Participants
Everyone who appears in the record of this meeting. No minutes, no agenda and no attendance sheet exist for it, so names and roles come from the chair’s opening sentence at 0:00:09, cross-checked against the district’s approved board minutes for 20 November, 4 December and 18 December 2024, which list the same administrators by title. This was a working session of a subcommittee: under the board’s by-law 1.05(b) such a session requires no public comment period, and no member of the public spoke. Segment counts are rows in the dialogue file.
| Name | Role | Participation |
|---|
| Frank Sprague | Chair, Finance Sub-Committee; Vice Chair, Claremont School Board | Presided, without calling the meeting to order. Framed the session — “in the interest of complete transparency, we will be talking about those on TV” — pressed the administration hard on out-of-district special-education placements from his own experience as a teacher and administrator, and put the target on the table himself: “Well, I’m going to throw out 4%.” Closed the meeting on “Okay. I think our business is done.” 119 segments. |
| Heather Whitney | Chair, Claremont School Board; Finance Sub-Committee member | The session’s principal questioner. Drove the tax-rate arithmetic line by line, proposed replacing the elementary student service coordinators with school-based social workers, tested the pre-kindergarten programme against what the district is legally obliged to provide, and set the January calendar. Also the member who says the committee cannot state the collective-bargaining numbers: “We can’t talk about the numbers out loud.” 235 segments. She chaired the full board that evening. |
| Candace Crawford | Claremont School Board member; Finance Sub-Committee member; Chair, Capital Improvement Committee | Came with a written school-by-school comparison of the new draft against the previous one and worked through it building by building, extracting an explanation for each variance. Reconstructed the whole increase from two causes — health insurance and special education — and delivered the meeting’s closing instruction: “Just fine. Just find me 200,000.” 254 segments, the largest share. |
| Mary Henry | Business Administrator, SAU 6 | Presented the revised draft and answered the variance questions from her own spreadsheet, line by line, live. Supplied every figure on the page: the $1,128,543 over-budget number, the 8.91 per cent gross increase, the tax-rate conversions, the pre-kindergarten cost, the athletics total, and the default budget she was still building — “I’m working on that tonight.” 232 segments. |
| Chris Pratt | Superintendent of Schools, SAU 6 | Opened for the administration, defended the draft as the end of what educators could responsibly cut — “I educationally couldn’t say I recommend any further cuts” — and gave the longest single account in the corpus of how the out-of-district special-education bill arose, attributing it to federal pandemic money and to programmes Claremont did not have. Accepted the committee’s direction at the end: “I mean, you got our orders.” 115 segments. |
| Mike McCosker | Director of Student Services, SAU 6 | Answered on special education: the annual review of every out-of-district placement, the new out-of-district coordinator, the instruction to report truancy weekly, the local-education-agency role the student service coordinators fill at IEP meetings, and what the district must provide if the pre-kindergarten programme closes. 30 segments. Rendered “Mike McCusker” in the chair’s opening and “Mr. McCusker” by the chair later; he is a man. |
| Michael Koski | Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum, Instruction, Innovation & Assessment, SAU 6 | Named present by the chair and never heard from. The opening sentence places “Mike Kosky” in the room; no row in the dialogue file is attributed to him and no one addresses him by name again. With no minutes and no attendance sheet, that single mention is the whole record of his attendance, and this page does not attribute any unlabelled voice to him. |
| Unidentified | — | 14 of 999 rows (1.4 per cent) carry no name. Thirteen are one- and two-word interjections in fast exchanges. The fourteenth, at 0:01:47, provably holds two voices: it opens with the chair finishing his handover and, after a pause, continues in the superintendent’s. A single row cannot carry two names, so it carries none. |
| Named on the record but not in the room: Steve — the district’s buildings-and-grounds director, whose maintenance lines and encumbrances are discussed at 0:23:39; Jessica, named only by first name as the out-of-district coordinator (0:44:14) — no surname is spoken and none is supplied here; Mr. Beaupre, to whom the athletics review is referred (1:16:42); Charlie Gessner, credited with the saturation studies the chair used as an administrator; and Chelsea — the superintendent’s executive assistant, whom the board chair says she asked not to change the 2 January agenda (1:29:23). |
Agenda
No agenda was posted for this meeting, and none has since appeared in any district share — even though the meeting itself was noticed a month in advance (see flag 14). The board’s own by-law 1.11 makes “creating agendas” a duty of the subcommittee chair. The item list below is reconstructed from the chair’s own transitions and from the order in which business was actually taken up; it is not an official document. There were no motions, no seconds, no votes, no roll call and no adjournment, so the disposition column records what the committee did with each item, not what it decided. Hover over (or Tab to) a clipped cell to read the full text.
| Taken up | Item (reconstructed) | What was said, and the disposition |
|---|
| 0:00:09 | 1. Opening; the room named for the cameras | The chair opens without a call to order, a roll call or an agenda: “I think what we’re live in on camera. Good afternoon everyone.” He dates the meeting — “Today is Wednesday the 18th. The 18th of December. One week before Christmas” — names the two other committee members and the four administrators, and sets the frame: “this is just our third meeting”. That sentence is the entire attendance record for the session. |
| 0:01:47 | 2. Administration presents the revised FY2026 draft | “So at this time, I’d like to, turn it over to the administration to talk about what’s substantively, substantively different from this budget as to what we saw when the last we met.” The superintendent hands to the business administrator, who reports that pre-kindergarten has been removed, that the middle school is down by nearly half a million and that the draft now sits “roughly the 1.1 million over after revenue increases”. No document was published; the committee works from a file the public cannot see. See flag 4. |
| 0:05:40 | 3. Tax-rate impact, and the two unratified contracts | The board chair takes the draft apart figure by figure — which of the two files sent out carries revenues, what the increase actually is, what it does to the rate. The business administrator gives $1,128,543 after revenues, $0.97 on the rate, and $137.80 per $100,000 once the teachers’ agreement is added. Neither collective bargaining agreement is in the draft. Disposition: no decision; the numbers are established for the rest of the session. |
| 0:14:12 | 4. Where the FY2026 revenue increase comes from | The business administrator walks the committee through adequacy: the extraordinary-need grant per free-and-reduced-eligible pupil, the statewide education property tax falling by about $100,000, enrolment roughly flat. “You end up with 7.5 instead of 5.6” — about $2 million more. She gives the old per-pupil grant figure twice, differently. See flag 5. |
| 0:19:39 | 5. School-by-school comparison against the previous draft | “So I have general questions and specific questions.” Crawford works through Bluff, Maple, Disnard, the middle school, Stevens, the alternative and autism grouping and district-wide, asking for the cause of each variance. The answers are almost entirely repricing rather than staffing: “Its accounting changes. Not staffing changes.” She then reconstructs the whole $3,238,000 increase from health insurance and special education. Disposition: no decision; the record of causes is built. |
| 0:39:36 | 6. Out-of-district special-education placements | The chair’s pushback — “this number of out of district placements is, in my experience, is a new phenomenon” — draws the superintendent’s account of how the cost arose, the Director of Student Services on annual placement review and weekly truancy reporting, and a $77,000 transportation line at Stevens alone. Disposition: referred to the administration as an area to find money in. |
| 0:48:58 | 7. Replacing the elementary student service coordinators with social workers | The board chair’s “out of the box kind of thought”: budget school-based social workers instead of the student service coordinators, on the ground that the coordinators are administrative posts the schools cannot justify under Ed 306 and are paid at about $80,000 for a 185-day year. Twenty-two minutes of discussion follow, covering certification, suspension authority and the local-education-agency role. Disposition: the superintendent offers to cost it — “if you guys want to, you know, language a, you know, a proposed” — and it goes on the administration’s list. See flag 6, flag 7 and flag 9. |
| 1:15:14 | 8. What the taxpayer will bear: athletics, legacy costs, staffing saturation | “How do we determine what a palatable level is for for the taxpayers of Claremont?” Athletics is raised on low participation and low success rates, with the chair noting “It has to be compliant with title nine. Any decision we make.” The Stevens athletics total is given as $584,000. The chair describes the saturation study he used as a principal; the superintendent reports the high school running at 75 to 78 per cent. Disposition: athletics referred to the administration. |
| 1:26:40 | 9. The January calendar | An emergency board meeting on 7 January to ratify two collective bargaining agreements and to receive the committee’s budget; the public hearing on 15 January; a Saturday work session of the committee proposed in between. The board chair states why the budget cannot be discussed openly until the contracts are ratified. See flag 3, flag 13 and flag 16. |
| 1:39:22 | 10. The target — four per cent | “Well, I’m going to throw out 4%.” Revenue included. The board chair converts it: “We want the total number to be a 4% increase.” Against the committee’s own working estimate of 5.5 per cent fully loaded, that is a further cut of about a point and a half. No motion, no second, no vote. See flag 2. |
| 1:50:26 | 11. Pre-kindergarten — what the district must provide if the programme closes | “Can I steal five minutes of the time about the preschool?” Whether the children pay tuition, what the state contributes, how places are allocated, and whether the programme is required at all. The Director of Student Services separates the two: special-education services are required, an in-house preschool is not. Least restrictive environment is never mentioned. Disposition: the related-services costing stays with the Director of Student Services. See flag 8. |
| 1:53:20 | 12. The target refined — another $200,000 | “if we reduce that by 200,000, which would translate to this number coming down to 100,000. And I think that would result in a 4.5% increase.” Then: “Just fine. Just find me 200,000.” The committee chair adds “I don’t have any more requirements than that either”, and the administration accepts: “I mean, you got our orders.” This is the operative outcome of the meeting, and it exists only on this recording. |
| 1:56:43 | 13. Close | “Okay. I think our business is done. Thank you, thank you.” No motion to adjourn, no vote, no stated time. The recording ends seven seconds later. |
Discussion timeline
Times are the Start (sec) values from the dialogue file (Output/Dialogue/16226 SchoolBoardFinance121824.mp4.CSV) and link to the same moment in the Cablecast recording. Flags link to the review items below. Quotations are reproduced exactly as the speech recognizer rendered them, with corrections in square brackets; where a correction changes the sense, the garbled wording is left visible beside it. Single-word transcript items are set in italics rather than quotation marks.
