Claremont School Board, Public Hearing & Meeting — February 18, 2026

MEDIUM The article going to the ballot does not use the wording the statute makes mandatory, and pegs the cap to a figure state law defines three different ways

RSA 32:5-f, IV prescribes the question's wording, and the blank in it is a dollar figure: a budget cap "whereby the school board (or budget committee) shall not submit a recommended budget that is higher than _____ dollars per pupil cost times the average daily membership in residence." The petitioned article substitutes a reference to a fiscal year. The chair read counsel's opinion into the record before public comment opened, at 0:40:47: "the governing law are essay [RSA] 32 colon 5-F sets for [forth] the mandatory language, and that language requires that the budget cap be set as a dollar amount shown as blank dollars. Changing a dollar amount to a fiscal year reference is not permitted under the statute." Counsel's conclusion, also read aloud: "If the petition article passes in its current form, I will likely advise the board that it is unenforceable due to flaws explained above."

The second limb is verifiable independently and it holds. Counsel said that "there is no single definition of cost per pupil in state law" and, at 0:41:35, cited RSA 189:75, which "defines cost per pupil, but that definition consists of three possible figures." RSA 189:75, I defines cost-per-pupil as the lowest of three alternatives — current expenditures divided by average daily membership in attendance, a reasonable good-faith estimate of that, or an amount the Department of Education determines in good faith to correspond to it. It has been in force since July 1, 2025.

There is a sharper edge to this that nobody at the podium reached. Since September 30, 2025, RSA 671:20, II requires the district clerk to print on the very same ballot "The average cost-per-pupil for the preceding year as calculated in accordance with RSA 189:75, I(a)" together with the district's ELA, math and science proficiency rates. At the January 20 hearing the district gave those figures for the operating-budget article as a per-pupil cost of $26,012.84 and proficiency of 35% ELA, 25% math and 29% science. So the March 10 ballot will carry a statutorily defined per-pupil figure for the preceding year in one place, and an article pegging a permanent spending cap to an undefined per-pupil figure for a year not yet closed in another. The chair, reading counsel, put the timing plainly: the 2025-26 figure "does not exist at the time of the deliberative and will not exist on voting day, March 10th," and "will not exist until the summer."

Nothing here is a criticism of the board. The article is a petitioned one. Neither the board nor the deliberative session may strike it, and the board has done the two things open to it — recommended against it unanimously, and had counsel's objection read into the record at the statutory hearing. Under RSA 40:13, IV(c) the deliberative session could have amended the dollar figure, and the chair says she "even worked with the moderator to create forms that voters could use to amend it to comply with statute"; the attempt failed on February 7. This is flagged so that a reader comparing the ballot to the statute can see the divergence, not as a lapse by any public body.

Sources: RSA 32:5-f, IV (mandatory warrant article wording); RSA 32:5-e (school district budget cap; 3/5 majority to exceed); RSA 189:75, I (cost-per-pupil defined as the lowest of three figures; 2024, 332:3, eff. July 1, 2025); RSA 671:20, II (cost-per-pupil and proficiency scores on the ballot; 2025, 281:1, eff. Sept. 30, 2025); RSA 40:13, IV(c) (an amendment may change a dollar amount); the January 20, 2026 hearing page for the per-pupil and proficiency figures as the district gave them.

MEDIUM Three fiscal years of annual audits are unfinished, a forensic audit has not started, and the officer responsible is also running payroll

The February agenda carries "Address the financial audits" as a pre-populated item, and the answer given is that fiscal 2023, 2024 and 2025 are being worked concurrently: "I'm trying to get the trial balances for Claremont. To the auditors for 20, 23, 24 and 25 concurrently. And then I'm going to pivot to SA six [SAU 6] and get all of those done." Unity's trial balances are in; Claremont's are not. Asked for a target, the answer was "if I didn't have anything else to do, I can get it done in 30 days" — and then "we haven't even mentioned the fraud audit yet either." A separate forensic audit, with Bernstein Shur engaged to represent the district, is "about to kick off," with the audit firm still running conflict checks.

RSA 197:25 assumes an examination of the treasurer's and the board's accounts "at the close of each fiscal year." