Claremont School Board, School Board Vacancy Discussion — November 5, 2025

MEDIUM Three votes of a six-member board seated a seventh member, and the statute and the by-law do not obviously say the same thing about that

The governing provision is RSA 671:33, II: "The school board shall fill vacancies occurring on the school board, except as provided in subparagraph (b), and in all other district offices for which no other method of filling a vacancy is provided." Subparagraph (b) governs cooperative districts only and has no application to Claremont. Subparagraph (a) supplies both the term and the fallback: "Appointees of the school board shall serve until the next district election when the voters of the district shall elect a replacement for the unexpired term," and — the sentence the chair read aloud — "In the case of a vacancy of the entire membership of the school board, or if the remaining members are unable, by majority vote, to agree upon an appointment, the selectmen of the town or towns involved shall appoint members by majority vote in convention." Claremont is a city, not a town; RSA 21:28, I supplies the bridge, providing that "The word 'selectmen' may mean the selectmen of the town or ward, or the mayor and aldermen of the city, to which the subject matter to be acted upon belongs or in which it is situate." That is the route by which counsel's warning about the city council reaches this board, and nobody on the recording states it.

The difficulty is the phrase by majority vote. Six members remained — a state of affairs RSA 671:4 is written to avoid: it fixes school boards at 3, 5, 7 or 9 members and provides that "The board will increase or decrease in membership so that there will always be an uneven number of members until the desired number is reached." The reason this board could deadlock at all is that a vacancy had left it even, which is also why RSA 671:33 states the duty to fill one in the imperative. The motion that seated the seventh carried on three affirmative votes, two against and one abstention. Three is a majority of the five members who voted; it is not a majority of the six remaining members, and it is not the four that the board's own rule 2.11 fixes as "A majority of the whole CSB". On one reading the remaining members were "unable, by majority vote, to agree upon an appointment" — which is the condition RSA 671:33, II(a) makes the trigger for the city council, and which would mean the board resolved by three votes a question the statute had already passed elsewhere. On the other reading the statute's phrase describes only the failure condition and leaves the board's own voting threshold to ordinary parliamentary practice and to its rules, under which three of five carries.

The board took the second reading, and it did so from a written rule rather than from instinct. By-law 2.07, in the copy adopted on June 5, 2024, provides: "A motion, unless governed by the ⅔ vote rule in CSBL or Robert's Rules exceptions, shall be adopted by a majority vote of members present and voting. No proxy or absentee votes shall be allowed. For example: 7 members present, 2 abstain , 2 vote no, 3 vote yes the motion passes." That worked example is this vote with one more member in the room. Rule 2.12 repeats the standard — "A vote shall be determined by the members present and voting" — and rule 4.01 requires the chair to vote on everything, which is what makes a six-member board tie in the first place. On the by-law's own terms the arithmetic the chair and Crawford did aloud is correct.

What keeps this a flag is by-law 2.15: "All laws of the State of New Hampshire and all rules of the State Board of Education shall take precedence over these rules and regulations." A by-law cannot settle what a statute means. Two further points belong on the record. First, the board never read RSA 671:33 to itself — the chair paraphrased counsel's paraphrase, the section was reduced on the tape to whether it was "guidance", and no one asked what "by majority vote" was doing in it. Second, the forty-five days the chair invoked at 0:09:28 appears in neither RSA 671:33 nor RSA 197:26; Hawkins said on the record she believed it was a municipal rule, and the question was dropped. Nothing in either section fixes any period at all.

One thing the statute does settle, and which nobody stated: the appointment is not a restoration of the elected term. Under RSA 671:33, II(a) an appointee serves only "until the next district election", at which the voters "elect a replacement for the unexpired term". The chair's framing — an opportunity to "bring back a person to finish the term that he was elected to serve" — overstates it; Petrin's, that the appointee sits "for the remainder of the term" and "in March, the voters get to speak again", is the accurate one only because the term in question expired in March 2026 in any event. RSA 197:26 grants the same power in older and slightly different words, running an appointment "until the next annual meeting of the district" — which in an SB 2 district is a two-session event beginning with the February deliberative session. The later and more specific section governs; the difference was never raised.

