1.05(d)’s own deadline — five days, on the SAU 6 website — was not: 15 December had passed, and the document went to the packet share rather than the destination the by-law names.
The Visioning document is a different problem. It is headed “Claremont School Board Visioning Sub-Committee Dec. 9, 2024”, is written throughout in the language of minutes — “Ms. Herrington began the meeting by reporting…” — and records a gathering of one board member and one member of staff. That is not a meeting of a public body: RSA 91-A:2, I requires the convening of a quorum of the body, and one of three is not one. So no notice was owed and no minutes were owed — and a document that looks like minutes was filed anyway, for a subcommittee that appears nowhere on the agenda’s list of six.
A member raised exactly this from the table, at 1:10:25: “I know you mentioned this wasn't an official meeting. I just asked that if we're having a subcommittee, we need to make sure that we're having a meeting.” The chair of the subcommittee agreed on the record: “But I agree with you. Yes, we will do that in the future.” That exchange is the mitigation, and it is why this is MEDIUM.
What the document also shows. A decision was taken in it: “After a lengthy discussion, it was agreed that Claremont would not proceed with this offering since Newport is considering offering a fire safety program.” A career-technical programme was given up by two officials in a conversation, and the board learned of it nine days later in a subcommittee report. Under by-law 1.05 subcommittees “are advisory in nature” and “The board retains the right, and has the duty, to make all final decisions”; three members audibly objected once they heard.
MEDIUM The capital list the board was handed prices the same roof twice, leaves one item at $???, and reports a $150,000 reserve with no plan attached
The meeting was quorate and unnoticed. The minutes open: “Chair Crawford called the meeting to order at 3:30 with all present. Also in attendance was Business Administrator Mary Henry and Maintenance Director Steve Holt via ZOOM.” That is all three members of a three-member subcommittee — a public body under RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d) — and no notice for 10 December has been found in any share (by-law 1.05(c), 24 hours on the SAU 6 website).
The internal contradiction. The list gives “SHS Roof Replacement, final section $96,000”; two paragraphs later the same document discusses “the third phase of the SHS Roof Repair at $98,000” and calls it “Priority 1”. One item, two prices, $2,000 apart, in a two-page document. The board was pointed at this document from the table and the chair called it “These are great minutes by the way.”
What else it puts on the record. Nine near-term items, one of them priced $??? and one of three longer-term items priced $??. A per-school maintenance line-item table. A statement that “we did not have any data on current expenditures in the Maintenance Repairs and Maintenance Building budget lines” — a subcommittee assessing capital needs, in December, without current-year spending data. And: “Ms. Henry informed the group that there is currently $150,000 in the Fund”, with a suggestion of “a warrant article that would give permission to put a portion of unused fund balance into the Capital Reserve Fund”. None of this is reported to the board in figures; the spoken report is “we talked about the items on the, the improvements list… We don't have those answers yet”.
Why MEDIUM. The mitigating limb applies: the minutes exist, they are detailed, they name who was present, and they reached the public share inside the statutory window. What is defective is the document’s content and the missing notice, not the existence of a record.
OBSERVATION The 2 January 2025 meeting this agenda promised was never held — and the record shows where its business went
The agenda’s Future Dates list opens with “a) Claremont School Board Meeting-1/2/2025”, and a member plans around it on the record: “we will be bringing forth for policies at the January 2nd meeting.” for policies is four policies
No such meeting exists. There is no recording, no packet folder, no agenda, no minutes and no section in this project’s map for 2 January 2025. The next Claremont board meeting in the record is 7 January, and its approved minutes settle the point three ways: its consent agenda reads “Minutes Approval-none”, so the 18 December minutes were not before it; its Future Dates list begins with the 15 January hearing and never mentions 2 January; and it takes up exactly four policies — KCD, JRA, GBEAA and JFABD — which corroborates the count promised here and identifies where the item went.
Why this is an OBSERVATION and not a missing-record flag. This project maintains a table of 2024 sessions that exist only as fragments, and the honest reading of this one is different from those: the business demonstrably moved to a meeting five days later, so the likeliest explanation is a cancellation rather than an unrecorded meeting. What is missing is the cancellation. No notice of it appears in any share, nothing on this recording announces a change, and the board’s own December packet went out telling the public to expect a meeting on 2 January — the same date the superintendent’s report told them to expect the budget hearing (flag 3).
