| 0:03:01 | The hearing is framed — and named three ways | Whitney: "We're going to have a public hearing to consider a grant of a revenue anticipation note. We're going to open the public hearing with a motion. Then we're going to give a PowerPoint presentation… an explanation of the revenue anticipation note and what the obligations are to the community and to the board and or the bank." The printed agenda calls it a Grant Anticipation Note; the slides and Angell call it a Reimbursement Anticipation Note; the resolution calls it "revolving debt in anticipation of adequacy education grant reimbursement". | OBSERVATION |
| 0:03:34 | Opening the hearing by motion | "Do I have a motion to open a public hearing?" — Crawford moved, Hawkins seconded, and the chair announced the voice vote: "Miss Crawford moves. Miss Hawkins seconds. All in favor, say aye. A public hearing is open." The minutes fix the time at 6:36 pm. The board then sat in hearing for the next two hours and forty-nine minutes without leaving it. | POSITIVE |
| 0:07:41 | Who is running the district | O'Hearn: on August 22 the SAU 6 board placed Business Administrator Mary Henry on paid administrative leave and hired Angell as full-time Business Administrator; on August 26 it placed Superintendent Chris Pratt on paid administrative leave and began hiring an interim; on August 29 the Director of Student Services "abruptly" resigned. O'Shaughnessy: the law requires superintendent services, not a certified superintendent, and the SAU board — not this board — hires and supervises. | |
| 0:18:34 | $5 million of overdue invoices | Angell: "I have discovered approximately $5 million in outstanding overdue invoices and liabilities. Payments have not been entered or reconciled correctly in the accounting system. For this reason, it will take several more weeks for me. It's a disaster. Wow. The vendors we owe include, but are not limited to employee health insurance, food service for students, and the New Hampshire Retirement for staff." | MEDIUM |
| 0:23:47 | "a 40% confidence level"; cash unreconciled since July 2022 | Angell: "I remain hopeful that the general ledger be completed within a month… until that time. The district will not will cannot report reliability on its financial standing." And: "when I talk to people about the, the budget versus actual, I tell them I have a 40% level on it. That means it's not reliable… a 40% confidence level if cash is not reconciled. Basically, nothing is reliable. And right now, cash hasn't been reconciled for Claremont school districts since, I believe, a July of 2022." O'Shaughnessy, more bluntly: "there isn't a general ledger because, what was spent hasn't been entered… So there is no general ledger." | HIGH |
| 0:30:48 | Audit status: FY22 due "anytime this week", FY23–25 concurrent | Crawford: "The 22 audits have been done and they are we expecting the final report anytime this week… Because they're finally caught up to 22. They are trying to do 23, 24, 25 concurrently because of the situation to to get to figure out how far what our actual numbers are." FY22 ended June 30, 2022 — the report was still unissued more than three years later, and the presentation's own slide quoted the auditor at the August 20 meeting saying the audit was delayed because the business office "repeatedly failed to provide required information." | HIGH |
| 0:41:48 | The bank had said yes — and that was not the loan | O'Shaughnessy on an email that had gone out saying the district received a loan: "It was also premature because all they did was say, you're approved.… And under the law, there's a lot that has to go on prior to the bank actually loaning the money, including this funding hearing tonight. The purpose of which is to explain what the loan is, the terms of the loan, and then the board needs to vote and, and do some formal legal things so that the bank can get an attorney to sign off on the loan, which needs to happen, or they're not going to let money." | POSITIVE |
| 0:44:12 | The statute the district relied on, read into the record | Angell, from the slides: "Last week, Claremont Savings Bank authorized the district to borrow $4 million to fund operating expenses as an advance on state adequacy education grant for RSA. 198 20 D reimbursement anticipation notes." He then read the provision as the district quoted it — borrowing in anticipation of reimbursement, "after notice in public hearing", proceeds recognisable as revenue for rate-setting on written notice to the DRA commissioner, and exempt from statutory debt limits — and identified the distribution schedule provision by number. Those statutes are outside this project's verified citation list and are reproduced here as the district stated them. | OBSERVATION |
| 0:45:27 | What the note does and does not do | Angell: "tonight the board is going to vote on whether to approve the loan at the at the meeting immediately following the public hearing. Repayment of the loan. This loan will be paid in full in April of 2026. The loan will be our immediate short term cash flow problems and it does not reduce the deficit." O'Shaughnessy in plainer terms: "It's a line of credit… like a payday loan"; the interest, 2%, comes out of appropriations already taxed for, so "there's no new taxation on on the interest". Crawford put it at "between 65 and $75,000" for the eight months. | |