| Time | Topic | What was said (leading text; hover or focus for the rest) | Flags |
|---|
| 0:00:09 | The room, named once, and never again | Sprague: “I think what we’re live in on camera. Good afternoon everyone. It’s. What is today? Today is Wednesday the 18th. The 18th of December. One week before Christmas. And I’d like to welcome everyone to our budget finance committee. And again, introducing everyone to my left is Heather Whitney. To my right is Andy [Candace] Crawford. Administrators are here. Chris Pratt, Mary Henry, Mike Kosky [Koski] and Mike McCusker [McCosker] are here.” There is no call to order, no roll call and no agenda. That sentence is the whole attendance record; the assistant superintendent named in it is never heard on the tape. | HIGH |
| 0:00:40 | “this is just our third meeting” | Sprague: “And, this is just our third meeting and sort of recapping our our last meeting, we looked at the draft of a budget and patterns emerged pretty quickly as to what, where the major increases in the budget are. And that’s issues of special education and health insurance.” Three televised sessions had been held by this date — 19 November, 13 December and 18 December. The district’s own notices had named 12 November, 4 December and 18 December, and its 4 December minutes record a further meeting planned for 12 December. The chair’s count does not reach any of those three. See flag 3. | MEDIUM |
| 0:01:15 | The transparency claim the rest of the page has to be read against | Sprague: “And as I had indicated in my opening remarks last time we met, there may be some or there will be some very difficult decisions to be made. And in the interest of complete transparency, we will be talking about those on TV so that people have the sense that there was a process in these decisions and not things that we came by lately.” The commitment is to televise the process. It is kept. What it does not produce is a written record of any kind — no agenda, no document, no minutes. | POSITIVE HIGH |
| 0:02:55 | Pre-kindergarten is out of the draft | Henry: “So I went through the budget again and went down through it, and I did I did take out pre-K because you guys had talked about that. So I took that out of the budget. But again, I want to reiterate what you said, that a lot of these positions, or if not all of these positions, would be absorbed back into the district based on openings that we have.” The removal was directed at a previous session and is presented here as done. The programme itself is not discussed until the last seven minutes of the meeting. | MEDIUM |
| 0:05:10 | Where the draft now sits | Henry: “But we took what you guys gave us for recommendations, and we went back down through and made those adjustments as well. So, that’s how we got down to where we are, which is roughly the 1.1 million over after revenue increases. I just want to make sure that’s in there. So 1.1, 1.2 is where we’d be currently sitting over budget, or would be the additional amount we’d have to raise in taxation after revenues.” | |
| 0:06:51 | $1,128,543 — the number the meeting works from | Whitney asks for the actual increase after revenue. Henry: “After revenues it is 1.1 million $28,543.” The figure recurs through the session as “the million 128”. It is the amount by which the FY2026 draft exceeds what the district can raise without an increase — before either collective bargaining agreement is added. It is spoken nowhere in the district’s written record of that day. | MEDIUM |
| 0:08:02 | The pre-kindergarten line: $430,104.13 | Henry: “400. That’s the number I have listed in my email, which was 484,000. Oh. Excuse me. $430,104.13.” Whitney rounds it to “Roughly 440”, and Henry agrees. Pratt establishes what it is: “that’s just that’s just operation of the current pre-K program” — not the special-education services the district must still provide. | MEDIUM |
| 0:08:39 | The board chair asks for the offsetting costs before deciding | Whitney: “So I did I sent an email to Mr. Pratt and Mr. McCosker together, listing a bunch of things that I think is important for us to have to make our final decision about the pre-K and what the actual budget impact will be if related to contracted services, if we need to change our service model to provide for kids outside of the preschool program, and all the variables that could actually negate the decrease.” She adds at 0:10:01: “I didn’t want to make assumptions that were incorrect.” The answer is not ready — McCosker: “Not yet. I’m working on it, but not yet.” | POSITIVE |
| 0:10:10 | What it does to the tax rate | Henry: “Actually, what it is is that actually $0.97 increase to the tax rate for a total of $97.27 per 100,000.” Crawford: “Okay. So it’s so on a 200 $0 house. It’s about $200.” The conversions are done live, twice corrected, and are the only place any of this arithmetic appears in public. | |
| 0:10:30 | Neither contract is in the draft | An unidentified voice: “So it’s a CBA. Are the CBA’s in there?” Henry: “No, they are not in there.” Whitney confirms — “But the so that I wanted to make sure that the teacher CBA is not in here” — and supplies the number as a single word: 514. Crawford adds the paraprofessionals at “about 200,000”. Both agreements were still unratified; both are stated aloud anyway. See flag 13. | OBSERVATION |
| 0:11:16 | With the teachers’ agreement: $137.80 per $100,000 | Henry: “It’d be $137.80 per 100,000. Right. So it increased the tax rate by $1.38.” Crawford queries the arithmetic twice — “And the teachers are 50. So 50 and 97 is 147, not 137. Is that right?” — and Henry explains it as a rounding artefact of the underlying totals: “It went from 1.2 million to 1.7 million in raising.” | |
| 0:12:33 | Planning against the worst case | Whitney: “Do agree with you. I agree there’s a lot of variables that impact. But we have to act as if we have the worst case scenario.” And: “anywhere, we can reduce legacy costs in a meaningful way will stabilize the tax rate for our community as much as possible.” Pratt’s objection is that treating a one-year revenue gain as permanent is “almost like pretending” the budget is stable when it is not. | |
| 0:14:12 | The extraordinary-need grant, given correctly the first time | Henry: “the main increases for this was in your, free and reduced grant. They increase the sliding scale per pupil on the extraordinary grant that they have out here, which, went from like 8500 to 11,500.” That is the statute: RSA 198:40-f fixed the maximum grant at $8,500 per free-and-reduced-eligible pupil from 1 July 2023 and raises it to $11,500 from 1 July 2025. She also reports the statewide education property tax falling: “It’s not a lot, but it’s $100,000.” | MEDIUM |
| 0:16:04 | …and differently, two minutes later | Henry: “So the sliding scale grant that they’re talking about went from 8670 to 11,500. So that is really where your gained your money was under that. That’s tied to free and reduced.” The starting figure has moved by $170 inside two minutes. She then quantifies the effect — “You end up with 7.5 instead of 5.6”, which Crawford converts: “So that’s 2 million.” At the board that evening the same figure is given a third way, and the approved minutes publish a fourth. See flag 5. | MEDIUM |
| 0:20:43 | 8.91 per cent — the gross increase | Crawford presses on a percentage printed on the sheet that makes no sense. Henry: “That is with revenues though. So if you take the total budget itself, it’s up 8.91%. So that number is skewed because of revenues.” The 8.91 per cent is the gross-basis increase — the figure RSA 32:5, III requires appropriations to be stated on — and it is the only such figure spoken anywhere in the district’s December record. | MEDIUM |
| 0:21:30 | The document nobody outside the room can see | Crawford: “Because so here’s my tip for future. Do not ever send a budget out without a line of explanation. When the number shows 224% increase.” And: “We have a lot of board members who were on the ledge last night.” The file is identified only by its timestamp — “I’m talking about 1217, the 10:30 a.m. report that shows the million 128” — and a second version is referred to as “the 1031 version”. Neither is in any public share. See flag 4. | MEDIUM |
| 0:21:58 | The administration says it would rather not circulate it | Pratt: “And that’s why before, we said we’d like not to give it to you in advance. Right. Without explanation.” The board’s own by-law 2.09 says the opposite for anything presented to a committee: “Any and all presentations by the administration to the board or any committee shall be contained in the agenda and made available to the public in its original format online so the public may download or access the information prior to or during board meetings.” | MEDIUM |
| 0:23:01 | $195,000 of capital work, in neither budget | Crawford, as chair of the Capital Improvement Committee: “And the amount to, to for seven, nine, ten. About $100,000, plus about 95,000 for the roof replacement at Stevens. Correct. And when we met, we talked about how some of those items could be covered in the current budget for maintenance. I just want to verify that indeed that can happen. And if it can’t or those numbers in the new budget.” Henry: “Those numbers are not in the new budget.” Crawford: “My biggest concern is the 95000 for the roof replacement, right?” Henry: “Yes, that that definitely needs.” | OBSERVATION |
| 0:25:54 | Whether this year’s money has been encumbered is not known in the room | Henry: “Right now, out of the budget that we had of 106,000, he has, a total of encumbered 21. Or maybe he hasn’t encumbered it yet because he had talked to me yesterday about doing it.” And: “Right. But I don’t see where he’s done it yet because he had met with me yesterday. So Candace, I can’t tell you that just yet.” She undertakes to settle it: “Well, I’ll have it addressed today.” Whether the projects are encumbered decides whether the appropriation lapses at the end of the fiscal year under RSA 32:7. | OBSERVATION |
| 0:26:33 | The SAU 6 assessment falls, and a member insists the public hear it | Crawford: “Because we had an saw [SAU] meeting last week. The new numbers for the s, a [SAU] cost to the Claremont district are in the new one. And in fact, the cost goes down 91,000 from this year.” Whitney: “Almost 100,000.” Crawford: “And so when we’re looking at the increases, it’s not because of 6SA6 [SAU 6] office. … Stay just a statement. That’s not where the increase is.” The SAU 6 budget she refers to was adopted at the 12 December public hearing, at $2,755,723. | |
| 0:27:31 | School by school, against the previous draft | Crawford: “I did the comparison from a week ago budget to this budget and, and tried to see where the reduced costs were. And so, I went to school by school to see where it was. And so I saw a bluff was a variance of about $1,000.” Then Maple — “Maple is down 33,700. I round to hundreds” — and Disnard: “The Disney [Disnard] Disney art variation is $51,700.” Henry answers each from her own working spreadsheet, which she kept precisely because “I knew this was going to be a question.” | |
| 0:31:01 | The reductions are repricing, not cuts — and the committee says so | Whitney: “These are these are accounting. These are accounting changes that resulted in.” Crawford: “Its accounting changes. Not staffing changes.” Whitney: “Not true cuts.” Henry: “No not true cuts. But I just made adjustments.” Whitney: “It’s it’s making our budget more accurate. Yes. But not really decreasing it.” The changes named are a single-plan health premium, a $2,500 buyout line “without a name on it, which means that person’s left”, and a guidance salary repriced to a new hire. | OBSERVATION |
| 0:32:32 | Summer school comes out of the middle-school line | Henry: “So just to give you an idea and regular at a loan, I’m going to tell you with everything, including benefits, we came down 254,000. Where in in the salaries line. The, summer school came out.” Crawford: “So that. Okay, that’s important to mention. So the summer school is out? Yes. Right. Okay. Good.” The high school’s summer school had been discussed on 13 December; a citizen came to the board that evening to object to it, and the guidance counsellor presenting the Program of Studies was asked to remove summer school from the course catalogue. | MEDIUM |
| 0:33:14 | Six positions | Pratt: “Some of them were were, you know, get into specific positions because it’s fair for the people, but that they did cut some positions. Okay. I think it was how many. It was total of six. I think.” Crawford: “It’s cutting positions. But you’re redeploying people. I mean, you’re not.” Pratt: “No. Nope.” The number is given with an audible hedge at both ends and is never confirmed against a list. | |
| 0:33:32 | The business administrator declines to name an individual line | Henry: “Thank you. So. And the next one I really don’t want to go into, because it impacts one person, so I don’t know. That’s about giving that out.” Nobody presses. It is the one point in the meeting where an employee-specific figure is withheld — and the body had no lawful mechanism to take it up privately, because it never convened formally enough to move into nonpublic session at all. See flag 12. | OBSERVATION |
| 0:33:47 | A social worker taken out against a grant not yet awarded | Crawford: “Stevens High School is down 114,000.” Henry: “We took out the social worker that was in there because of the grant that we’re hopefully anticipating to get.” Crawford: “So so taking out a social worker that you hope to cover with grant funds. Yes. Correct.” Whitney returns to it at 1:21:54: “any any grant that’s not a legacy grant. We’re going to end up paying for it anyway. Five years out.” | |
| 0:36:53 | The whole increase, reconstructed from two causes | Crawford: “I researched and I did the math and I did the increases for health insurance by school and the total increase for health insurance, one increase is $1.4 million. And then I looked at two situations, said [sped] costs at the middle school and the high school for a total of, almost $2 million. So if I take $2 million for speed [sped] increases and a million for for health insurance increases, that explains why the budget is up 3.2 million.” Henry: “That is correct. You are right.” Crawford then nets it: “the budget if it weren’t for those two items would that be down to $200,000.” | |