OBSERVATION The default budget moved $2,981,517 in twenty-eight days, after “some minor changes”
The two figures, each from a district source.
- 18 December 2024: $39,791,261 — spoken at 0:54:50 and printed in the approved minutes of this meeting, with the caveat “Again I might make some minor changes to it”.
- 15 January 2025: $42,772,778 — from the approved minutes of the budget public hearing: “The default budget is projected to be $42,772,778”. The same minutes print the figure a second time as “$42,772.778”, with a decimal point where a comma belongs.
The arithmetic, which nobody performs on either record. The change is +$2,981,517, or 7.49 per cent, in twenty-eight days. Against the FY25 general-fund default of $35,906,773.87, the December figure is +$3,884,487.13 (+10.82 per cent) and the January figure +$6,866,004.13 (+19.12 per cent). No comparison of any kind accompanies the December figure — no prior-year default, no percentage, no worksheet, no question from any member.
The prediction, and how it came out. The business administrator told the board “I think your default would be higher than your budget”, and the Finance Committee had reached the same view that afternoon. At the hearing the proposed budget was $42,933,564 and the default $42,772,778 — the proposed budget $160,786 above the default, not below it. The expectation on which the December discussion rested was reversed.
Recorded, not accused. A default budget is a working calculation until the form is filed, and RSA 40:13, XI(b) expressly allows the governing body to adjust it before the ballot is printed. Nothing here says the December figure was improper. What the record does not contain is any explanation, on either date, of what moved by three million dollars.
OBSERVATION A $30,000 programme was cut where the public could not see it, and the only way anyone found out was by watching television
The sequence. The decision not to fund the high school’s summer school was taken at the Finance Committee meeting of 13 December, which has no notice, no agenda and no minutes in any share — only a broadcast. A citizen was told about the broadcast by another citizen, watched it, and came to the board: “I was encouraged by another citizen to watch the CCTV recording of the Budget Finance Committee meeting that was recorded on December 13th… I'm here to talk about a decision that was referenced in the high school portion, which is to not fund summer school.”
The person who runs the programme found out the same way. She is the school’s counsellor and the summer school coordinator, and she says so at the podium. Later the same evening, presenting the Program of Studies, she is asked why summer school is still in it: “That's because I was. Again, I was not made aware of any changes.”
The figure and the funding history are supplied by the citizen, not the board. “the $30,000 cost, which was the quote given in the CCTV recording, is a cost of a lot, especially since it was previously funded by Esser funds”; the staffing, “eight teachers, one coordinator”; and the argument, that it is “counterintuitive to decide not to fund a program that helps to get kids back on track and keep them on track for graduation” in a district whose stated priority is the graduation rate.
No board member responds, then or later. By-law 2.04 and policy BEDH both contemplate that: “members of the board are without authority to act independently as individuals in official matters”, and the chair recited the rule at the start. The item does not return under Other Business, and no motion, referral or answer appears in the minutes. This is recorded as what the record shows, not as a breach: no rule required an answer.
Why it belongs on this page. It is the clearest available illustration of what flag 4 costs. A subcommittee that keeps no minutes made a decision about a programme with a coordinator, eight staff and a $30,000 line; the coordinator and the public learned of it from a television archive; and the board’s own approved document went on carrying the programme until it could be edited out of a Google document afterwards.
OBSERVATION The schedule review publishes sixty-odd verbatim staff statements against a department roster in which four departments have exactly one teacher
Exhibit B is the raw coding of seventeen interviews. It is anonymous in the ordinary sense — no statement carries a name. Its first page, however, publishes the departmental breakdown of the seventeen: eight departments, with four of them represented by exactly one teacher. Several of the statements it then reproduces name the subject being taught. In those four cases the combination identifies the speaker to anyone inside the school, and some of what those statements describe is personal — health, exhaustion, effects on family life, and self-doubt coded under a heading of that name.
