Claremont School Board — February 4, 2026

OBSERVATION Athletics was restored inside the adopted bottom line with no motion and no vote, on a list of savings that does not close — and $250,000 of it is money the adopted budget had counted twice

The setting. On 21 January the board adopted a bottom line of $42,957,713 with athletics carried in the line-item budget at $1, because the business administrator had to post the MS-26 by 26 January and told the board he could not honestly guarantee the programme. Two weeks later, at the last regular meeting before the voters take up the warrant, the Finance Subcommittee Chair read a statement saying the money had been found. What follows is what she named.

Item one: the budget was wrong. “there were two duplicate entries found, one for guidance position at dinner, two were in the budget and we only want one” — a guidance post at Disnard entered twice — “And the district wide and a district wide position was listed in two different places. These two mounted to a savings of about $250,000.” That is a quarter of a million dollars of double-counting discovered inside a budget the board had already adopted and reduced to the line-item form posted on 26 January. It is not returned to the taxpayer, because the bottom line is fixed; it is spent on athletics instead.

Items two and three. “This request was withdrawn, freeing up an approximate $450,000 in salaries and benefits” — Stevens High School's request for 5.6 additional teachers — and “a couple of support programs with limited enrollments that are not mandated are will be reconfigured to free up another $150,000. Various other categories may have small reductions to cover the difference as needed.” Only one of those programmes was named, and only as a possibility: the alternative school, called the Academy.

The arithmetic, put to the meeting and left open. The three items total $850,000. The Vice Chair asked at 0:41:53 what the target was — “The request from athletics is around 865,000 363 effort” — and then, at 0:42:02, “Is that hitting the 860.” He was told to add up what had been listed. On 21 January the same figure was put to the board as $863,000. So the named savings fall roughly ten to thirteen thousand dollars short of the named requirement, and the closing item is “Various other categories may have small reductions”. The approved minutes carry the $250,000 and the $450,000, omit the $150,000, and reduce the last item to miscellaneous small reductions — so a reader with only the minutes cannot do the sum at all.

No motion, by design. Frank Sprague asked directly: “so I'm want to make sure that this actually happens. So is it a motion to to codify this”. The Chair answered that it is “a directive by the board”, done every year, and that “So us making a motion wouldn't, wouldn't make it any different than five years ago or ten years ago or one year ago.” None was made. The single most contested question in this budget — the one a resident had opened the meeting by calling underhand, and the one that decided a 4–3 vote a fortnight earlier — is disposed of on 4 February by a read statement and a chair's ruling, with no motion, no second, no vote and no document in the packet.

Why this is an observation and not a violation. Nothing here breaks a verified rule, and three provisions say so. Under the official-ballot form of meeting at RSA 40:13 what the voters act on is the operating budget as a total; the composition of the lines behind it is the board's. RSA 32:10 expressly lets a governing body transfer an unexpended balance from one appropriation to another during the year, subject to the total appropriated. And RSA 32:5 — whose ¶III requires appropriations to be stipulated on a gross basis and whose ¶IV requires the comparative columns — bars insertions of appropriations not disclosed at the final hearing, not internal reallocation within a total that was disclosed. A board may lawfully do exactly what this board did.

What is worth a reviewer's attention anyway. The MS-26 posted on 26 January, and the line-item budget the district will publish alongside the warrant, show athletics at $1 and show $250,000 attached to two posts the board now knows do not both exist. Every participant said out loud that the line items will move. The gap between the document the voters see and the plan the board has already settled is not unlawful; it is simply not visible to anyone reading the document. The board's own answer, from the Finance Chair at 0:45:12, is that “we have to get through the budget and then we can take a look and see what happens after that.”

Sources: the recording at 0:35:11 to 0:47:35; approved minutes, 2/4/26; approved minutes, 1/21/26 for the adopted figure, the $863,000 athletics line and the MS-26 date; RSA 40:13; RSA 32:10; RSA 32:5, ¶¶I–IV; RSA 32:8 (no liability may be incurred for a purpose for which no appropriation has been made). The one-dollar difference between $42,957,713 in the January minutes and the $42,957,714 read aloud here is noted in the last flag.

OBSERVATION The manifest was listed for approval, deferred on the record, and never taken up

The consent agenda carries three items: the agenda, the minutes of 20 and 21 January, and “Approval of Manifest”. Closing the item at 0:02:08 the presiding officer adopted the first two by name and expressly held the third back: the board “also have manifest here to go through inside at some point this evening.” Neither the recording nor the approved minutes shows it returning. The minutes print the heading with nothing under it.