Sources: RSA 671:33, "Vacancies" — ¶II the school board fills vacancies on the board; ¶II(a) appointees serve until the next district election, and the selectmen appoint where the remaining members cannot agree by majority vote; ¶V a vacancy arising between the start of the filing period and the election is not filled by official ballot until the following year (source note ends 2021, 42:1, eff. July 16, 2021; 91:318, eff. July 1, 2021 — so the text served today is the text in force on this meeting's date). RSA 197:26, "Vacancies" — the board fills vacancies in district offices except moderator, "until the next annual meeting of the district" (unamended since the 1942 revision). RSA 21:28, I — "selectmen" may mean the mayor and aldermen of a city (2008, 183:1, eff. Aug. 10, 2008). RSA 671:4 — a board of 3, 5, 7 or 9 members as the district votes, three-year terms, and an uneven membership at all times (1979, 321:1, eff. Aug. 21, 1979; never amended). Board rules: Claremont School Board By-Laws, rules 2.01, 2.07, 2.11, 2.12, 2.15 and 4.01, the text adopted June 5, 2024 and filed as Exhibit E in that meeting's packet. No verified rule was identified fixing a school board's own voting threshold for filling a vacancy; the question stated here would be settled by a court, or by counsel's written advice, which has not been published.

MEDIUM A motion was moved and seconded and never disposed of; two later motions were taken over it; and the first vote's result was declared before the negative votes were taken

At 0:04:20 Petrin moved to reinstate Frank Sprague and the chair seconded it. It was then set aside without a vote of any kind. The draft minutes dispose of the whole event in two words, "Motion deferred", and record no motion to defer, no seconder for one and no vote on one. The board's own rule is explicit that this is not how a motion leaves the floor. By-law 2.07 provides that "Another motion cannot be raised until all other motions are settled or adjourned -only one motion must be discussed at a time" and that "When a motion is made and seconded, it shall be considered by the Board and not otherwise"; it then lists the seven motions that may be received while a motion is under debate, of which "To lay on the table" and "To postpone to a certain time" are two. Each is a motion, requiring a second and a vote. The board used exactly that mechanism five weeks earlier, on October 1, when the chair moved to lay the appointment on the table until November and the motion was seconded and carried.

The consequence was not academic. Two further motions were moved, debated and voted while the first was, on the by-law's face, still before the board — Howard's to appoint Don Lavalette and Crawford's to reopen applications — and Crawford objected on the record three times: "Well, you have a motion on the floor." at 0:16:14, "Let's close out the motion that we have on." at 0:41:12 and "But you have to. You have to close out the vote for." at 0:41:30. Hawkins agreed with her twice. The motion that eventually carried was Petrin's own, re-made in the same terms at 0:43:21 and seconded again by the chair — so the seat was filled on a motion duplicating one that had been pending, unresolved, for thirty-nine minutes.

The first vote has a second defect of the same family. At 0:40:05 the chair called for the affirmative hands and announced "A we have a tie" on that showing alone; at 0:41:19 she declared the motion failed. The negative hands were not raised until 0:41:54, after Crawford and Howard had both told her the vote was not finished. On a six-member board with three ayes the inference is arithmetically safe, but a declared result that precedes the count is a result the record cannot check, and by-law 2.13 offers the remedy that was never used: "A roll call vote may be requested by any member."

Graded MEDIUM rather than HIGH on the mitigated limb, and the mitigation is substantial and comes from inside the room: the board policed itself, the objections are on tape, the vote was reconstructed before it was left, and the minutes ultimately record each member's position on all three motions by name — which is more than RSA 91-A:2, II requires and more than most of this corpus contains. What is unmitigated is that the by-law was not followed and no member cited it.