The applicable standards, stated precisely. These are employees, not students, so FERPA is not engaged. No New Hampshire statute forbids publishing them: RSA 91-A:5, IV permits a body to withhold records whose disclosure would constitute an invasion of privacy — it does not require it — and the district chose to publish. So this is an observation about a foreseeable consequence of a document’s design, not a finding of unlawfulness. The same document is also the strongest piece of evidence in the packet, and the principal’s decision to put the unedited words of his staff in front of the board is unusual and defensible.
This page reproduces none of the statements in question, and quotes from Exhibit B only the aggregate counts.
A separate content point. The exhibit’s counts are 14/17, 12/17, 7/17, 6/17, 3/17 and 11/17. It contains no tally matching either the principal’s spoken “23 responses out of 34 teachers” or the minutes’ “Over 34% of teachers”, and the two of those are not equivalent to each other. The board was given three accounts of one vote and no document that settles it.
OBSERVATION Two of seven seats leave no trace in the recording, and this page says so with numbers rather than guessing
The roll. Four of seven names draw an audible answer — the chair, Sprague, Crawford and Petrin. Three do not: Miles, Skillen and Hawkins. The chair covers one of them at once — “You can write down when she. When she comes in” — without a name.
The minutes resolve it as far as they can. “Present: Heather Whitney, Frank Sprague, Bonnie Miles, Candace Crawford, Michael Petrin, Arlene Hawkins (arrived 6:33). Absent: Whitney Skillen.” That identifies the late arrival and is the anchor this page uses for the meeting’s clock.
What is left. Bonnie Miles is recorded present and holds not one attributed word in 366 rows. She is named twice by others, and the Capital Improvements minutes place her at that subcommittee’s meeting eight days earlier, so her participation in the board’s work in this period is documented — just not on this recording. Arlene Hawkins’s first audible word is at 1:10:59, seventy-one minutes in, against a minuted arrival of 6:33 p.m.; one of her later sentences refers to “some comments made from the community tonight”, which is consistent with her having been present for the citizens’ comment at 0:03:21 but does not prove it, since she could have been told.
Unattributed speech is 10 of 366 rows, 80 words, 0.6 per cent — and six of those ten are the soundtrack of a played video rather than anyone in the room. The four that remain are short reactions, one of them the second to the first motion. Elimination is not available for any of them, because two seated members are in the room without clusters of their own, so no name is printed. Where the minutes name someone the recording cannot place, this page reports both (flag 8).
OBSERVATION The board was told class sizes will rise, and the rule that caps them had been renumbered five days earlier
The principal’s proposal for next year is five teaching periods and two preps, and he says what it costs: “the class sizes went down this year because you're teaching so many more classes. So you're going to have your classes go up… They will still be less than they were last year.” The vice chair agrees from experience: “there is going to be an impact on class size. It's unavoidable.” No number is put on the table, by anyone, and none appears in Exhibit B or in the minutes.
The rule. The State Board’s minimum standards set student–educator ratios, and for this level the figure is “Middle school and high school, 30 students or fewer per educator.” Vintage matters and this is the first page in this corpus on the far side of the change: the provision was Ed 306.17, “Class Size”, through 2024 and was renumbered to Ed 306.14, “Student-Educator Ratios”, by Doc. #14150, effective 13 December 2024 — five days before this meeting. A page about an earlier Claremont meeting must cite the old number; this one cites the new. Ed 306.17 now carries an entirely different subject, “Alternative Programs”.
Nothing here asserts a breach. No enrolment or staffing figure on this record would let anyone test the ratio, which is the observation: a school board discussed a deliberate increase in class size for twenty-two minutes without the number that governs it.
POSITIVE The default budget was disclosed a month before the statute required it, and the chair described the post-hearing sequence the Municipal Budget Law actually contemplates
Early disclosure. RSA 40:13, XI(a) requires only that “The default budget shall be disclosed and presented for questions and discussion at the first budget hearing held pursuant to RSA 32:5 or RSA 197:6”. The first budget hearing was 15 January 2025. The board asked for the figure on 18 December and got it, twenty-eight days early, at a televised meeting with a citizens’ comment period. The deficiencies in how it was disclosed are flag 5; that it was disclosed at all, this early, is to the board’s credit and is not required of it.