Why it is worth recording. RSA 197:23-a provides that the district treasurer “shall pay out the same only upon orders of the school board or upon orders of the 2 or more members of the school board empowered by the school board as a whole to authorize payments.” The manifest is how that order is normally given, and this record does not show it being given. It is possible that the board signed the manifest off camera during the meeting, that a two-member authorisation under the second limb of the section covers it, or that the item was simply carried; none of those appears in the record either. The 21 January minutes for the identical item read “Consent acceptance”, so the clerk records the disposition when there is one to record.

Recorded as an observation. No rule requires a board to approve a manifest at any particular meeting, and the section's requirement runs against the treasurer's payments rather than against the agenda. The point is narrow and checkable: on the face of this record, an agenda item authorising the district's payments was deferred and never disposed of.

Sources: RSA 197:23-a; approved minutes, 2/4/26, consent agenda; 2.4.26 CSB Meeting Agenda (2).pdf; approved minutes, 1/21/26 for the comparator.

OBSERVATION Policy JLCK was adopted under the wrong title, with the sample's drafting instructions still in it, and with both of its administrative-rule citations pointing at the wrong subparagraphs

Two titles for one code, in the space of a minute. The Policy Subcommittee Chair introduced it at 1:04:10 as “JLCK, which is physical and emotional well-being of students”; the Chair announced its adoption at 1:05:04 as “policy JLCK special physical health needs of students”, and the agenda and the approved minutes both use the second. The second is the title of the policy being replaced — a single paragraph adopted on 4 October 2017 after three readings. The packet carries both documents.

The adopted document is an unedited sample. The text the minutes link is the New Hampshire School Boards Association model, and it still carries the association's own instructions to the adopting board, including the direction that the marked passages “should be removed prior to adoption” and the guidance that highlighted or blank spaces “indicate areas which Boards should review, change or complete to reflect local personnel titles”. Neither was done: the notes are still there, and one sentence still carries an unclosed placeholder where a local title was to be inserted before the words about a school nurse. Nor is there a Claremont adoption history — the document's only dates are the association's own original and revision dates, where the policy it replaces and the district's public-comment policy BEDH both print the readings and the adoption date.

Both rule citations are wrong. The policy's reference table gives Ed 306.04(b)(15) as “Behavior Management and Intervention for Students” and Ed 306.04(b)(23) as “Meeting the Special Physical Health Needs of Students”. Read against the rule as readopted by document #14150 effective 13 December 2024, (b)(15) is “Supporting the physical and emotional health needs of students and providing appropriate” support, and (b)(23) is “Developmentally appropriate daily physical activity pursuant to Ed 310.” The document contradicts itself, too: the association's revision note immediately above the table describes the June 2025 rewrite as made “specifically, the requirement in Ed 306.04(b)(15) that schools have a policy addressing” the physical and emotional health needs of students — which is right, and which the table then denies.

Why it is an observation. Nothing requires a district to strip a model policy's commentary, and a mis-described cross-reference in a reference table does not invalidate an adoption. The substance of the policy is unobjectionable and the subcommittee followed its process — first read on 21 January, second read and adoption on 4 February, no comment received in between. It is recorded because this is now the fifth Claremont or SAU 6 document this project has found citing a provision that says something else, after by-law 4.03's attribution of the clerk's minutes duties to RSA 671:20 and RSA 671:25, policy BBBH-S's citation of RSA 194:4 for superintendent services, and policy DIE's citation of RSA 671:5 for a filing requirement. A board that adopts its own rules by reference to the wrong rule cannot be checked against them.

Sources: Copy of 12.17.25 Update Policy JLCK — Physical and Emotional Well-Being of Students, the document the approved minutes link as adopted, read in full; Copy of JLCK Claremont Special Physical Health Needs of Students, the policy replaced; N.H. Code Admin. Rules Ed 306.04 as readopted 12-13-24; approved minutes, 2/4/26; policy BEDH for the district-history block a Claremont policy normally carries.

OBSERVATION Two subcommittee meetings surface in this record with no notice or minutes located anywhere, a third was cancelled without trace, and the committee charged with the budget did not meet through the budget

What the round produced. Finance: “Finance subcommittee. We haven't had any meetings since, way back when”, which the minutes render as no recent meetings. Capital Improvement: a March meeting to be scheduled, and — at 1:06:26 — “So we had a meeting scheduled in January, but, that got canceled for a variety of reasons.” SRVRTC: the minutes record that it last met in January, a line that appears nowhere on the recording. Executive Leadership Ad Hoc: it met the previous week, and a third board member joined the two-member committee.