| 0:38:48 | What the member wants the public to take from it | Crawford: “I think it’s important I really think it’s important for people who are watching to see where the costs, where the costs, how where the increase is coming from. And I think it’s really important for them to see that, the administration has done a Herculean job looking everywhere to try and find where the money is spent and is it the best use of the funds, and is it an accurate number and the costs because of two uncontrollable outside our control items, the budget has gone up 3.2 million.” | |
| 0:39:36 | The chair’s pushback on out-of-district placement | Sprague: “my only pushback to that is, as is a former school employee, and having worked in several different districts and looked at an experienced out of district placements and, that this really this, this number of out of district placements is, in my experience, is a new phenomenon. We just did not have that, to even the most remote degree when I worked in the public schools ten years ago.” He goes on: “I wonder how many of these placements took place without any real process”, and “I don’t want to say we never send anybody up, but we really never ever placed anybody.” | |
| 0:40:55 | The superintendent’s account: pandemic money paid for the placements | Pratt: “based on what we found out is that they were using Covid money to pay for the out of district. So it was almost like it was not we don’t have to pay for it now. So let’s put them out. And now we have inherited as we’re paying for it later kind of thing. And so I think that’s a more speculating is that’s what we’re encountering now where we do have this astronomical cost of out of district placements between the Esser [ESSER] funds that we had for Covid and not having programs in place in Claremont to support the kids who are currently here.” He labels it speculation twice, and adds: “it’s another thing that we’ve inherited.” | |
| 0:44:14 | Every placement is reviewed annually, and one person now owns that | McCosker: “Part of every annual IEP process placement has talked about. So it’s always talked about with the IEP team. And since Jessica has gotten on the job as the out of district coordinator, one of the things she’s doing very carefully is looking at every student to see if we can service them in district, right, rather than out of district.” And: “I sit here and I don’t know how it happened, but I can tell you the process going forward.” | POSITIVE |
| 0:45:01 | The chair puts a disclaimer on the record | Sprague: “I’m going to say. My disclaimer. I say again, this predates the sitting over here. I just want to make sure the public is aware of that, that that I am when I’m slinging this, I’m not slinging it.” McCosker: “And I’m not right. And I’m not taking it personally.” Whitney supplies the transport figure a moment earlier: “Yes. 77,000 Stevens High School” — out-of-district transportation for one building. | POSITIVE |
| 0:47:35 | A weekly reporting instruction, stated on camera | McCosker: “My, my memo to every point of contact is you start calling DC wife [DCYF] once a week. I don’t care, I don’t care if they tell you there’s nothing we can do. Followed up with a letter every week. Because then we stand before a judge and a judge says, well, you didn’t do anything.” Pratt: “if kids aren’t coming to school, whether it’s the kid or the parent, we’re going to either file a Chins [CHINS] or educational neglect because it’s getting out of control.” Asked to explain, McCosker: “It’s truancy. Okay, so somebody from whatever building it is. Yeah. You need to call and you need to make a report.” | |
| 0:48:58 | “out of the box kind of thought” — replace the coordinators with social workers | Whitney: “So following up on I have this out of the box kind of thought, it’s clear that we have an issue with special education in our district. What my experience has been from past boards and from what I’ve learned in the past, is that one of the issues in Claremont is we haven’t captured these students early enough, that we haven’t pushed in the services, that they haven’t they haven’t received the sports [supports].” McCosker on capacity: “We can’t hire social workers. We can’t find.” And on one elementary school: “three years that I was there three years after I left, was working with 1 or 2 special educators when there should have been three.” | |
| 0:50:51 | The rule the proposal rests on — and what the rule actually says | Whitney: “in the elementary school realm, as a workaround for getting a stand in for a assistant vice principal. But because the Ada [ADA] of each school does not meet the threshold of the Ed 306 Ada [ADA] expectations for like, you have to get an assistant vice principal at this number.” A minute of confusion over the acronym follows — Pratt: “Either one. It all depends where you are. Adam. Ada. Absolutely going to look. Average daily potato.” The rule is keyed to neither: Ed 306.12(d) is triggered by an enrollment of 500 or more, and it imposes a floor rather than a ceiling. See flag 6. | MEDIUM |
| 0:52:15 | The proposal, stated | Whitney: “Could we consider, instead of having student service coordinators at the elementary school budget social workers instead, or school counselors, and I think there would be an additional cost savings, attached to that.” And: “because right now, I don’t really know what these coordinators do. What the value is, because if it’s an administrative position, then it’s not meeting Ed 306 requirements for an additional administrative position. It’s a work in my opinion. It’s a workaround for an administrative position that doesn’t meet minimum standard requirements.” Crawford: “And perhaps use Esser [ESSER] funds to do so.” | MEDIUM |
| 0:54:21 | The chair, who helped create the posts, says what they were for | Sprague: “So I was actually I worked in the district when we created those positions. Okay, I know what the original intent was and and I’m speaking I don’t know what they do, but this was the intent. We would have principles [principals] in our principles [principals] meetings, of which I was one, envious of the fact that at the high school we were able to get all of our walkthroughs done, all of our evaluations done, because we had the freedom given to us by the fact that we had someone in the building handling low level discipline.” And: “that was the intent, because we had principals who were so tied up with the minutia of their day, they couldn’t get in the classrooms.” | |
| 0:56:25 | The superintendent’s answer: certification and liability | Pratt: “we just gone to the days that we were allowed to put people in those positions who don’t carry the certification level as a principal or assistant principal, because the liability, you know, your certification, you know, covers you for that liability.” And: “the technically, you know, we we can’t have, non certified administrators dealing with, a lot of the stuff that they’re expected to deal with. Now.” Crawford: “I think having administrators who aren’t certified is a problematic.” New Hampshire’s suspension statute turns on a different test — see flag 9. | OBSERVATION |
| 0:58:03 | The superintendent draws his own line | Pratt: “I’ve talked to some of you before based on the current status in the budget, you know, I educationally couldn’t say I recommend any further cuts. But as a subcommittee of the board, you guys, you know, as the board and it’s your role to say we want you to go in and take out.” He repeats it at 1:20:16: “we’ve gone as far as we can as administration to say we’ve reduced that as much as we can”, and “I can’t in good faith say we, you know, we need I get to recommend further cuts”. | |
| 0:59:47 | The coordinators sign for the district at IEP meetings — and the credentials question is not answered | McCosker: “the point of contact student Service coordinator, whatever we call them. Also, Leah [LEA], any special ed meeting”; then “L a [LEA] are the people who are tasked with fiduciary responsibility at an IEP meeting. Yes, we can do this. No, we cannot do this. So they’re the ones who are signing off in those meetings that we can we can implement this IEP.” Whitney: “You mean the student service coordinators are doing that?” then “What credentials do they have to do that?” McCosker’s whole reply is a single syllable. Pratt offers a substitution — “you could you could have delegate counselors and social social workers do that as well” — and McCosker adds “Legitimately with training.” See flag 7. | MEDIUM |
| 1:01:08 | “an egregious waste of money” | Whitney: “So we have people roughly 80. All the student service coordinators are roughly making $80,000 a year at 185 plus ten.” Then: “We could actually hire full time social workers for less and have them in the community following these kids through the summer summer programs, I, I think it’s an egregious waste of money.” And the saving she estimates: “the salary would be roughly at the top end, 10,000, 30,000 saving in salary. Then, you know, just salary alone. And getting year round coverage for kids.” No document supporting any of these figures was produced. | MEDIUM |
| 1:03:18 | Differentiated paraprofessional pay, from a television news item | Sprague: “the news the other day they were talking about the Nashua school board and Nashua is has 75, I believe open para positions.” The idea: “paras that would engage in personal care or really high level behaviors would be at a different level than people who don’t do that.” And: “it’s late in the game to be talking to the pairs [paras] about this now, but it’s just it’s some of the creative thinking, I think, that’s going out in other, other districts”. | |
| 1:03:46 | A member stops herself mid-sentence — and then the numbers are said anyway | Crawford: “You will be interested to note that in the new pair [para] of contracts, previously there was only one track.” Then: “Haven’t read and and we haven’t ratified it yet. Can I talk about.” Henry: “Until it’s ratified?” Pratt nonetheless states the substance a moment later: “I proposed instead of one track three, and we’ll just have to see if that’s ratified.” See flag 13. | OBSERVATION |
| 1:05:31 | The superintendent offers to cost the proposal | Pratt: “if you guys want to, you know, language a, you know, a proposed, you know, proposing of cutting the student service coordinators in reallocating the funds towards social workers and counselors.” Whitney first: “I feel. Like the last thing we want to do is to actually make cuts. That or that I would propose is to make cuts to people’s to not have them have a job.” Sprague: “the administration will make every effort to… try to figure out how to keep them in the district.” No motion is made; the item simply passes to the administration. | MEDIUM |
| 1:08:33 | Who can suspend a pupil | Whitney: “the person who may have the certification they can technically administer or say you’re suspended, but the other student service coordinators cannot do that because they are not certified, am I correct?” Pratt: “technically they they still have to go through the certified administrator to approve, you know, a suspension… even even a dean would, you know, technically couldn’t suspend. They’d have to get permission from the principal to make those decisions.” And: “No matter how you roll it, that always comes from the principal.” RSA 193:13, I(a) makes the test a written designation by the superintendent. See flag 9. | OBSERVATION |
| 1:12:11 | The proposal is withdrawn, and then is not | Whitney: “I would withdraw the consideration if the if it is felt strongly that that would be a detriment because I think I don’t want there to be one lose one to get another.” Nothing had been moved, so nothing is withdrawn; and at 1:49:38 the item is still on the administration’s list. In the same passage she says what she thinks the underlying problem is: “one of the issues we’ve been having at the school level is principles [principals] are not supporting their teachers in instructional excellence and evaluations, and we’ve seen that as being a problem.” | MEDIUM |
| 1:15:14 | “what will be palatable to the taxpayers” | Sprague: “the reality of the budget is how do we with 45 minutes left in this session, how do we we first of all, we have to determine, I think, what is what will be palatable to the taxpayers. How do we, convince them that it’s it’s essential.” And the stake: “The the negotiated agreement with the teachers is at stake. If the budget goes down, that all that work was for nothing.” | |
| 1:15:59 | Athletics enters the discussion | Whitney: “I think the only thing that we can do is bring it down as low as we think we can bring it, without causing harm. And I think actually, we need to look at even athletics, and not all athletics, but I don’t know, I don’t do we still have lacrosse?” Sprague names the criteria used before — “low participation” and “low success rates” — and adds the constraint: “It has to be compliant with title nine. Any decision we make.” He refers the work to the administration and the athletic director. | POSITIVE |
| 1:17:58 | Reserves — asked about, and closed in four lines | Crawford: “Are there any reserves that we can offset the texts [taxes]?” Whitney: “Where do you put it in?” Crawford: “It’s already in.” Whitney: “Where did the end of year have?” Henry answers with a single Yes. Whitney: “We’ve already voted on that.” That is the whole of it. No dollar figure for the FY2024 close, the retained fund balance or the statutory ceiling is spoken at any point in the meeting. See flag 10. | OBSERVATION |
| 1:20:48 | The athletics total: $584,000 | Henry: “So that cost is 584,000”; asked whether that covers both buildings: “That’s just high school.” The middle school is “a very small amount”. She then offers a precedent from her own career: “I’ve been a school record. Athletics. It was, it was a K through eight school. We cut athletics. We cut all bussing to the high school… So parents had to find a way to get their kids there. It’s a really tough.” | |
| 1:22:38 | The saturation study | Sprague describes the staffing measure he used as an administrator: “I knew that if my number was around 50%, 40%, 50%, that I had too much staff. The sweet spot really was around 75%, which meant that they were full. But you had room if you wanted to put somebody else in there. And if there are 95 or 100% or more I really had I didn’t have enough staff in that particular area.” Pratt reports that on the courses required to graduate “the saturation rate is there, 75, 78%”, and the middle school average class size “around 20”, concluding “there’s no more meat on the bone at the middle school”. | |