The sequence. At 1:21:46 the chair explains why the vote to move the budget forward should not happen at the hearing: “It gives the board members time to digest it, go home, think, talk about it, come back, discuss it again, and then make our decision before we put it forward to the deliberative.” That is RSA 32:5, I working as written: the governing body holds the hearing and “after the conclusion of public testimony shall finalize the budget to be submitted to the legislative body”. ¶II’s bar afterwards runs only against insertions — a reduction voted after the hearing cannot breach it — so a board that deliberately leaves itself room to cut after hearing the public is doing the thing the statute anticipates, not evading it. 2023 codification; source note ends 2021, 134:3, 4, eff. 21 September 2021. Deliberately not applied: 2025, 144:1, eff. 30 August 2025.
And they did it. The hearing was held on 15 January; the approved minutes of that meeting record the chair telling the room “Vote for deliberative will be next Tuesday after the Board has time to reflect”, and the vote to move the budget to the deliberative session was taken on 21 January. The budget itself was moved forward to the hearing on 7 January, by a motion those minutes record with mover, seconder and result.
A negative anchor recorded for the pages that follow this one. Because RSA 40:13, II-a opens “Notwithstanding any other provision of law” and expressly governs budget hearings under RSA 32:5 in official-ballot districts, a mid-January hearing in this district is not a breach of ¶I’s twenty-five-day interval and must not be flagged as one.
POSITIVE The packet went up six days ahead, the agenda’s four exhibits are all in it, and the superintendent’s report carries the data he promised the board in September
Timeliness. The folder was created on 12 December 2024 at 21:03 UTC and eight of its ten files followed within twenty-four seconds — six days before the meeting. Their modification times are the previous day, so the documents were genuinely written before they were posted rather than stamped by an upload session. Set against the neighbouring bodies in this same fortnight, that is a real difference: the SAU 6 board’s 12 December packet went up about two and a half hours before its gavel, and its 3 December agenda on the morning of its own meeting day.
Completeness. The agenda names Exhibits A, B, C and D and all four are present: the Program of Studies, the schedule review, the letter to Senator Ward and the tax-rate presentation. The only missing item is the one that was never noticed (flag 1).
The written report. In September the superintendent committed to monthly attendance, truancy and discipline data. The December report carries it for every school — Stevens, the technical centre, the middle school and all three elementaries, plus Unity — each with enrolment, absence and OSS/ISS counts and a bullying-and-harassment line. Twenty-one pages. This project has recorded promised reporting that did not arrive; this one arrived.
Two smaller ones. The chair recited the public-comment rule rather than skipping it, as she had on 4 December. And the meeting’s only citizen speaker was recognised, heard without interruption, and recorded in the minutes by name and ward with an accurate four-line summary of what she said.
OBSERVATION The superintendent’s report is assembled from parts written for other readers and other months
Read in full for this page, the twenty-one-page report carries the substance flag 18 credits and, alongside it, a set of assembly defects that a reader should know about before relying on any figure in it.
- A blank left in. One elementary school’s page reports parent-conference attendance as “% of families attended!” — the percentage was never filled in and the document was published anyway.
- Two different months. Stevens reports absences and suspensions for November; the middle school’s attendance block is headed “Absences (Oct.1-31)”. The report gives no note that the periods differ, so the school-to-school comparison it invites cannot be made.
- Stale copy. One elementary school’s goals section reads “Our goals are currently under construction with the Disnard Leadership Team who meet on 10/08/24. Goals will be finalized at that point” — future tense, in a December report, about a date two months past.
- Written for a different audience. One page addresses the reader in the second person as a parent (“during your child's health UA on 12/5/24”), about a date already gone when the packet was posted — a newsletter paragraph lifted into a board report.
- An impossible date. One school’s events list gives a concert on 19 December with “Snow Date - Dec 18th”, a fallback the day before the event.
- The curriculum director is spelled two ways on one page, as Cat and as Catlin McLaughlin — adding to a corpus-wide count that now runs to six renderings of one person’s name across district documents. This page prints no spelling as fact.
- And the last page carries the wrong budget calendar, which is flag 3.