Each of those is a public body. RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d) includes in the definition any governing body, board, commission, committee or authority of a school district “or any committee, subcommittee, or subordinate body thereof, or advisory committee thereto” — the trailing clause is the operative one. So notice under RSA 91-A:2, II and minutes open within five business days attach to the January SRVRTC meeting and to the leadership committee's meeting in the week before 4 February. The board's own by-laws send subcommittee notices and minutes to the SAU 6 website. This project checked the five subcommittee folders linked from the board's page on that site on 29 August 2026: Capital Improvement, Policy, SRVRTC and Ad Hoc Reconfiguration were empty, and Finance held a purpose statement and one folder. Nothing corresponding to a January 2026 SRVRTC meeting or a late-January leadership meeting was found.

The Finance gap is the one that bears on the warrant. This project's map of the corpus — built from recordings, so an unrecorded session would not appear in it — records Finance Committee sessions on 10 and 12 December 2025 and none after. Between those and 4 February the board held a budget public hearing on 20 January, adopted a $42,957,713 bottom line and a $44,449,704 default budget on 21 January, settled every warrant article, and filed the MS-26 on 26 January. Its Finance Subcommittee met for none of it. On 21 January a member is minuted saying she had thought there would be input from the finance committee; on 4 February the answer is that there have been no recent meetings. This project has separately recorded that the Finance Subcommittee filed no minutes for any of its televised sessions in December 2024, while two other subcommittees minuted theirs and the district filed them.

Recorded as an observation. No rule requires a subcommittee to meet, and a cancelled meeting is not a defect. What is recorded is that four subcommittee events reach the public record only as single lines inside this meeting's minutes, and that the destination the by-laws designate for their own notices and minutes holds nothing for any of them. Any negative here should be read as not found: search on the district's Drive shares is known to under-report, and the SAU 6 site cannot be inspected as it stood in January 2026.

Sources: RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d); RSA 91-A:2, II; approved minutes, 2/4/26, subcommittee reports; approved minutes, 1/21/26; the SAU 6 Claremont School Board page and its five subcommittee folders; MAP.md sections 102 and 103 for the December 2025 Finance sessions.

OBSERVATION The district's best hope on the Stevens renovation is a bill with no precedent behind it, and the board heard its timetable from its sponsor rather than from a document

What was reported. Rep. Hope Damon described House Bill 1399 as an effort “to get a $5 million appropriation to the Claremont School District as a retroactive payment for the building aid project that was done at Stevens during the moratorium”, called it “a longshot effort but worth a try”, and named the obstacle as the absence of precedent for retroactive appropriations. Her distinguishing argument was that Claremont's project was forced: “We are the only one that happened because of the risk of losing accreditation.” She expected a House Finance division work session on Monday 9 February, a division recommendation the same day, the full committee, and a floor vote “this month”.

The bill is real and the description is accurate. HB 1399 of 2026 is titled “Making an appropriation to the Claremont school district for costs associated with a building renovation project from the revenue stabilization reserve account”, introduced 4 December 2025, with Rep. Damon as lead sponsor among eight legislators including Rep. Michael Cahill — the member the business administrator reported speaking to that day — and Sen. Debra Altschiller. Nothing about it was in the packet; the board's information about a $5 million question came entirely from the sponsor standing at the podium during citizens' comments.

What became of it, for a reader tracing this forward. The timetable slipped. The House Finance Committee's reports were filed on 4 March 2026: a majority recommending that the bill be deemed inexpedient to legislate by fourteen votes to eleven, with a minority report recommending passage with an amendment. That is a month after this meeting and is recorded here only so that a reader is not left with February's expectation; it forms no part of what the board knew on 4 February.

Why this is an observation. No rule requires a board to have a document before it when a legislator briefs it, and the exchange was substantive and useful — the hearing time, the building, the room number and the parking were all pinned down on the record, and a board member with direct knowledge of the accreditation history volunteered to help. It is recorded because the board's own budget case rests in part on state action it does not control, and because the only account of that action in the district's record is one participant's oral report.

Sources: the recording at 0:08:53 to 0:17:45; approved minutes, 2/4/26, citizens' comments; HB 1399 (2026), bill history — a secondary source, cited as reporting of the legislative record; RSA 198:15-a for the school building aid the moratorium suspended. The accreditation account is the representative's and the board member's, not this project's finding.