| 1:26:40 | The calendar, and the date the hearing moved to | Sprague: “Okay. So we have a half hour left. So we’re not going to meet again until, the new year. So I’m not sure how many meetings we have.” Whitney: “That we have to have a plan because I’d like to present this budget, whatever our budget is going to be, prior to the public hearing. So the board has an opportunity.” Crawford supplies the date, correcting herself: “January 17th, 15th.” The 20 November agenda and the 4 December minutes had both noticed the FY2026 budget public hearing for 2 January; the 18 December board agenda prints 15 January. See flag 16. | POSITIVE |
| 1:27:18 | Why the board will not be told the number | Whitney: “So we are already planning to have an emergency meeting for the Clarence Surprise for the Claremont School Board on January 7th to ratify the C, a [CBA] and the pair [para] of contracts. Okay. 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.” And: “So we can’t really even talk to the Claremont School Board, with any other than terms or what our ideas are.” The bar she names is a bargaining protocol, not a statute. See flag 13. | OBSERVATION MEDIUM |
| 1:29:43 | “we have to give them a number” | Sprague: “I think what we have to do is give them a number. That’s number one. We have to give them a number and then recommendations as to how to get to that number.” Pratt sets out the mechanism he expects: “typically like what happens is the, the, the board, you know, said go let’s the administration know we want this much cut from the bottom line. And we’re recommending you look at x, y and z. So it’s first is coming up with the bottom line.” The mechanism he describes is a board decision; what happens instead is a three-member consensus with no vote. | MEDIUM |
| 1:31:12 | The contracts, estimated aloud at about $800,000 | Whitney: “Well it’s 514 is the SRA [SREA]. It’s not in here. We have already have an 8.9% increase in the budget with revenues without the SRA [SREA]. So I’m thinking at least close to another million dollars.” Then, five lines after saying “We can’t talk about the numbers out loud”: “I’m assuming we’re looking at $800,000 if I’m going to. My gut is telling me are combined CB A’s for the first year, impact is going to be roughly $800,000.” Crawford: “Okay, I would agree with that.” | OBSERVATION |
| 1:33:11 | The default budget, still being written | Whitney: “And so what is our default budget to.” Henry: “I’m working on that tonight.” And: “I will get you a rough estimated number on where we’re going to be, but I think it’s going to probably land anywhere from a half 1 million to 1 million, depending on what I find.” Crawford: “Higher than the actual budget.” Henry: “They’re not going to be that far off of each other.” That evening she gave the board $39,791,261 — the one FY2026 figure in the district’s written record of 18 December. | MEDIUM |
| 1:34:07 | Whether the voters can cut below the default budget | Henry: “What SB two because a deliberative session, you could get ten people come in and cut the budget.” Whitney: “If there’s if there’s almost nothing to cut, I mean, they can’t cut the budget below the default.” Henry: “Yes they can. SB two you can.” Crawford agrees with Henry. Henry is right on the law: RSA 40:13, XI(b) protects the default budget amount from amendment by the legislative body; nothing in RSA 40:13 puts a floor under the proposed operating budget, and ¶IV(c) expressly permits an amendment that changes the dollar amount of an appropriation. | POSITIVE |
| 1:36:31 | The base the percentage is measured against: $36,349,753 | The committee cannot at first agree what to divide by. Whitney supplies it: “I’m sorry. It’s 36 36,349,753.” Henry: “Of 11%. If it’s at 40 million, it would be an 11% increase over the 36” — gross, before revenue. The FY2025 appropriation is the denominator for every percentage in the rest of the meeting. | |
| 1:37:48 | 5.5 per cent, fully loaded, as things stand | Crawford: “It’s a 5.5%.” Whitney: “Right 5.5% increase.” Crawford states what it includes: “With the anticipated, Revenues with the revenues and with the added for the bargaining units.” This is the committee’s own working figure for the FY2026 budget on 18 December 2024 — and it appears in no document. | MEDIUM |
| 1:39:22 | “I’m going to throw out 4%” | Sprague: “Well, I’m going to throw out 4%.” Crawford: “4% on the loaded.” Sprague: “Revenue included.” Whitney converts it into an instruction: “We want the total number to be a 4% increase.” Henry confirms the basis at 1:44:12: “The 4% that you’re talking about that you’re talking about is that 4% over and above this year’s budget, or 4% including the new revenues.” Sprague on the reasoning: “That’s just my suggestion. I’m just thrown out there. See what it says what I think I think we can defend that number.” No motion, no second, no vote, no minute. | MEDIUM |
| 1:43:05 | What it costs a household | Whitney: “That’s looking at over $2 if, if we don’t change anything”; then “$2.05 on the mill.” Crawford: “All right, then, it’s 400,000 for $400 on a 200. That’s. I think that’s kind of the sweet spot.” Whitney: “It’s a set of snow tires.” Crawford grounds the example: “there’s the sale value and the. Assessed value. And I think the assessed value is around 200,000.” | |
| 1:46:10 | A Saturday work session, proposed on camera | Whitney: “I’m thinking that we as a finance committee should try to get together. I don’t know if anybody who’s willing to give up a Saturday to really go through and get a presentation together, for the 15th, so we can have a very articulate so we can communicate to the board exactly why the budget looks the way it does, and why we have made the cuts that we’ve made and the thought process and the data that we’ve used to drive those decisions.” Sprague lists it as fixed at 1:48:45: “I’ve got the special meeting, I’ve got the public hearing, a work session for this group to nail things down before the 15th.” Notice is not mentioned. See flag 3. | MEDIUM |
| 1:49:04 | What the board will get tonight: a thumbnail | Sprague: “So the opportunity for the rest of the board to come up to speed on this whole process will be the seventh. Seventh. Okay. And tonight we’re going to give them just a thumbnail of where we’re headed.” Whitney: “And quite frankly, I’m going to encourage every one of them to watch these meetings” — which is what she in fact told the board that evening, and what the board’s approved minutes record instead of a figure. Crawford immediately: “No, they’re not clear. We’re not clear okay.” | MEDIUM |
| 1:49:38 | The administration’s list, read back | Henry: “Well, I’ve only got I’ve got two things or two things on the list the sports, the outer district placement, but also looking into the, the one we talked about, the social worker and that to see if there’s a differential there.” Sprague adds the fourth: “One thing it’s still pending is the, the, which Mike is, is going to work on is the related services”. McCosker: “I am starting to get the hours in on what’s required right now. In-house, if we have to start going here, there and everywhere to do those services, that will change.” This read-back is the closest thing to a minute the meeting produced. | HIGH |
| 1:51:13 | Who the preschool serves, and on what terms | McCosker: “We we have to serve anybody for special education who’s identified for special education services. The non special ed students, our first come, first serve.” Asked whether the programme expands and contracts with demand: “Right. If we have a program, you have to take them, especially if they’re.” Crawford asks about the balance of the two groups — “And then do offset that by the students who are not special ed unequal proportion” — and McCosker answers “Equal portion.” Nobody names the placement rule that makes that balance matter. See flag 8. | MEDIUM |
| 1:52:27 | “we are not required by law to provide in-house preschool” | Whitney: “So so currently we are providing a service. Just be clear. We’re providing a service that is not required by any RSA.” McCosker: “No special ed service is required.” Whitney: “But we are not required by law to provide in-house preschool that is paid for by the local local taxpayer funds.” Pratt: “We’re just obligated to pay to the for the services that are tied to their IEP.” Henry: “You do not have to have a preschool.” Sprague closes the exchange by thanking the Director of Student Services: “The document you sent was helpful by the way.” | MEDIUM |
| 1:53:20 | The arithmetic that turns 4 per cent into $200,000 | Crawford: “if we could reduce 200,000 out of that, that would be about a 5.5%. That would reduce.” Then: “if we reduce that by 200,000, which would translate to this number coming down to 100,000. And I think that would result in a 4.5% increase.” Henry does not check it: “Yeah I double check it. But I trust your math.” Crawford: “It’s but that’s 4.5%… So I’m trying to get the so I could I could live with cutting to see if you folks could come up with another 200,000 in cuts.” Sprague: “That’s roughly 4%.” | MEDIUM |
| 1:55:12 | “Just find me 200,000” | Crawford: “And and and frankly, I, I don’t care where you find it. I mean, if I could support the social workers, I really I really like that if you can figure out I mean, I don’t I don’t want to cut athletics, but if that’s where it is, okay. If you find it in an out of district placement that you bring them back in, okay.” Then: “Just fine. Just find me 200,000.” Sprague: “Yeah. I don’t have any more requirements than that either.” This is the operative act of the meeting. | MEDIUM HIGH |
| 1:55:33 | “you got our orders” | Pratt: “I mean, you got our orders. Yeah, we’ll.” Henry: “Got our marching orders.” Pratt: “Don’t know how at this point, but we’ll see what we can get.” The administration treats a three-member consensus, taken without a motion, as a direction it is bound to execute — which under by-law 1.05 it is not: subcommittees “are advisory in nature” and the board “retains the right, and has the duty, to make all final decisions”. | MEDIUM |
| 1:55:39 | A member states, on the record, that she would not cut at all | Crawford: “I don’t know how. And frankly, I don’t know how you’re going to find I could support the budget right now. Where? Because. Because it is the the default budget is going to be more than the actual budget. This is crazy. We don’t it is driven. This increase is driven by factors beyond our control.” And: “to cut more, I think is becoming irresponsible. And I have a really hard time with that. And I, I. It was I am a big supporter of athletics and that really kills me.” She had asked for the $200,000 twenty seconds earlier. There is no vote, so the dissent inside her own instruction is recorded nowhere. | MEDIUM |
| 1:56:43 | Close, without adjournment | Sprague: “Okay. I think our business is done. Thank you, thank you.” No motion, no vote, no time stated. The recording runs seven more seconds. Five and three-quarter hours later the board convened at 6:30 p.m. in the same building, and its approved minutes record the Finance Sub-Committee item without a single number from this afternoon. | MEDIUM |
Items flagged for review
Flags are a reviewer’s aid, produced by reading the recording against New Hampshire and federal law as it stood on 18 December 2024. They are not findings of violation and they are not legal advice. Each card names the rule it rests on and the date that rule took effect; where no verified rule was identified, the card says so and is graded OBSERVATION. Severity tracks legal grounding, not importance. Because this meeting produced no agenda, no packet and no minutes, several cards rest on the recording alone — that limitation is stated where it matters.
HIGH A properly noticed, televised meeting of a public body that produced no minutes, no agenda and no document — while the same evening’s board packet carried December minutes for two other subcommittees
The duty. The Right-to-Know Law’s definition of “public body” reaches “Any legislative body, governing body, board, commission, committee, agency, or authority of any county, town, municipal corporation, school district, school administrative unit, chartered public school, or other political subdivision, or any committee, subcommittee, or subordinate body thereof, or advisory committee thereto”. This three-member Finance Sub-Committee is therefore a public body in its own right, and the whole of RSA 91-A:2, II attaches to it: minutes must include “the names of members, persons appearing before the public bodies, and a brief description of the subject matter discussed and final decisions”, and must be “promptly recorded and open to public inspection not more than 5 business days after the meeting”. A draft satisfies the deadline. Vintage: the version in force on this date is the 2023 codification — the source note ends 2023, 188:1, eff. Oct. 3, 2023 — so the start-time, end-time and minutes-producer clauses added by 2025, 112:1 are deliberately not applied here.
The board imposed the same duty on itself, in writing, six months earlier. By-law 1.05(c), adopted 5 June 2024: “Notice of the meeting including place and time must be posted at least 24 hours in advance on the SAU 6 website.” By-law 1.05(d): “Minutes must be recorded and available for public inspection on the SAU 6 website within 5 days of the meeting. Minutes should include the names of board members present and a brief description of the subject matter discussed… The subcommittee chair is responsible for ensuring the minutes are sent to the Executive Assistant to the Superintendent to post on the SAU 6 website per RSA.” By-law 1.11 repeats it as a personal duty of the subcommittee chair: “Delegate or compile minutes and ensure they are posted within 5 days”, alongside “creating agendas”. And by-law 2.09 covers the documents: “Any and all presentations by the administration to the board or any committee shall be contained in the agenda and made available to the public in its original format online so the public may download or access the information prior to or during board meetings.”