| 0:47:43 | The chair apologises for the communication failure | Whitney: "The board and the ministry [administrative] team has felt inadequate in our ability to communicate to the community, and we want to apologize for that." Her image for it was standing on a beach being told a wave was coming and trying to get people to higher ground. The board, she said, could only speak together at a noticed meeting — "because we have to be, have a scheduled meeting to have a quorum of folks together to communicate" — and information changed radically between Friday and Tuesday. | POSITIVE |
| 1:03:31 | The floor opens — comments limited to the note | "please form a single line behind the podium, state your name Ward, and then direct your comments to the board… Each speaker will be given three minutes and each should be a citizen of Claremont." The clerk timed with a yellow then a red card; a second turn ran two minutes. The chair hoped for 45 minutes and got 109, and no speaker appears to have been cut off for subject matter despite the hearing's stated restriction to the note. | POSITIVE |
| 1:36:52 | The tax rate was set on money that wasn't there | Angell, answering Sonya Woodhams: "I believe it's fiscal year 22. The audited financial statements say that the district had a surplus of $94,000. The district put over $1 million as a reduction of the tax rate. That's $1 million that the district did not have to reduce the tax rate." Asked why, he could not say — "That may be another person being brought in to do that independently." O'Shaughnessy: the state identified the root cause as records "in such disorder", which "has a lot to do with their overestimating revenues". | HIGH |
| 1:34:46 | Federal grants: reimbursed through 2023, corrective action plan to January | SAU administration (the dialogue file does not attribute these segments; the minutes give them to Mr. Koski): grants "fully reimbursed" through 2023, with the 2023 grant still in an active cycle until September 30; the state "did an audit on our grants out of compliance with federal rules, and we needed to generate procedures and get those in place. We had to update policies at the board level and get those in place."; a second-year audit followed — "They call it a corrective action plan that's in place. All of the corrections are due in January." Later, on the December 2024 hold: reimbursement was "temporarily held due to filing noncompliance by the Administration. The Board was not notified." | MEDIUM |
| 1:39:28 | "Paid leave was not one of the penalties" | Kevin Tyson, from a career in financial services: at every firm "if you fail to fill, if I do theory [fiduciary] responsibilities, you pays civil penalties, criminal penalties or be barred from the industry for life. … Paid leave was not one of the penalties." Crawford's answer: "In New Hampshire, the, the responsibility for having on it's [audits] in school districts. There is no, there is no teeth. There is no teeth or in audits or auditing firms or to do anything." Hawkins pointed to the updated fiscal-management policies; Howard said an administrator-accountability policy with "an exact mechanism" would come to the board within two weeks. | POSITIVE |
| 1:52:21 | The treasurer nobody asked about | Stephen Horsky put two statutory questions. On the bond, Angell answered it is part of the district's insurance policy and "It's been paid in full." On the second — "19723 A [RSA 197:23-a], which is the Treasurer's responsibility" — Horsky observed that "the school board is all sitting here, but our treasurer, who we elect as citizens, is not sitting here, and their responsibilities and duties are to go through the books every month, balance the checkbook, verify that the revenues are coming in… So the shortfall of money would have been known a hell of a lot quicker if somebody else was doing their job." No one from the district answered that half of the question. | MEDIUM |
| 2:22:46 | Where the $4,000,000 goes | Angell, on Nick Koloski's question whether the money was already spent: "we have a large stack of obligations we have to meet. There are some bills that were unpaid from last year, and that $4 million is going towards pretty much restarting our relationships with our vendors… We owed them $265,000 to make sure they were servicing food on the first day." A week earlier he had "just enough money to make payroll"; the state's first adequacy payment of about $3.3 million arrived Tuesday, and roughly $1.7 million and then another million went straight back out to vendors. | HIGH |
| 2:37:01 | Why a federal audit was owed, in the district's own words | Angell, explaining the audit process to a student: "because of Claremont, you guys have you spend about $3 million in federal grants. You're required to do what you're required to do an audit. For the government. Okay. And you're required under the federal government rules to submit that audit to the federal government within nine months after the end of the fiscal year." He described the FY21 opinion — "they gave an adverse opinion saying that your financial statements can't be relied upon" — and the management letter and federal findings report that accompany it. | HIGH |