A student-privacy note, stated as a caution rather than a finding. The Stevens page publishes November’s ten suspensions broken down into seven stated causes, several with a count of one, in a school of 479 students. Aggregate counts are not education records, but 34 CFR 99.3 (2023 annual edition, the correct vintage) defines personally identifiable information to include information that would allow a person in the school community to identify a student “with reasonable certainty”. A single-count category in one month at one school can approach that line. This page reproduces none of the categories or counts, and asserts no violation: the observation is that a public monthly report of that granularity is worth the district’s attention.
Appendix — source files
Official and public sources
- Recording: Claremont Community Television, Cablecast show 16222 — “School Board 12/18/24”. Event date 18 December 2024; total run time 5,106 seconds (1:25:06) on a single reel, per the Cablecast API, read 2026-08-29. The reel record’s user file name is mistyped as 16222 SchoolBoard128124.mp4; the project’s local copy is 16222 SchoolBoard121824.mp4.
- The other recording of the same day, cited but not linked from the timeline (one show identifier per page): Cablecast show 16226 — “School Board Finance Meeting 12/18/24”, event time 12:50 p.m., run time 7,045 seconds (1:57:25), per the same API read. Its dialogue file is Output/Dialogue/16226 SchoolBoardFinance121824.mp4.CSV, 999 rows. Quotations from that file appear in four places on this page and each says so in the sentence that carries it — at 1:27:18, 1:33:11–1:33:17 and 1:46:10. They are deliberately not rendered as deep links, because a page carries one show identifier and this page’s is 16222. They are the evidence for the ordering of the two meetings and for what did and did not pass between them (flag 4).
- Minutes of this meeting: 11. Approved CSB minutes 12.18.24 — nine pages, read in full, signed “Respectfully submitted by Noelle Kronberg, school board clerk”. Approved by consent at the meeting that followed the budget public hearing on 15 January 2025; the approved copy reached the district’s 2024 Meeting Minutes folder on 21 January 2025. The draft, 12.18.24 DRAFT CSB minutes (1).pdf, is in the 15 January packet, created there 10 January 2025 with a modification time of 8 January (flag 2).
- Packet: 10. CSB 12.18.24 — 10 documents, all ten read in full for this page. Folder created 12 December 2024 at 21:03 UTC; eight files created 21 to 24 seconds later, with modification times on 11 December — a genuine day-scale gap, so these documents demonstrably existed before they were posted. Two files were created on 17 December 2024 at 15:40 UTC, about thirty-two hours before the meeting. The agenda’s own modification time is 13 December at 16:07 UTC, nineteen hours after its creation, so the posted agenda was altered after posting and this page cannot say how.
- CSB Agenda 12.18.24.pdf — the official agenda; seven numbered sections, four exhibits named, six subcommittees listed, three future dates.
- Exhibit A- Program of Studies 2025_2026- PERIOD FORMAT .pdf — approved at this meeting, with the summer school reference still in it.
- Exhibit B- 2024-2025 SHS Schedule Review.pdf — seventeen coded interviews, six themes with counts, sixty-odd verbatim statements, and a comparison of six area schools’ timetables and prep time (flag 14). The source for every count this page attributes to the exhibit.
- Exhibit C- Dear Senator Ward.docx.pdf — the Funding Fairness Project letter, read in full. Asks for “$4,100 to $7,356.01 per pupil”, names HB 1583 and HB 1676 as left on the table, and asserts that Claremont, Newport and Charlestown “were plaintiffs” in the ConVal case.
- Exhibit D-School Tax Rate 12-11-24 Presentation.pdf — read in full. Source for $39,962,266, $34,087,764, $14,283,440.22, $1,575,757, $18,228,566.78, the SWEPT rate of $1.338565 and the valuation of $1,177,198,621. Its arithmetic all foots exactly, including the SWEPT calculation, which comes to $1,575,756.87 against the $1,575,757 printed. One presentational defect: Section III uses the label “Total Tax Assessment” for two different numbers, the $34,087,764 it starts from and the $18,228,566.78 it ends with. The default budget appears nowhere in it.
- December Superintendent’s Report .pdf — 21 pages, 32 MB, read in full. Attendance and discipline data for every school (flag 18); assembly defects and the contradictory budget calendar at flags 19 and 3.