What exists. A recording, and this page. No minutes, no agenda, no attendance record and no budget document for 18 December 2024 have been found in any district share. Input/SupportingDocuments/MAP.md §65 records the two-stage search made for this meeting on 2026-08-28: the main packets share, which has never carried a Finance Committee folder; the 2024 Meeting Documents archive; both candidate year folders of the district’s Meeting Minutes share, every entry in which is a full-board, deliberative or public-hearing document; the next board meeting’s packet folder; and keyword searches for finance and the quoted dotted date. The district’s own Claremont Finance Sub Committee Drive folder exists and holds no files; the Finance folder linked from the SAU 6 board page was read on 2026-08-29 and contains only a purpose statement created in June 2025 and a 2025-2026 folder created in July 2026.
What makes the absence unmistakable is the packet assembled for the board meeting that same evening. Folder 10. CSB 12.18.24 contains CSB Visioning Sub 12.9.24.docx.pdf and Cap Improvements Committee Meeting minutes 12.10.24.pdf — minutes of two other subcommittee meetings held nine and eight days earlier. The district can file subcommittee minutes, does file subcommittee minutes, and filed them for two subcommittees in the same fortnight. It filed none for the subcommittee that spent that afternoon setting the target for the district’s FY2026 operating budget — whose FY2025 predecessor was $36,349,753 and whose draft that afternoon stood 8.91 per cent above it — and none for its two preceding sessions either.
The consequence is visible on this page. The $1,128,543 over-budget figure, the 8.91 per cent gross increase, the $430,104.13 pre-kindergarten line, the $584,000 athletics total, the 5.5 per cent working estimate, the four per cent target and the $200,000 instruction survive only because the meeting was televised and this project transcribed it. So does the attendance: the assistant superintendent is placed in the room by one sentence of the chair’s and is never heard again, and there is no document that confirms or contradicts it.
Which severity limb, and why it differs from the neighbouring page. This is the unmitigated limb: a public body met, no minutes exist in any district share, and nothing on the record explains it — nobody says minutes exist elsewhere or are coming, and the body transacted substantive business. The companion page for 19 November 2024 graded the identical fact HIGH on the same limb. The difference here cuts the other way rather than in mitigation: this meeting was properly noticed, twice, a month in advance (flag 14), so the failure is not part of a general lapse in the committee’s paperwork — it is confined precisely to the record of what happened.
The honest limit. The statute requires availability for inspection; nothing in this record shows anyone asking for these minutes and being refused, and absence from Drive is not proof that no minutes were written. The Google Drive interface under-reports on these shares — folder enumerations silently omit folders this project has separately recorded, and title searches miss files that read fine by identifier — so every negative here is written as not found, never as does not exist. And the SAU 6 website as it stood in December 2024, which is where by-law 1.05(d) sends these minutes, cannot be inspected from here.
What would resolve it: dated minutes for 18 December 2024, or a working public link to wherever this committee’s minutes are in fact kept. What would sharpen it: a documented request to inspect them that went unanswered.
Sources: RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d); RSA 91-A:2 as codified in 2024 — the version in force at this meeting; RSA 91-A:4; Claremont School Board By-Laws, adopted 5 June 2024, rules 1.05(b)–(d), 1.11 and 2.09 two rules in this document are numbered 2.09; the one quoted is the agenda-itemisation and publication rule, not the amendments rule; packet 10. CSB 12.18.24; Input/SupportingDocuments/MAP.md §§64 and 65.
MEDIUM The committee set the FY2026 target on camera at a quarter to three, and by half past six not one of its figures had entered the district’s written record
What the committee arrived at. Working from a draft that ran $1,128,543 over after revenues and 8.91 per cent up on a gross basis, and from its own estimate of about $800,000 for two unratified collective bargaining agreements, the committee put the fully loaded FY2026 increase at 5.5 per cent against the FY2025 appropriation of $36,349,753. The chair then set the target — “Well, I’m going to throw out 4%”, revenue included — the board chair converted it into an instruction — “We want the total number to be a 4% increase” — and the third member turned it into a dollar figure: “if we reduce that by 200,000… I think that would result in a 4.5% increase”, then “Just fine. Just find me 200,000.” The administration accepted it: “I mean, you got our orders.”
What the district’s record of that day contains. The approved minutes of the board meeting five and three-quarter hours later dispose of the Finance Sub-Committee item in three sentences, and they are worth setting out in full because they are the entirety of the public written record of this afternoon: that the board chair “recommended those who would like to know more about the budget and the challenges the committee and district face, such as uncontrollable costs, to watch the CCTV recordings of the committee meetings”; that another member “noted that she has watched some of those meetings and commended the committee and that the information regarding unfunded mandates was eye opening”; and that the chair “noted that any questions that people have can likely be answered in those meeting recordings”. No percentage, no dollar figure, no target and no instruction to the administration appears. The only FY2026 figure minuted that evening is the default budget, $39,791,261 — a number that had not yet been finished when the committee met, and that is larger than the operating budget it belongs to.
The chair said in advance that this would happen. At 1:49:04: “And tonight we’re going to give them just a thumbnail of where we’re headed.” The board chair’s substitute was the recordings themselves — “I’m going to encourage every one of them to watch these meetings” — and that is exactly what she told the board. A third member said, on this recording, what that leaves: “No, they’re not clear. We’re not clear okay.”
Why the gap is reported and nothing is inferred from it. This project’s standing rule, learned from the same committee’s December 2023 cycle, is that a difference between what is discussed on tape and what appears in the record is a hole in the record, not proof of what was settled away from it. So: the committee’s target and the board’s minute are both set out above, the gap between them is stated, and no claim is made about what any member understood, agreed or decided outside this recording. The next public appearance of an FY2026 operating figure is at the emergency board meeting of 7 January 2025.
What the by-laws say about the relationship. By-law 1.05 makes subcommittees “advisory in nature” and provides that the board “retains the right, and has the duty, to make all final decisions related to reports and recommendations that have committee involvement”; by-law 1.05(1) requires the Finance Committee to “report to the full Board monthly”. A report was given. It carried no number.
Why MEDIUM and not HIGH. No statute requires a subcommittee to state a figure to its parent board at any particular meeting, and the board’s own minutes accurately record what was in fact said at the board — the defect is not in them. The unmitigated failure is the committee’s absent minutes, graded HIGH at flag 1; this card is about the consequence, and grading it HIGH would count the same absence twice. The reason the committee gave for withholding the total is treated separately at flag 13.
Sources: the recording, at the timestamps linked above; Approved Claremont School Board minutes, 18 December 2024, items IV.3 and IV.5(b); Claremont School Board By-Laws, rule 1.05 and 1.05(1); RSA 91-A:2, II (2024 codification).
MEDIUM A further session of the same three members was proposed on camera, with no mention of notice — in a season that already contains three finance meetings with no public trace
What was proposed. At 1:46:10 the board chair asks the other two members to give up a Saturday “to really go through and get a presentation together, for the 15th”; three minutes later the committee chair lists it among the things now fixed in his calendar: “I’ve got the special meeting, I’ve got the public hearing, a work session for this group to nail things down before the 15th.” Notice is not mentioned by anyone, and no date is set on the tape.
Why a work session of these three is a meeting. RSA 91-A:2, I defines a meeting as the convening of a quorum of a public body “for the purpose of discussing or acting upon a matter or matters over which the public body has supervision, control, jurisdiction, or advisory power”, with members able to communicate contemporaneously. The Finance Sub-Committee has three members; all three would be present. There is no “work session” exclusion. The four exclusions are collective-bargaining strategy or negotiations, consultation with legal counsel, a caucus of members of the same political party, and circulation of draft documents intended only to formalise decisions previously made in a meeting. The third is unavailable to any New Hampshire school board: RSA 671:30 requires every school district without a special statute to use the non-partisan ballot system for the election of district officers, so a body elected non-partisanly has no party caucus to hold. And the fourth reaches only the circulation of documents formalising decisions already made in a meeting — not a session at which the presentation is built.
The pattern this sits in. Six Finance Sub-Committee dates are traceable in this budget season: four published in advance in the approved 16 October 2024 minutes, one planned in the 4 December minutes, and one — 13 December — held and televised with no located notice at all. Three of the six left no public record of any kind:
- 12 November 2024 and 4 December 2024 — both printed on the approved 16 October 2024 minutes as Finance Subcommittee budget dates, 4 December repeated on the 20 November agenda and in its approved minutes. No recording, no agenda, no minutes, no Drive folder.
- 12 December 2024 — set on camera at the 4 December board meeting and recorded in that meeting’s draft minutes in terms that describe it exactly: “The meeting on Thursday the 12th will be a premeeting for the 13th so that the finance committee understands the budget before it is presented to the public.” No notice, agenda, minutes or recording has been found.
The chair’s own count is consistent with all three. He opens this meeting with “this is just our third meeting”. Three televised sessions had been held by 18 December — 19 November, 13 December and 18 December. Whatever else happened on 12 November, 4 December or 12 December, the chair is not counting it.
What this card does not say. It does not say that a Saturday work session took place, and it does not say what was discussed at any unrecorded session. The record establishes a proposal made in public and a pattern of gaps around it; it establishes nothing about what was decided away from the camera, and no inference of that kind is drawn here or anywhere on this page.
Why MEDIUM and not HIGH. The three vanished meetings are graded HIGH on the companion page for 4 December 2024, where they were noticed or minuted as planned and then left no trace — that is the unmitigated limb. What is added here is a further proposal whose occurrence the record does not establish either way, which is a lesser thing; grading it HIGH would double-count the December gaps already carried by the neighbouring page.
Sources: RSA 91-A:2, I — definition of a meeting and the four exclusions (2024 codification); RSA 671:30 — non-partisan ballot system for school district officers (1979, 321:1, never amended); RSA 91-A:2-a — communications outside a meeting (2008, 303:4); Draft Claremont School Board minutes, 4 December 2024; CSB Agenda 11.20.24; By-Laws 1.05(c) and 1.11.
MEDIUM The whole meeting is a discussion of a document nobody outside the room could see — and the administration says on the record that it prefers not to circulate it
What the document is. The committee works from a spreadsheet identified only by when it was produced: “I’m talking about 1217, the 10:30 a.m. report that shows the million 128”, and a second version referred to as “the 1031 version”. A third was sent the previous evening — “Last night’s budget was down 375,000” — and a fourth, in two parts, is the pair the board chair opens the meeting by trying to distinguish: “the last two budgets that we received came in two packets and I really didn’t I really didn’t understand. One was a revenue and one was not”. None of these files is in any public share. Every school-by-school variance in the middle forty minutes of this meeting — Maple down $33,700, Disnard down $51,700, Stevens down $114,000, district-wide moving by nearly two million between drafts — is unintelligible to a viewer without them.
What the board’s own rules require. By-law 2.09: “Any and all presentations by the administration to the board or any committee shall be contained in the agenda and made available to the public in its original format online so the public may download or access the information prior to or during board meetings.” By-law 4.03(d) makes the posting a delegated duty: “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.” Both are satisfied by neither an agenda nor a document here.
The administration’s stated position. When a member objects that a percentage on the sheet was unexplained — “Do not ever send a budget out without a line of explanation. When the number shows 224% increase”, and “We have a lot of board members who were on the ledge last night” — the superintendent’s answer is: “And that’s why before, we said we’d like not to give it to you in advance. Right. Without explanation.” The concern is intelligible and the fix he describes is a covering note; the by-law’s answer is publication with the agenda, not withholding.