| 2:43:17 | State Rep. Hope Damon on adequacy | Damon: the court set the minimum constitutionally adequate figure and "in the ranch [Rand] pace, which came out three weeks ago, sometime in August, they ruled against the state again, saying that the differentiated eight [aid] amounts are also not adequate. … Claremont and many other communities throughout the state pay heavily in property taxes to fund our public schools because we don't have a fair and equitable state education funding system." Reported here as the representative's characterisation of the litigation. | |
| 2:52:59 | Closing the public portion | "I'm seeing no one in the audience. I'd like to ask for a motion to close the public hearing portion of the meeting". Madden moved, a second came from the table, and when the chair announced "Public hearing is closed" Madden interjected — the chair corrected on the floor — "We just have to amend it to say the public part of the hearing." — reput the motion, and took it again: "All in favor, say aye. Aye." The minutes record the amended form: a motion "to close the public part of the hearing," Petrin seconding, all present in favour. | POSITIVE |
| 2:53:56 | A motion, then the motion that mattered | Whitney: "There's a motion on the table to approve the loan as described by Mr. Angel[l]. Is there a second that. Seconded by Arlene Hawkins?" — the minutes attribute that motion to Howard. No board member took up the invitation to discuss. O'Shaughnessy then intervened: "In order to move forward with the loan, the board needs to pass a resolution." Neither the recording nor the minutes shows the first motion being voted on, withdrawn or tabled. | OBSERVATION |
| 2:55:17 | The resolution, read in full | Hawkins read all seven paragraphs into the record over four minutes: authority to enter a revolving line of credit with Claremont Savings Bank in anticipation of the FY2026 adequacy grant; that "The district held a public hearing on September 3rd, 2025, to consider issuance of a note and provided notice of said public hearing by publication no later than August 27th, 2025"; that superintendent and business administrator acting singly may accept the bank proposal; that a majority of the board and the treasurer execute the note; and that "pursuant to an August 21st, 2025, letter from the New Hampshire Department of Education, the district district's fiscal year 2026 adequacy education grant totals $16,931,006.67". The attested copy was to be signed by the clerk and filed with the minutes. | POSITIVE |
| 2:59:39 | Roll call: 6–0 | O'Shaughnessy: "So that has a motion on the floor, and second and a roll call vote." Whitney: "seconded by Mike patron [Petrin]." Kronberg then called each member and each answered in turn — Crawford yes, Hawkins yes, Howard yes, Madden yes, Petrin yes, Whitney yes. Six members, six votes, no absences, no abstentions. The chair closed the item by telling the clerk to sign the attested resolution before it went to the minutes. | POSITIVE |
| 3:02:11 | Sprague's resignation, and the seat | "Moving on to our third item on the agenda, Mr. Frank Sprague, regretfully, submitted his letter of resignation." The chair described the appointment process — letters of intent by 3:30 p.m. on September 15, names read aloud at the following meeting, written questions to candidates, a special meeting the week after — and said two people had already come forward. The draft minutes record the vacancy and the process but never record the resignation itself, its date, or Sprague's name in that item. | OBSERVATION |
| 3:21:42 | Payroll controls: nobody was signing off | Madden, on a morning spent with O'Hearn: "I got more and more answers in one morning than the prior four and a half months". On payroll: "it was no signing in, there's no signing out, there's no time clock in the system. They have the ability to have the individual's supervisor checked off and prove their time.… But for the most part, maybe, I don't know. We looked at it quickly. Nobody was doing that. And the payroll clerk had the the ability to just go straight across the board." He said that when he first raised it while Pratt was superintendent, "I got shut down pretty quickly, couldn't ask the questions." | MEDIUM |
| 3:19:25 | The chair asks to be investigated | Whitney asked the board to empower her, the request coming out in fragments — "To seek assistance from the." … "Sullivan County attorney and." … "Investigating our current." … "Financial situation as an independent citizen." — and explained she had already written to the Attorney General over the weekend: "But I can only do that as a private citizen and not as, An arm of the board or a representative of the board." She circulated what she had written. The board consented, and she asked that the consent be documented in the minutes. | POSITIVE |