Sources: Claremont School Board By-Laws, rules 2.07 (motions; the seven motions receivable during debate) and 2.13 (roll call on any member's request), adopted June 5, 2024 — the same rules appear under the same numbers in the live Google Docs copy on the district's Drive. RSA 91-A:2, II — "The names of the members who made or seconded each motion shall be recorded in the minutes" (2018, 244:1, eff. Jan. 1, 2019). 11.5.25 DRAFT CSB Meeting Minutes, which name the mover and seconder of every motion and record the votes by name. The October 1 comparator is on the October 1, 2025 page.

MEDIUM The minutes carry neither the start time nor the end time of the meeting — a requirement that had been in force for seventy-five days — and they drop the exchange a resident asked for

RSA 91-A:2, II was amended by 2025, 112:1, effective August 22, 2025, so that minutes must include, alongside the names of members and of persons appearing, a brief description of the subject matter and the final decisions, "the start time and end time of the meeting, and name of the person who produced the minutes." November 5, 2025 is the seventy-fifth day of that duty. The draft minutes satisfy the third of the three new contents and neither of the first two. They close "Respectfully submitted by Noelle Kronberg, school board clerk"; they print the agenda's scheduled headings — 6:30 PM Call to Order, 8:30 PM Adjournment — which are the notice's times, not the meeting's; and they record no call-to-order time and no adjournment time at all. The only clock times in the document belong to the nonpublic session: entered 7:35 p.m., out at 8:07 p.m., "returned to public session at 8:08pm".

The gap is not trivial in this instance, because the meeting overran its notice by nearly two hours. Those two nonpublic times, set against the parent recording — the motion to go nonpublic 3,849 seconds in, the return 3,915 seconds in — fix the start of the recording at about 6:30 p.m. and the recording's gap at 33 minutes, and from there the rest follows: this agenda item was reached at about 9:12 p.m., forty-two minutes after the meeting was noticed to end; the last word on it falls at about 10:02 p.m.; and the meeting adjourned at about 10:21 p.m. A resident reading the minutes to find out when the board took up the seat, or how long the meeting ran, cannot learn either. The derivation above is this page's, not the district's, and it exists only because the board happened to minute the nonpublic session precisely.

A second omission is smaller and sharper. The last ninety seconds of this item are a resident asking the board to read the next sentence of its own by-law, and the chair of the policy subcommittee doing so — the New Hampshire School Board Association's recommendation that abstentions be reserved for conflicts of interest and that "Abstaining in an effort to avoid public accountability for such decisions or to force a tie vote, is counter to members public duty," read aloud immediately after an abstention had decided the vote. None of it is in the minutes. The minutes reduce the entire abstention question to one clause: "Discussion regarding whether or not someone can abstain from voting, Heather Whitney confirmed with the by-laws that a member can abstain and a motion passing is based on members who are present and voting." On the recording it is Hawkins who reads the by-law, twice, and the second reading happens only because a member of the public asks for it. RSA 91-A:2, II requires "a brief description of the subject matter discussed"; a reader of these minutes would not know the exchange occurred.

Graded on the mitigated limb, and the mitigation is real: minutes exist, they name their author, they name every mover and seconder, they record every member's vote by name on all three motions, and they reached the public share inside the five-business-day deadline. The board's own record of who did what is good. What it does not carry is when.

Sources: RSA 91-A:2, II — minutes contents including the start time, the end time and the name of the person who produced the minutes (the source note ends 2025, 112:1, eff. Aug. 22, 2025, so the text served today is the text in force on this meeting's date; the mover/seconder sentence is older, 2018, 244:1, eff. Jan. 1, 2019). 11.5.25 DRAFT CSB Meeting Minutes; CSB Agenda 11.5.25. Claremont School Board By-Laws, rule 2.07, adopted June 5, 2024. Clock derivation from the draft minutes' two nonpublic times and the parent recording, Cablecast show 16951.