Who did see it. All seven board members. A document that shaped the views of the whole board — enough for a member to describe colleagues as “on the ledge” — is a governmental record in the district’s possession within the meaning of RSA 91-A:4, whose inspection right is available on request. Nothing in this record shows anyone asking for it, so this is a publication finding, not a refusal finding.
Sources: Claremont School Board By-Laws, rules 2.09 (agenda itemisation and publication) and 4.03(d); RSA 91-A:4 — availability of governmental records amended 2024, 49:1, 2, eff. Aug. 13, 2024, so the current text is the text in force here; the recording at 0:21:30 and 0:21:58.
MEDIUM The statutory figure driving the FY2026 revenue increase is given three different ways in one day, and the district publishes the wrong one
What the statute says. RSA 198:40-f establishes the extraordinary need grant. The maximum grant — the amount payable to a district at or below the lowest equalized-valuation threshold — was $8,500 per pupil eligible to receive a free or reduced-price meal, enacted by 2023, 79:153, effective 1 July 2023 and in force on the date of this meeting. The same session law, at 2023, 79:154, raises it to $11,500 effective 1 July 2025, which is the FY2026 year the committee is budgeting. The increase is therefore $3,000 per eligible pupil, and the two endpoints are $8,500 and $11,500.
What was said, in order. At 0:14:12 the business administrator gets it right: the grant “went from like 8500 to 11,500”. At 0:16:04, answering a follow-up, she says it “went from 8670 to 11,500”. That evening, presenting the same material to the full board, she gives it as “it used to be right around eight 8600 per kid to 11,500 a kid” quoted from the recording of the 6:30 p.m. board meeting, Cablecast show 16222, not from this session. And the board’s approved minutes publish a fourth version: “the amount was increased from about $8,600 per student to $11,500”.
Why it matters. This grant is the whole of the revenue story the committee is relying on. The business administrator quantifies its effect twice — “You end up with 7.5 instead of 5.6”, which a member converts to “So that’s 2 million” — and the board’s minutes put the adequacy increase at about $1.9 million. A reader checking that arithmetic against the published figure of “about $8,600” will be working from a per-pupil delta of $2,900 where the statute gives $3,000, on a base of several hundred eligible pupils. The published minutes are the district’s only written account of why FY2026 revenue rises, and the number in them is not the number in the statute.
Two adjacent traps, stated so the correction is not compounded. RSA 198:40-f is the extraordinary-need grant; the two-per-cent annual adjustment lives in a different section, RSA 198:40-d, and the two are easy to cross. And the $8,500 and $11,500 figures are the maximum grant per eligible pupil, not a “grant floor”: the floor in this section is an equalized valuation per eligible pupil, a separate quantity entirely.
Sources: RSA 198:40-f as codified in 2024 — the version in force at this meeting, showing $8,500 until 1 July 2025 and $11,500 from that date; RSA 198:40-f, current text, whose source note reads “2022, 318:1, eff. July 1, 2022. 2023, 79:153, eff. July 1, 2023; 79:154, eff. July 1, 2025. 2025, 141:224, eff. July 1, 2026.”; Approved Claremont School Board minutes, 18 December 2024, item IV.3.
MEDIUM A live proposal to cut four positions rests on a reading of Ed 306 that the rule does not support, stated three times and corrected by no one in the room
The premise, as stated. At 0:50:51: the elementary student service coordinators exist “as a workaround for getting a stand in for a assistant vice principal. But because the Ada [ADA] of each school does not meet the threshold of the Ed 306 Ada [ADA] expectations for like, you have to get an assistant vice principal at this number.” At 0:53:00: “if it’s an administrative position, then it’s not meeting Ed 306 requirements for an additional administrative position. It’s a work in my opinion. It’s a workaround for an administrative position that doesn’t meet minimum standard requirements.” And at 0:58:24: “if they if they are an administrative positions and our school ADM or Ada [ADA] does not warrant an extra administrator, then why don’t we put a more effective person or somebody who has the skill set in those positions?”
What the rule says. Ed 306.12(d), as readopted by Document #14150 effective 13 December 2024 — five days before this meeting: “The local school board shall require that each school with an enrollment of 500 or more students provides the services of an assistant principal or 2 or more persons with administrative licensure under Ed 506 who together act as a full-time equivalent to carry out administrative duties assigned by the superintendent in accordance with local school board policy.” Three things follow. The measure is enrollment, not average daily attendance and not average daily membership — the two the room spends a minute failing to distinguish. The rule is a floor: it compels a school at 500 or more to provide that administrative capacity, and says nothing at all about a school below 500, which it neither requires nor forbids to have administrative help. And no threshold in Part Ed 306 makes a non-licensed support position a substitute for, or a breach of, anything.
The enrolments. On the district’s own December 2024 Superintendent’s Report, published in the packet for the board meeting that same evening: Stevens High School 479, Claremont Middle School 335, Maple Avenue 264, Disnard 262, Bluff 168. No Claremont school reaches 500. Ed 306.12(d) therefore requires nothing of any of them — which is not the same proposition as the one the proposal is built on.
Why this is graded MEDIUM. The mis-statement is not incidental: it is the stated justification for eliminating four positions and reallocating the money, it is repeated three times across eight minutes, and it is not corrected by the superintendent, the assistant superintendent, the Director of Student Services or the business administrator, all of whom are present. The proposal itself may be sound on its merits — the same speaker gives independent reasons, and every elementary principal had asked for a social worker at the 19 November session. The defect is that the rule is being used as authority for something it does not say, in a public meeting whose recording is the only record of it.
Vintage note. Part Ed 306 was renumbered in the readoption that took effect 13 December 2024: the staffing rule that had been Ed 306.15 became Ed 306.12, and the class-size rule that had been Ed 306.17 became Ed 306.14, “Student-Educator Ratios”. This meeting falls five days on the current side of that line, so the current numbering is the right one to cite here — and the wrong one to cite against any meeting before 13 December 2024.
Sources: N.H. Code Admin. R. Ed 306.12(d), “Provision of Staff and Staff Qualifications”, Doc. #14150, eff. 12-13-24; December 2024 Superintendent’s Report for building enrolments.
MEDIUM The people who sign for the district at IEP meetings are the people the committee proposes to remove, and the question of their qualification was asked and not answered
The exchange. The Director of Student Services raises it himself as the thing the committee needs to know before deciding: the student service coordinator, “whatever we call them”, is also “Leah [LEA], any special ed meeting”, and “L a [LEA] are the people who are tasked with fiduciary responsibility at an IEP meeting. Yes, we can do this. No, we cannot do this. So they’re the ones who are signing off in those meetings that we can we can implement this IEP.” The board chair asks the obvious follow-up twice — “You mean the student service coordinators are doing that?” and then “What credentials do they have to do that?” The reply on the recording is a single syllable. The superintendent then offers a substitution — “you could you could have delegate counselors and social social workers do that as well” — and the Director adds “Legitimately with training.”
What the regulation requires. The public agency representative on an IEP Team must be someone who “Is qualified to provide, or supervise the provision of, specially designed instruction”, who “Is knowledgeable about the general education curriculum”, and who “Is knowledgeable about the availability of resources of the public agency”. All three limbs must be met by the same person. That is a functional test, not a credential test and not a training test — which is why neither the answer the room did not get, nor the answer it did get, disposes of it.
Why it matters here rather than generally. The proposal on the table would remove the incumbents from the role and put counsellors or social workers into it. The regulation’s three limbs would then have to be satisfied by the replacements, and the second limb in particular — knowledge of the general education curriculum — is not obviously met by a clinical social worker without more. Nobody in the room raises it. The committee chair had already put his finger on the risk: “Mr. McCusker [McCosker] said about the fact that that other people could assume the li e a [LEA] role makes me feel better, but not great about that.”
Sources: 34 CFR 300.321(a)(4) — IEP Team; representative of the public agency; 34 CFR 300.101 — FAPE.
MEDIUM Closing the district preschool was tested against cost and against the bare special-education duty — and never against the placement rule that decides where those children are taught
What was established on the record, and correctly. The removal of pre-kindergarten from the draft is presented as already done at 0:02:55; the line is $430,104.13; and the superintendent is careful that this is “just that’s just operation of the current pre-K program”, separate from services the district must still provide. In the last seven minutes the Director of Student Services draws the distinction cleanly: “We we have to serve anybody for special education who’s identified for special education services. The non special ed students, our first come, first serve”, and “No special ed service is required” is his answer to a question about the programme, not about the services. The superintendent: “We’re just obligated to pay to the for the services that are tied to their IEP.” All of that is right.
What was never said. Where those children are taught is not a budget question. Federal law requires that “To the maximum extent appropriate, children with disabilities… are educated with children who are nondisabled”, and that removal from the regular educational environment “occurs only if the nature or severity of the disability is such that education in regular classes with the use of supplementary aids and services cannot be achieved satisfactorily”. The district preschool is where that happens for Claremont’s three- to five-year-olds, and the room itself describes the mechanism without naming the rule: a member asks whether the non-disabled places offset the special-education places “unequal proportion”, and the Director answers “Equal portion.” Closing the programme removes the peers. Nobody — not the committee, not the superintendent, not the Director of Student Services — raises least restrictive environment at any point in the meeting.
The financial half of the question was, to the committee’s credit, asked. The board chair had emailed the superintendent and the Director in advance for exactly the offsetting numbers — contracted services, a changed service model for children served outside a preschool programme, “all the variables that could actually negate the decrease” — and says why: “I didn’t want to make assumptions that were incorrect.” The answer was not ready on 18 December (“Not yet. I’m working on it, but not yet”) and is still outstanding at the close of the meeting. So the $430,104.13 saving was carried in a draft for at least a week without the offsetting cost being known.
What this card does not say. It does not say that closing the preschool would breach the placement rule. That depends on each child’s IEP team and on what the district puts in its place, and none of that is in this record. It says that a placement requirement was engaged by a budget decision and was not mentioned, and that the offsetting cost of the decision was unknown when the decision was carried forward.
Sources: 34 CFR 300.114(a)(2)(i)–(ii) — least restrictive environment; 34 CFR 300.101 — FAPE available to all children aged 3 through 21 residing in the State; RSA 186-C:2 as codified in 2024 the version in force here; the section was amended by 2025, 156:1, eff. Sept. 5, 2025, so the current text is not the December 2024 text.
OBSERVATION Who may suspend a pupil in New Hampshire turns on a written designation by the superintendent, and the word “designation” is not spoken in the meeting
What the room concluded. The board chair: “the person who may have the certification they can technically administer or say you’re suspended, but the other student service coordinators cannot do that because they are not certified, am I correct?” The superintendent: “technically they they still have to go through the certified administrator to approve, you know, a suspension… even even a dean would, you know, technically couldn’t suspend. They’d have to get permission from the principal to make those decisions”, and “No matter how you roll it, that always comes from the principal.” Earlier he had put the general proposition: “we we can’t have, non certified administrators dealing with, a lot of the stuff that they’re expected to deal with. Now.”
What the statute makes the test. RSA 193:13, I(a): “A superintendent or chartered public school director, or a representative designated in writing by the superintendent or chartered public school director, may suspend pupils from school for a period not to exceed 10 consecutive school days”. The gate is a written designation by the superintendent. It is not a principal’s permission, and the statute does not condition the power on holding an administrator’s credential. Longer suspensions run through I(b), which requires the school board or its written designee and a hearing.
Why this is an OBSERVATION and not more. Nothing in this meeting suspends anyone, and the practical arrangement described — that suspensions come from the principal — may well be exactly what the district’s written designations provide. The point is narrower: the room reasons from certification where the statute reasons from designation, and it does so while deciding whether four posts can be replaced by people with different credentials. Whether written designations exist, and whom they name, is not on this record and could not be determined from any document reviewed for this page.