- 11.20.24 DRAFT CSB meeting minutes.pdf — a second copy of the draft that had sat unapproved in the 4 December packet; approved by consent here. Source for the noticed Finance Subcommittee dates and for the 1/2/2025 hearing date (flag 3).
- 12.4.24 DRAFT CSB meeting minutes.pdf — approved by consent here.
- Cap Improvements Committee Meeting minutes 12.10.24.pdf — two pages, read in full, signed Candace Crawford; created 17 December (flags 9 and 10).
- CSB Visioning Sub 12.9.24.docx.pdf — two pages, read in full, signed Candace Crawford; created 17 December. The first district document in this corpus to print the Newport technical centre director’s full name, and the source for the criminal-justice decision (flag 9).
- The by-laws in force at this meeting, adopted 5 June 2024: Exhibit E- Claremont School Board By-Laws .pdf — twenty-two pages, read in full. Rules relied on here: 1.05 and 1.05(b)–(d) and 1.05(1)–(3) (subcommittees, notice, minutes, reporting frequency, the Finance and Capital Improvement committees), 1.09 (committee documentation with the agenda, by the Wednesday prior), 1.11 (subcommittee chairs’ duties), 2.01 (meeting dates and quorum), 2.04 (public comment), 2.05 (opening and roll), 2.07 (motions, and disposal by absence of objection), 2.09 — the second rule of that number, on agenda itemisation, the fourteen-day submission deadline, action under new business, and publication of administration presentations, 2.10 (consent agenda) and 4.03(a) and (d) (the clerk’s record and the posting of agenda materials). The two rules numbered 2.09 are a defect of the governing document, so this page quotes the text of the rule it relies on and never the number alone.
- Board policy. BEDH, Public Comment & Participation at Board Meetings — linked directly from the agenda; first reading 17 May 2023, second reading and adopted 6 September 2023, per its own District Policy History block. Relied on for the chair’s recital and for the absence of a duty to answer a citizen (flags 13 and 18).
- Neighbouring district documents this page relies on, each read in full: 9. Approved CSB meeting minutes 11.20.24; 10. Approved CSB meeting minutes 12.4.24; 12. Approved CSB minutes 1.7.25 — the source for the motion that actually moved the FY26 budget to the public hearing, for the four policies, for the “Minutes Approval-none” consent line that closes flag 11, and for the PreK figures; and 13. Approved CSB Public Hearing minutes 1.15.25 — the source for the January default budget of $42,772,778, the proposed budget of $42,933,564 and the consent approval of these minutes. Also the contents list of packet 12. CSB Budget Public Hearing 1.15.25, whose four documents include no default budget form.
- The SAU 6 website. SAU 6, Claremont School Board — the destination by-laws 1.05(c), 1.05(d) and 1.11 name for every subcommittee notice and every set of subcommittee minutes. Its five linked subcommittee folders were read for this project on 2026-08-29; the Finance folder holds only a purpose statement created 2 June 2025 and a 2025-2026 folder created 2 July 2026, and the Capital Improvement, Policy, SRVRTC and Ad Hoc Reconfiguration folders are empty. Nothing from 2024 is reachable from any of them. The site as it stood in December 2024 cannot be inspected from here, so flag 4 says not published where the by-laws require, and not recoverable, never never existed.
- Explicit negatives, from reading all ten packet documents in full rather than from a search: the packet contains no lease, lease-purchase agreement, term sheet or lessor name; no default budget worksheet or form; no FY26 budget summary, although the agenda notices one; no notice, agenda or minutes for any Finance Committee meeting; and no ESSER schedule, balance or disposition. The words ESSER, lease and default budget appear in no packet document other than, for the last, the agenda’s own item heading.
- Negatives that rest on the Drive interface and are therefore weaker, flagged as such: that no minutes exist for the Finance Committee meetings of 4, 12, 13 or 18 December 2024, for the Policy subcommittee meeting of 18 December, or for the Christmas-week Finance session; and that no record exists of a 2 January 2025 board meeting or of its cancellation. A parentId enumeration of this meeting’s own packet folder returned an empty result on 2026-08-29 while every one of its ten files read perfectly by identifier seconds later — another independent confirmation of a failure mode this project’s files have now recorded seven times. Any negative derived from that interface alone is unsafe and is written here as not found, never as does not exist.