OBSERVATION The March ballot, and seven smaller things this record leaves open

• A new ballot-content requirement is in its first application, and nobody mentions it. RSA 671:20 gained a second paragraph by 2025, 281:1, effective 30 September 2025: “Immediately preceding the question of adopting a school budget, the following information shall be printed on the ballot” — the average cost-per-pupil for the preceding year calculated under RSA 189:75, I(a), and the district's proficiency scores from the department of education, printed as “ELA Proficiency: X%; Math Proficiency: X%; Science Proficiency: X%”. The ballot of 10 March 2026 is the first Claremont school district ballot to which it applies. The duty falls on the school district clerk, an elected district officer whose own one-year term is on that same ballot, and not on the board or its clerk — so this is not the board's omission. It is recorded because the board spent the closing minutes of this meeting on the ballot and the election without it arising, and because this board's own by-law 4.03 already misreads the same section, heading the board clerk's minutes and posting duties “per RSA 671:20 and RSA 671:25” when neither section mentions minutes.
• Wrong information about voting day, and a private platform as the remedy. A post the district says it cannot remove tells the public that voting day is at Stevens High School at 7 p.m.; it is an all-day ward election. The clerk's answer — a correction on the website's public-notice board — is the right destination. The Chair's other answer, that “folks should be turning to the district Facebook page for accurate information”, points the public at a platform the district does not control and where, on its own account, it could not take down a false notice. Nothing here breaks a rule; the district's own website is where a public body's notices live.
• The snow date was announced by the administration; the power to use it belongs to the moderator. Under RSA 40:4 (as amended by 2019, 192:1, effective 10 July 2019) “The moderator may, up to 2 hours but not more than 48 hours prior to the scheduled session, postpone and reschedule the session”, after consulting so far as practical the governing body, the clerk and the emergency services, and must then “employ whatever means are available to inform citizens of the postponement”. Printing a snow date in advance is ordinary and helpful, and the statute preserves the original date for the purpose of statutory deadlines. What this record does not contain is the moderator — an office also on the 10 March ballot — or any consultation.
• The student board member's heading is printed and empty. RSA 189:1-c provides that the school board “shall have at least one nonvoting student member from each public high” school maintained by the local school board within its district, with powers and duties under RSA 194:23-f, whose ¶IV(a) makes attending board meetings a duty of the office and whose ¶III requires the board to fix the date the term begins. The agenda and minutes carry the heading with nothing under it. Two student members were named on the masthead as recently as November 2024. This project has recorded the same gap on ten earlier pages and takes no position on whether an unfilled seat is itself a breach; the point is that the board's own template shows the seat and the record shows nobody in it.
• Public comment ran about twenty minutes against a policy that says thirty. Comments opened at 0:02:28 and closed at 0:22:39. Policy BEDH says the board “will provide a minimum of thirty minutes in total to hear all public comments” and that the individual time limit may not be set so as to “decrease the aggregate time below 30 minutes”; the same policy's §B.3 says the Chair “will close the public comment period after there is no response to the Board Chair's” vocal invitation. Both presiding officers gave that invitation, three times between them, and nobody was turned away — so the closure followed §B.3 while falling short of §B. The two provisions pull against each other, and RSA 189:74's own text does not settle whether its thirty minutes is a floor on the opportunity or on elapsed time. Separately, BEDH tells speakers the period “is not a question and answer session”, and three board members and the Interim Superintendent conducted an extended exchange with a legislator inside it — which produced the hearing's time, address and room number, and was plainly useful.
• Who chairs Capital Improvement is answered two ways in one hour. The agenda and minutes give “Capital Improvement Subcommittee: Chair Michael Petrin, Candace Crawford” and put Candace Crawford in the chair of Finance and of SRVRTC. On the recording at 1:06:10 she asks “Am I still the chair of that committee. It says I am”, and the Chair tells her she is the chair of Capital Improvement. This page follows the document.
• The packet's answer to a board question is an unfinished document. The staffing comparison the Interim Superintendent prepared sets 2025 against 2026 post by post and then ends with a change-of-personnel sentence that stops mid-list, after nine names and a comma. One of those names appears in neither column of the table above it. The same officer is styled Interim Business Administrator on the agenda masthead and Business Administrator in the sheet. And the link the approved minutes give for it addresses a spreadsheet as a document, so it does not open from the minutes.
• Two small identity problems worth carrying forward. The bottom line adopted on 21 January is $42,957,713 in that meeting's approved minutes and is read into this meeting's record as $42,957,714. And the approved minutes of this meeting attribute a question during the reading-programme discussion to “Mr. Lowney”, who is on no roster of this board; the dialogue file labels the same segment an unidentified board member. A Ward 2 resident and district teacher of that surname appears repeatedly in this corpus as a citizens'-comment speaker, which is the likeliest reading and is not printed here as fact.

Sources: RSA 671:20 (source note 1979, 321:1; 2025, 281:1, eff. Sept. 30, 2025); RSA 40:4; RSA 189:1-c (source note ends 2022, 195:1, eff. Jan. 1, 2023); RSA 194:23-f (source note ends 2024, 69:1, eff. Aug. 13, 2024); RSA 189:74; policy BEDH, sections B, B.3, B.6 and B.10; Copy of 2025 vs. 2026 Dow Staff; approved minutes, 2/4/26; approved minutes, 1/21/26; the companion page for 20 November 2024 on the student-member seat.