Sources: RSA 193:13, I(a)–(b) — Suspension and Expulsion of Pupils source note ends 2020, 38:1, eff. July 29, 2020 and July 1, 2021, so the current text is the text in force at this meeting.
OBSERVATION The FY2024 close is asked about and closed in four lines, and the last budget session of the year passes without a single figure for it
The exchange, in full. Crawford: “Are there any reserves that we can offset the texts [taxes]?” Whitney: “Where do you put it in?” Crawford: “It’s already in.” Whitney: “Where did the end of year have?” Henry answers with a single Yes. Whitney: “We’ve already voted on that.” That is the whole of it, and it is the only time in one hour and fifty-seven minutes that the district’s own retained money is mentioned.
What “already voted” refers to. On 16 October 2024 the board resolved the FY2024 fund-balance question: the business administrator gave a surplus of $497,000 plus $114,000 of additional revenue, a total of $611,000, against a stated maximum retention of $469,000; the vice chair moved “to retain up to $350,000 with the stipulation that it be used to offset the 25/26 tax rate”, a second member seconded, and it carried on a voice vote with no count. That retention is what the members mean when they say the money is “already in” the FY2026 draft. None of those figures is spoken here.
What remains unreconciled behind it. Three different figures for the same close sit in the corpus and have never been bridged. On 18 September 2024 the business administrator gave the FY2024 surplus as $544,145.29. On 16 October the board worked from $497,000, with no stated bridge to September’s figure, and the worksheet the agenda and minutes both cite as Exhibit B is absent from that meeting’s packet. At the same 16 October meeting the statutory retention ceiling was stated as $466,664.43, and within four minutes everyone in the room was saying 469; the approved minutes publish “$469,000”, which is $2,335.57 above the maximum the business administrator had just given.
Why the omission is worth recording here. The retention decision is what the members are referring to when they say it is “already in” the draft: retained fund balance reduces what must be raised in taxation, and every tax-rate conversion done in this meeting sits on top of it. This was the committee’s last working session before the public hearing, and the amount actually retained is never stated, checked or reconciled against the ceiling. The relevant provisions are RSA 198:4-b, II, which caps retained year-end unassigned general funds at 5 per cent of the net assessment and requires a public hearing with seven days’ newspaper notice before expending retained funds — not before retaining them — and RSA 32:7, under which appropriations lapse at year end unless encumbered.
What would settle it: the FY2024 Exhibit B worksheet, or the MS-25 as filed, either of which would reconcile $544,145.29, $497,000 and the retention ceiling to one another.
Sources: the recording at 1:17:58; RSA 198:4-b as codified in 2024 ¶II’s 5 per cent cap dates from 2020, 38:25, eff. Sept. 27, 2020; it was 2.5 per cent before that; RSA 32:7 — lapse of appropriations (2017, 127:3, eff. Aug. 15, 2017); the companion page for Approved Claremont School Board minutes, 16 October 2024, item IV.3, for the retention motion and the $469,000 maximum; the companion page for 16 October 2024.
OBSERVATION About $195,000 of identified capital work is in neither budget, and whether this year’s money has been committed to it was not known in the room
The items. The chair of the Capital Improvement Committee brings a list her committee had gone through with the business administrator and the buildings-and-grounds director: “the amount to, to for seven, nine, ten. About $100,000, plus about 95,000 for the roof replacement at Stevens”, with playground equipment at two elementary schools behind it. Her question is whether they can be absorbed by the current year’s maintenance lines or must go into FY2026. The answer to the second half is immediate: “Those numbers are not in the new budget.” She presses on the roof — “My biggest concern is the 95000 for the roof replacement, right?” — and gets “Yes, that that definitely needs.”
The answer to the first half is that nobody knows. “Right now, out of the budget that we had of 106,000, he has, a total of encumbered 21. Or maybe he hasn’t encumbered it yet because he had talked to me yesterday about doing it”; and then “I don’t see where he’s done it yet because he had met with me yesterday. So Candace, I can’t tell you that just yet.” The business administrator undertakes to settle it that day: “Well, I’ll have it addressed today.”
Why the encumbrance question is the whole question. Under RSA 32:7 an appropriation lapses at the end of the fiscal year unless it is “encumbered by a legally-enforceable obligation, created by contract or otherwise” before then. If the projects are encumbered, the money follows them into the next year; if they are not, the balance lapses and the work has no appropriation in either budget. The alternative route — a transfer between appropriations by the governing body under RSA 32:10 — requires the board, not the committee, and was not discussed. The recording is the only public record of the question having been asked, and it contains no answer.
In the district’s favour: the Capital Improvement Committee did minute its own December meeting. Cap Improvements Committee Meeting minutes 12.10.24.pdf is in the board packet for that evening, and the board received a capital report the same night — which is precisely the comparison that makes the Finance Committee’s silence at flag 1 visible.
Sources: RSA 32:7 — lapse of appropriations; RSA 32:10 — transfer of appropriations by the governing body (2017, 127:4, eff. Aug. 15, 2017); Cap Improvements Committee Meeting minutes 12.10.24.
OBSERVATION Individual employees’ pay was discussed in public by a body that had no practical way to do it privately — and the business administrator stopped of her own accord
What was said. Explaining one building’s reduction: “It was 2500 in there for a buyout that was aligned without a name on it, which means that person’s left.” Explaining another: “the biggest one is the guidance salary, because we had a guidance counselor that was making top of the chart. And I moved that number down because I, because I figured we probably going to hire someone almost out of school or a couple of years.” In buildings with one or two guidance counsellors, those are identifiable people. Then, at 0:33:32, she declines to go further: “the next one I really don’t want to go into, because it impacts one person, so I don’t know. That’s about giving that out.” Nobody presses her, and the item is dropped.
The law is permissive on both sides, which is the point. RSA 91-A:3, II(a) makes “the dismissal, promotion, or compensation of any public employee” a ground on which a public body may go into nonpublic session; RSA 91-A:5, IV permits withholding records pertaining to internal personnel practices and files whose disclosure would constitute an invasion of privacy. Neither requires either. So nothing here is a breach.
The structural point. The nonpublic route was not practically available to this body. RSA 91-A:3, I(b) requires a motion stating the specific exemption on its face and a roll-call vote carried by a majority of members present. This meeting took no votes of any kind, kept no roll and produced no minutes, so it had no mechanism by which such a motion could have been made, recorded or later disclosed. A subcommittee that never convenes formally enough to vote has, in effect, only one register: everything, in public. The business administrator’s own restraint is what stood in for the statute.
Sources: RSA 91-A:3, I(b) and II(a) 2023, 189:1, eff. Oct. 3, 2023 — in force at this meeting; RSA 91-A:5, IV permits withholding; it is not authority for publishing.
OBSERVATION The reason given for keeping the total from the board and the public is a bargaining protocol, not a statute — and the numbers were said aloud anyway
The stated bar. “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”, and “we can’t really even talk to the Claremont School Board, with any other than terms or what our ideas are.” Later, more flatly: “We can’t talk about the numbers out loud.” A member stops herself mid-sentence about the paraprofessional agreement — “Haven’t read and and we haven’t ratified it yet. Can I talk about” — and the business administrator finishes the thought: “Until it’s ratified?”
What was nonetheless said, in the same session. The teachers’ agreement at 514, twice; the paraprofessionals at “about 200,000”; the combined first-year impact at “roughly $800,000”, agreed to by a second member; the structural change — “I proposed instead of one track three” — from the superintendent. Every one of those is a cost item in a tentative agreement, spoken on a live broadcast.
What the law says about it. “Ground rules” are a negotiated protocol between the parties, not a rule of law, and this page cannot see them. What can be said is what the statutes do not require. RSA 91-A:2, I(a) places “Strategy or negotiations with respect to collective bargaining” outside the definition of a meeting altogether, so the committee had a lawful way to discuss bargaining strategy privately without any of this. RSA 273-A:3, II(b) provides that “Only cost items shall be submitted to the legislative body… for approval at the next annual meeting” — cost items are destined for the voters by design. And RSA 32:5, III requires appropriations in the budget to be stipulated on a gross basis. Nothing located in RSA 91-A or RSA 273-A bars a public body from stating the cost of a tentative agreement in public.
The effect. Whatever the ground rules required, the practical result on 18 December was that a target was set in one forum and withheld in another, while the constituent numbers were broadcast in the first. That is worth recording plainly, and this card asserts nothing beyond it.
Sources: RSA 91-A:2, I(a) (2024 codification); RSA 273-A:3, II(b) (2013, 244:1, eff. Sept. 22, 2013); RSA 32:5, III (2024 codification).
POSITIVE This meeting was noticed — twice, in two documents the district published a month in advance, with the time and the room
The first notice is on the agenda of the 20 November 2024 board meeting, under Future Dates: “Finance Subcommittee Budget Meeting dates: 1-3 PM at SRVRTC John Goodrich Community Room. i) December 4, 2024 ii) December 18, 2024”. The approved minutes of that meeting repeat it. The second is on the calendar page of the November Superintendent’s Report, published in the same packet, which sets out both of that day’s meetings separately and tells the public how to watch: “12/18- Claremont School Board Finance Subcommittee Meeting 1:00 PM SRVRTC- Available LIVE on CCTV Channel 8” and “12/18- Claremont School Board Meeting 6:30 PM SRVRTC Available LIVE CCTV Channel 8”. Both documents were posted in the district’s public Drive share weeks before the meeting; both give a date, a time and a room; and the recording is consistent with both.
Why it is worth a card of its own. 18 December is one of four Finance Subcommittee dates the board published in advance — the approved minutes of 16 October 2024 list “i. November 12, 2024 ii. November 19, 2024 iii. December 4, 2024 iv. December 18, 2024” under Future Dates, with the same time and room — and it is the only one of the four that was both held and recorded. The televised session of 13 December, five days before this one and the session a member of the public came to the board to comment on, is on none of those lists: no posted notice for it has been located in any district document. The only advance reference to it anywhere is a sentence in the 4 December board discussion and its draft minutes, and those minutes did not reach the public share until the 18 December packet was assembled. By-law 1.05(c) requires 24 hours’ posting on the SAU 6 website, and by-law 1.11 makes warning meetings a duty of the subcommittee chair. For this date, both were plainly done.
The one loose end, stated neutrally. The published notice says 1:00 p.m.; Cablecast dates the show’s event to 12:50 p.m. and created the show record a minute after that. There is no call to order on the recording, so nothing in the record fixes when the meeting itself began, and the ten-minute difference is at least as likely to be the camera starting early as the body convening early. It is recorded here rather than flagged.
Sources: CSB Agenda 11.20.24; November Superintendent’s Report; Approved CSB minutes 11.20.24; Approved CSB minutes 10.16.24, Future Dates, for the four published Finance Subcommittee dates; By-Laws 1.05(c) and 1.11; RSA 91-A:2, II — 24 hours’ notice in 2 appropriate places (2024 codification).
POSITIVE The committee televised its hardest session on purpose, said why, and the broadcast demonstrably reached the public
The commitment, made on the record. “there may be some or there will be some very difficult decisions to be made. And in the interest of complete transparency, we will be talking about those on TV so that people have the sense that there was a process in these decisions and not things that we came by lately.” This is a subcommittee choosing to conduct in public a working session that many bodies would hold as a retreat, and it is the reason this page can exist.
It worked, and there is evidence that it worked. A citizen who is also a district employee came to the board meeting that evening and said so in citizens’ comments: she had been “encouraged by another citizen to watch the CCTV recording of the Budget Finance Committee meeting”, said it was “a great way for myself and other citizens to get a full picture of where the budget money goes when it comes to each school”, and objected to a decision she had learned about only from the broadcast quoted from the recording of the 6:30 p.m. board meeting, show 16222, not from this session. Another board member told the board she had watched the recordings herself. That is a public that is watching, and acting on what it sees.