Project files
Relative links; they work when this page is opened from Output/HTML/.
- Dialogue: ../Dialogue/16222 SchoolBoard121824.mp4.CSV — 366 rows, 12,872 words; nine speakers named, ten rows left unattributed.
- Video: ../../Input/Videos/16222 SchoolBoard121824.mp4
- Diarized transcript: ../../Input/Transcripts/16222 SchoolBoard121824.mp4.json
- Map: ../../Input/SupportingDocuments/MAP.md §66, with §65 for the Finance Committee session of the same afternoon and §§63–64 and §§67–69 for the meetings on either side.
- Companion pages: 4 December 2024, the meeting whose minutes are approved here and at which the budget season opened with no figure; 20 November 2024, whose minutes are also approved here and which noticed the two December Finance dates; Finance Committee — 19 November 2024, the only Finance session of the season with a page of its own; 16 October 2024, which carries the $466,664.43 ceiling, the “They're all done” answer about the roofs, and the last time this board asked for an ESSER accounting; 18 September 2024, the source of the $544,145.29 balance and the $648,931.76 encumbrance; SAU 6 — 12 December 2024, six days earlier, for the contrast in packet timing; 20 December 2023, at which this board moved $36,313,407.97 to hearing; and 5 June 2024, at which the by-laws were adopted.
Laws and rules cited on this page
- New Hampshire statutes, in the text in force on 18 December 2024. RSA 91-A:2, I and II — a meeting is the convening of a quorum of a public body able to communicate contemporaneously to discuss or act on matters within its jurisdiction, with “strategy or negotiations with respect to collective bargaining” expressly outside that definition; 24 hours’ notice; minutes to include the names of members present, persons appearing before the body, a brief description of the subject matter discussed and final decisions, with the mover and seconder of each motion recorded, open to public inspection “not more than 5 business days after the meeting”. 2023 codification; source note ends 2023, 188:1, eff. 3 October 2023, so the current text governs. Deliberately not applied: 2025, 112:1, which added the start time, the end time and the name of the person who produced the minutes, effective 22 August 2025. The mover-and-seconder clause is 2018, 244:1, effective 1 January 2019, and binds every meeting in this corpus.
- RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d) — “public body” reaches any board of a school district “or any committee, subcommittee, or subordinate body thereof, or advisory committee thereto”. The clause that makes the Finance, Capital Improvements and Policy subcommittees public bodies at flags 4, 9 and 10, and the clause whose quorum requirement means the Visioning gathering of 9 December was not a meeting.
- RSA 40:13 — the official-ballot statute. ¶II-a, opening “Notwithstanding any other provision of law”: (a) notice of budget hearings by the second Tuesday in January; (c) budget hearings on or before the third Tuesday; (d) warrants and budgets posted on or before the last Monday. ¶III — the first session between the first and second Saturdays following the last Monday in January. ¶IX(b) — the default-budget definition, quoted in full at flag 5, ending “and by salaries and benefits of positions that have been eliminated in the proposed budget”. ¶XI(a) — “The default budget shall be disclosed and presented for questions and discussion at the first budget hearing held pursuant to RSA 32:5 or RSA 197:6”, plus the form and its minimum contents. ¶XI(b) — the default budget may not be amended by the legislative body, but the governing body may adjust it before the ballot is printed. Durable: last amended 2019, 192:2, eff. 10 July 2019, so today’s text is the text in force here. ¶IX(b) and ¶XI(a) were re-fetched verbatim for this page on 2026-08-29 against the 2023 codification.
- RSA 32:5, I and II — at least one public hearing “not later than 25 days before each annual or special meeting”, on at least 7 days’ notice, “and after the conclusion of public testimony shall finalize the budget to be submitted to the legislative body” (¶I); appropriations disclosed or discussed at the final hearing, with no insertion afterwards without a supplemental hearing (¶II). 2023 codification; source note ends 2021, 134:3, 4, eff. 21 September 2021. Deliberately not applied: 2025, 144:1, eff. 30 August 2025. Negative anchor, restated because this page is the one where it bites: because RSA 40:13, II-a opens “Notwithstanding any other provision of law” and expressly governs budget hearings under RSA 32:5, a 15 January hearing in this official-ballot district is not a breach of ¶I’s twenty-five-day interval and is not flagged as one (flags 3 and 17).