MEDIUM The two documents this decision turned on are in no packet, and the public has only the chair's reading of them

Two papers decided the item: the district counsel's written advice on the vacancy, and Frank Sprague's letter requesting reinstatement. Neither has been published. The packet folder 11. CSB 11.5.25 contains exactly one document, the agenda. The draft minutes reproduce counsel's advice in a single sentence — "RSA 671:33 instructs to board it 'shall fill the vacancy.' If the board does not fill the vacancy the city council can vote to fill the vacancy and we would have no legal way of preventing that. He recommends the board should fill the vacancy at the meeting." — and dispose of the letter in a clause: "Heather Whitney shared a letter from Frank Sprague requesting the Board reinstates him in the position that he vacated." Everything else the public knows about either document is what the chair read aloud, into a microphone, once.

That matters concretely in at least one place. Counsel's advice as read contains an arithmetical claim — "There are more than five months until the election in March, and that is too long to leave the post vacant" — which is wrong by about a month: November 5, 2025 to the district election of March 10, 2026 is 125 days. Without the letter it cannot be established whether the error is counsel's, the chair's in reading, or the automatic transcriber's. The same is true of everything else in it: the board received an argument about legal risk that the public can only take on report.

The board's own rules point one way on this. By-law 1.09 requires that "The supporting documentation and background information for all items of business … which are to be considered by the CSB or a committee, shall be submitted in writing with the agenda"; by-law 2.09 requires the superintendent, in consultation with the chair, to "itemize any and all items to be presented in the agenda to ensure members of the public and board are aware, in advance, of any items that may require or result in board action"; and by-law 4.03(d) makes the posting online of "any and all agenda materials not-exempt from public dissemination by RSA 91-A" a duty of the clerk's office, "in conjunction with the posting of any board or committee agendas." Both papers were in the board's hands before the meeting: the chair says so at 0:00:04 — "I sent the emails, correspondence that was shared between myself and. And his cell and him with the with the board." — and again at 0:10:45: "So everybody knew what the legal advice was or the guidance and what the risks were."

Two qualifications. First, the two papers are not alike. Counsel's advice was exempt from disclosure and the board was entitled to keep it: RSA 91-A:5, XII exempts "Records protected under the attorney-client privilege or the attorney work product doctrine," and nothing on this record suggests the privilege was waived by the chair summarising the advice aloud. Sprague's letter is different — a written communication to the board, about business on the board's own agenda, held by the board — and no exemption in RSA 91-A:5 obviously reaches it. So the finding as to the letter is a transparency one and the finding as to counsel's advice is not a finding at all; what remains common to both is that the public got a reading rather than a document. Second, and importantly, the chair read both documents aloud in open session before any vote was taken. That is the mitigation, and it is the reason this is MEDIUM: the substance reached the public, even though the paper did not, and it reached them before the board acted rather than afterwards. The residents who then spoke were arguing against the actual contents.

Sources: Packet folder 11. CSB 11.5.25 — one document, folder created November 3, 2025 at 1:48 p.m.; CSB Agenda 11.5.25. Claremont School Board By-Laws, rules 1.09, 2.09 (agenda itemisation — note that two different rules in the adopted copy carry the number 2.09, so the text rather than the number is relied on) and 4.03(d), adopted June 5, 2024. RSA 91-A:4 — inspection of governmental records; RSA 91-A:5, XII — "Records protected under the attorney-client privilege or the attorney work product doctrine" are exempt from disclosure (source note ends 2022, 122:3, eff. May 27, 2022). 11.5.25 DRAFT CSB Meeting Minutes. Election date and filing window from the district's own January 2026 announcement, recorded on the January 20, 2026 page.