Three smaller things that belong in the same column. The committee chair puts a disclaimer on the record before criticising past practice, so that the current administrators are not implicated: “I’m going to say. My disclaimer. I say again, this predates the sitting over here. I just want to make sure the public is aware of that”. The board chair sends her questions in writing in advance and says why: “I didn’t want to make assumptions that were incorrect.” And the athletics review is referred out with the governing constraint named on the spot rather than discovered later: “It has to be compliant with title nine. Any decision we make.”
The limit of the credit. A recording is not a record. It is not indexed, not searchable, not summarised, and not what RSA 91-A:2, II asks for; the board itself substituted it for a report to the full board that evening, and the district’s written account of the afternoon is three sentences that carry no figure. The right conclusion is that the committee did something genuinely better than the statute requires in one respect while doing nothing at all in another — and that the two are not interchangeable.
Sources: the recording at 0:01:15, 0:45:01 and 1:16:42; Cablecast show 16222 — School Board 12/18/24; Approved CSB minutes 12.18.24, citizens’ comments.
POSITIVE The budget calendar settled at this meeting fits the SB 2 statute at both ends — and the 25-day rule that looks breached is not the governing rule
The calendar as fixed here. An emergency board meeting on Tuesday 7 January 2025 to ratify two collective bargaining agreements and receive the committee’s budget; the FY2026 budget public hearing on Wednesday 15 January 2025; the deliberative session on Saturday 1 February 2025, snow date Saturday 8 February. The hearing date is stated on this recording by a member correcting herself — “January 17th, 15th” — and it is a change: the 20 November agenda and the 4 December minutes had both carried 2 January, and the 4 December minutes explain the flexibility, that the hearing “has not been warranted yet, so it could be changed and they have until the middle of January”. The 18 December board agenda prints 15 January.
Against the statute, day by day. Claremont votes on the official ballot under RSA 40:13, so ¶II-a governs its January calendar. In 2025 the second Tuesday in January was 14 January, the third Tuesday 21 January, and the last Monday 27 January. II-a(c) requires budget hearings under RSA 32:5 “on or before the third Tuesday in January”: 15 January is six days inside it. ¶III sets the first session “between the first and second Saturdays following the last Monday in January, inclusive of those Saturdays”: following 27 January those are 1 and 8 February — so the deliberative session and its snow date are the two ends of the statutory window exactly. II-a(a) requires notice of the budget hearing to be posted by the second Tuesday, 14 January, and II-a(d) requires warrants and budgets posted “on or before the last Monday in January”, 27 January; whether those two were met is not determinable from this meeting’s record.
The rule that is not breached, stated so it is not flagged elsewhere. RSA 32:5, ¶I requires at least one public hearing “not later than 25 days before each annual or special meeting”. From 15 January to 1 February is seventeen days, and a reader doing that arithmetic will think a floor has been missed. It has not. RSA 40:13, ¶II-a opens “Notwithstanding any other provision of law” and expressly governs “Budget hearings under RSA 32:5 and RSA 195:12”. Its third-Tuesday deadline and ¶III’s first-Saturday-of-February window cannot both be satisfied together with a 25-day gap; the “notwithstanding” clause is what resolves the conflict, in favour of ¶II-a. No official-ballot district in New Hampshire can meet the 25-day floor on this calendar, and none is required to.
One further rule the committee got right on the record. Asked whether the voters could cut below the default budget, the business administrator said they could, twice, against the board chair’s contrary understanding. She is right: RSA 40:13, XI(b) protects the default budget amount from amendment by the legislative body, and RSA 40:13, IV(c) expressly provides that “An amendment that changes the dollar amount of an appropriation in a warrant article shall not be deemed to violate this subparagraph”. Nothing puts a floor under the proposed operating budget at a deliberative session.
Sources: RSA 40:13, ¶¶II-a(a)–(d), III, IV(c), VII and XI(b) last amended 2019, 192:2, eff. July 10, 2019, so today’s text governs this meeting; RSA 32:5, ¶I (2024 codification); CSB Agenda 12.18.24, Future Dates; Draft CSB minutes 12.4.24.
Appendix — source files
Official and public sources
- Recording: Claremont Community Television, Cablecast show 16226 — “School Board Finance Meeting 12/18/24” (title reproduced exactly as the Cablecast API returns it). The API also gives the show’s event date and time as 18 December 2024 at 12:50 p.m. Eastern, a creation timestamp one minute later, and a total run time of 7,045 seconds — the evidence for the start-time row in the facts above.
- No packet, no agenda and no minutes exist for this meeting in any district share. The two-stage search is recorded at Input/SupportingDocuments/MAP.md §65 and was verified 2026-08-28: the main packets share, which has never carried a Finance Committee folder; the 2024 Meeting Documents archive; both candidate year folders of the Meeting Minutes share; the next board meeting’s packet folder; and keyword searches. Every negative here is written as not found rather than as does not exist, because the Drive interface under-reports on these shares.
- Claremont Finance Sub Committee — a district-owned Drive folder that exists and holds no files. It is where this material would go if it were ever posted. The Finance folder linked from the SAU 6 board page was read on 2026-08-29 and contains only a purpose statement created June 2025 and a
2025-2026 folder created July 2026.
- CSB Agenda 11.20.24 — the first of the two notices of this meeting, with the time and the room, under Future Dates.
- November Superintendent’s Report — the second notice, on its calendar page, listing both of the day’s meetings and how to watch each live.
- Approved Claremont School Board minutes, 20 November 2024 — repeats the committee’s standing time and room.
- Draft Claremont School Board minutes, 4 December 2024 — the December meeting sequence as planned, including the untelevised 12 December pre-meeting, the business administrator’s undertaking to get the budget to the committee, and the exchange about whether the budget would be acted on on the 18th.
- CSB Agenda 12.18.24 and Approved Claremont School Board minutes, 18 December 2024 — the evening board meeting, 6:30 p.m., same building. The nearest thing to a record of this afternoon: its Finance Sub-Committee item is three sentences and carries no figure. Its budget item carries the default budget, $39,791,261, and the adequacy explanation quoted at flag 5.
- Packet 10. CSB 12.18.24 — ten documents, including CSB Visioning Sub 12.9.24 and Cap Improvements Committee Meeting minutes 12.10.24, the minutes of two other subcommittees’ December meetings. See flag 1.
- December 2024 Superintendent’s Report — source of the building enrolments used at flag 6: Stevens 479, Claremont Middle School 335, Maple Avenue 264, Disnard 262, Bluff 168.
- Claremont School Board By-Laws, adopted 5 June 2024 — rules 1.05(a)–(d) and 1.05(1) on subcommittees and the Finance Committee, 1.11 on the duties of subcommittee chairs, 2.09 on publication of administration presentations, and 4.03(d) on posting agenda materials. Two distinct rules in this document are numbered 2.09; the text is quoted rather than the number relied on.
- Cablecast show 16222 — School Board 12/18/24, the evening board meeting, and its dialogue file. Quotations taken from it are marked as such wherever they appear on this page.
- Cablecast show 16215 — School Board Finance Meeting 12/13/24, the session five days earlier that the chair is recapping and that a citizen came to the board to comment on. No notice for it has been located.
Project files
Relative links work when this page is opened from Output/HTML/.
- Output/Dialogue/16226 SchoolBoardFinance121824.mp4.CSV — speaker-attributed dialogue, 999 rows, 17,989 words.
- Input/Transcripts/16226 SchoolBoardFinance121824.mp4.json — diarized transcript with per-word confidences.
- Input/Videos/16226 SchoolBoardFinance121824.mp4 — local copy of the recording.
- Output/Dialogue/16222 SchoolBoard121824.mp4.CSV — the evening board meeting of the same day, used here only to establish what the board was and was not told.
- Input/SupportingDocuments/MAP.md — meeting-to-documents map, §65 for this meeting and §66 for the board meeting the same evening.
- Companion pages in this archive: Finance Committee, 19 November 2024; School Board, 4 December 2024; SAU 6 budget public hearing, 12 December 2024; School Board, 16 October 2024; Finance Committee, 6 January 2025; and, for the FY2025 precedent one year earlier, Finance Committee, 13 December 2023 and Finance Committee, 18 December 2023.
Laws and rules cited on this page
- RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d) — “public body” includes any committee, subcommittee or subordinate body of a school district
- RSA 91-A:2 as codified in 2024 — the version in force at this meeting source note ends 2023, 188:1, eff. Oct. 3, 2023; the start-time, end-time and minutes-producer clauses added by 2025, 112:1 are NOT applied here
- RSA 91-A:2-a — communications outside a meeting (2008, 303:4, eff. July 1, 2008)
- RSA 91-A:3, I(b) and II(a) — nonpublic session: the motion must state the exemption and be carried on a roll call (2023, 189:1, eff. Oct. 3, 2023)
- RSA 91-A:4 — availability of governmental records (amended 2024, 49:1, 2, eff. Aug. 13, 2024)
- RSA 91-A:5, IV — exemptions; permissive, not prohibitory
- RSA 671:30 — non-partisan ballot system for school district officers (1979, 321:1, never amended)
- RSA 40:13, ¶¶II-a, III, IV(c), VII and XI(b) — the SB 2 budget calendar (2019, 192:2, eff. July 10, 2019)
- RSA 32:5 as codified in 2024 — ¶I public hearing and finalisation, ¶III gross basis, ¶IV comparative columns amended 2025, 144:1, eff. Aug. 30, 2025 — after this meeting
- RSA 32:7 — lapse of appropriations (2017, 127:3, eff. Aug. 15, 2017)
- RSA 32:10 — transfer of appropriations by the governing body (2017, 127:4, eff. Aug. 15, 2017)
- RSA 198:40-f as codified in 2024 — extraordinary need grants, $8,500 per eligible pupil to 1 July 2025 and $11,500 thereafter (2023, 79:153 and 79:154)
- RSA 198:4-b as codified in 2024 — ¶II retained year-end unassigned funds, 5 per cent cap, hearing before expending
- RSA 193:13, I — suspension by the superintendent or a representative designated in writing (2020, 38:1)
- RSA 186-C:2 as codified in 2024 — children with disabilities, ages 3 to 21 amended 2025, 156:1, eff. Sept. 5, 2025 — after this meeting
- RSA 273-A:3, II(b) — only cost items go to the legislative body (2013, 244:1)
- N.H. Code Admin. R. Ed 306.12(d) — provision of staff; assistant principal or two licensed administrators at an enrollment of 500 or more (Doc. #14150, eff. 12-13-24) Part Ed 306 was renumbered by that readoption five days before this meeting; the former numbering applies to earlier meetings
Federal:
Cited by the record but deliberately not applied against this meeting:
- RSA 189:74 (school board public comment, minimum 30 minutes) applies by its terms to “a meeting of the school board held under RSA 91-A:2”. This was a subcommittee working session, and the board’s own by-law 1.05(b) provides that subcommittee meetings “require no Public Comment period”. The absence of a citizens’ comment period here is not flagged.
- RSA 32:5, ¶I’s 25-day floor — see flag 16. It is displaced for an official-ballot district by RSA 40:13, ¶II-a, which opens “Notwithstanding any other provision of law”. A mid-January budget hearing before a first-Saturday-of-February deliberative session is not a breach of it.
- RSA 32:5, ¶II bars insertions after the final hearing, not reductions, and ¶I directs the body to finalise the budget after public testimony closes. A post-hearing cut is lawful twice over and is not flagged anywhere on this page.