- RSA 32:8, Limitation on Expenditures — no school board “shall pay or agree to pay any money, or incur any liability involving the expenditure of any money, for any purpose in excess of the amount appropriated by the legislative body for that purpose, or for any purpose for which no appropriation has been made, except as provided in RSA 32:9-11.” 1993, 332:1, eff. 28 August 1993; unamended, so it binds the whole corpus. Text fetched verbatim for this page on 2026-08-29. Cited at flag 1 as the provision a seven-year lease has to be reconciled with, and to record that the public record does not show how it was.
- RSA 198:40-a, II — “A cost of $4,100 per pupil in the ADMR”, the figure the letter to Senator Ward asks the State to raise. 2023, 79:150, eff. 1 July 2023. URL trap: chapter 198 is under Title XV, not Title IX.
- RSA 91-A:5, IV — permissive, not prohibitory: it allows a body to withhold records whose disclosure would constitute an invasion of privacy. Cited at flag 14 precisely because it did not require the district to withhold anything.
- RSA 288:1 — the eleven legal holidays, used for the business-day arithmetic at flags 2 and 9. Christmas Day and January 1 are both on the list; 26 December is not. Source note ends 1999, 105:2 / 106:2. URL trap: chapter 288 is under Title XXV.
- RSA 189:74 — the school board public comment period of no less than 30 minutes, with exactly two exceptions (emergency meetings; meetings whose sole purpose is nonpublic session). 2022, 333:1, eff. 6 September 2022; never amended. Whether the 30 minutes binds the opportunity or the elapsed time is not settled by the text, and no violation of it is asserted here — the period was called, the rule recited, and the one person who came forward was heard without limit.
- State Board rules. Ed 306.14, “Student-Educator Ratios” — “Middle school and high school, 30 students or fewer per educator.” Vintage: this provision was Ed 306.17, “Class Size”, through 2024 and was renumbered by Doc. #14150, effective 13 December 2024, five days before this meeting. Ed 306.17 now carries a different subject, “Alternative Programs”. Pages in this corpus about earlier meetings must cite the old number; this one cites the new (flag 16).
- Federal. 2 CFR 200.512(a)(1) (2023 annual edition) — the single-audit reporting deadline; cited at flag 6 as the provision that would bite, on facts this record does not supply. U.S. Department of Education, grantee memorandum of 12 June 2024 — ARP ESSER funds “must be obligated by September 30, 2024” and liquidated “within 120 calendar days after the close of the obligation period, or by January 28, 2025”, which is why an unfinished ESSER accounting on 18 December 2024 was not yet a missed deadline. 34 CFR 99.3 (2023 annual edition) — personally identifiable information includes information that would allow a person in the school community to identify a student “with reasonable certainty”; cited as a caution at flag 19 and not as a finding. The 2023 annual edition is the right vintage: the 2024 Uniform Guidance revision at 89 FR 30046 applies to awards issued on or after 1 October 2024.
- Board rules. The Claremont School Board By-Laws adopted 5 June 2024, and board policy BEDH. These are the district’s own rules, not law, and a breach of one is a governance finding rather than a legal one — except where the rule restates a statutory duty, as by-law 1.05(c) and (d) do.
- Deliberately not cited. RSA 91-A:3 is not cited, because no nonpublic session was held or proposed — though the by-laws’ Appendix D remains a defect of the governing document, saying that section “sets forth eight grounds”, enumerating nine, calling them “the nine statutory bases”, and lettering six in its compliance checklist, where the statute has twelve live grounds. RSA 91-A:2-a, II is not applied: nothing on this record suggests sequential communication outside a meeting, and a subcommittee lawfully meeting in the afternoon before a board meeting in the evening does not engage it. RSA 32:10 and RSA 198:4-b are not cited, because no money was transferred, retained or spent at this meeting. RSA 194-C:9 is not cited: the SAU budget was adopted by a different body on 12 December. Ed 306.14 is cited only for the ratio it states, and no breach of it is asserted, because no enrolment or staffing figure on this record would let anyone test it.