MEDIUM No part of the vacancy was taken into nonpublic session — and the one closed session of the evening was disclosed on the seventh day, not within seventy-two hours

The first half of this flag is the negative finding this page was built to test, and it is clean. The board held exactly one nonpublic session on November 5. It was entered at 7:35 p.m. on Hawkins's motion, seconded by Petrin, on a roll call taken by Angell, under RSA 91-A:3, II(k) — "Consideration by a school board of entering into a student or pupil tuition contract" — about ninety minutes before this item was reached. The unsealed minutes of it record the exemption box ticked against II(k) alone, the three non-members present (counsel, the interim superintendent and the interim business administrator), that "Matt Angell discussed tuition rates", his recommendation on a tuition rate, and — in the form's own words — "No vote taken during non- public". The vacancy is not mentioned. Neither applicant is named. The whole of the item on this recording, from the reading of counsel's advice to the last vote, is in open session with an audience in the room, and both applicants spoke in it.

That the board could not lawfully have done otherwise is worth stating, because it is the question a reader will ask. RSA 91-A:3, ¶I contains no exemptions at all — it prescribes only the procedure, that the motion "shall state on its face the specific exemption under paragraph II" and that "The vote on any such motion shall be by roll call". All the grounds are in ¶II, which runs (a) to (m) with (f) repealed, twelve live grounds. The nearest of them is II(b), "The hiring of any person as a public employee" — and a seat on an elected school board is an office, not employment: RSA 671:33 speaks of filling a vacancy in a district office, RSA 671:4 fixes the members' terms, and the board's own by-law 2.11 keeps "appoint or remove any employee of the school district" in a separate rule from anything touching its own membership. II(c), reputational matters affecting a person other than a board member, would have been arguable as to the applicants; it was not invoked, and it was not used.

The second half is a timing defect discovered in the course of establishing the first. No motion to seal was made. The seal block on the district's own nonpublic-minutes form is left blank, and the public minutes record no such motion. RSA 91-A:3, III therefore applied in its unqualified form: "Minutes and decisions reached in nonpublic session shall be publicly disclosed within 72 hours of the meeting, unless, by recorded vote of 2/3 of the members present," they are sealed. Seventy-two hours from a meeting that ended at about 10:21 p.m. on Wednesday, November 5 expires on Saturday, November 8. The unsealed nonpublic minutes reached the district's Unsealed Minutes share on Wednesday, November 12, at 4:28 p.m. — the seventh day.

Graded MEDIUM rather than HIGH, and the limb is stated so a reader can disagree. Against the board: the deadline is a hard one, it is short, it is not conditioned on the significance of what was discussed, and nothing on the record explains the delay. For the board: the minutes were disclosed rather than sealed, which is the harder and better of the two courses; they went to the destination the district built for exactly this purpose; and this project cannot inspect the SAU 6 website as it stood in November 2025, which is where the board's own by-laws 1.05(c)–(d) and 1.11 send notices and minutes, so earlier publication there cannot be excluded. The finding is that the minutes are not found published within seventy-two hours, in the share where the district files them, not that they were nowhere.

Sources: RSA 91-A:3 — ¶I(a)–(c) procedure and the confinement of discussion to the matters in the motion; ¶I contains no exemptions; ¶II(b) hiring of a public employee, ¶II(c) reputation, ¶II(k) pupil tuition contract; ¶III minutes disclosed within 72 hours absent a two-thirds vote to seal (source note ends 2023, 189:1, eff. Oct. 3, 2023). 11.5.25 CSB nonpublic minutes unsealed — a scanned handwritten form; quotations from it are transcribed as legible, and its Drive record gives a creation time of November 12, 2025 at 4:28 p.m. 11.5.25 DRAFT CSB Meeting Minutes, which record the nonpublic motion, the roll calls and the times. RSA 671:33 and RSA 671:4 — office, not employment. Claremont School Board By-Laws, rules 1.05, 1.11, 2.11 and Appendix D, adopted June 5, 2024. Appendix D of those by-laws describes the nonpublic grounds four different ways — "eight grounds" in prose, nine enumerated, "the nine statutory bases", and six lettered in its compliance checklist — against the statute's twelve. The district's nonpublic-minutes form, used here, carries a further short list of its own and mislabels two entries, printing "RSA 91-A:3, 1 (d)" for a paragraph II ground and "(1)" for the emergency-functions ground. Neither error affected this session, which cited II(k) correctly.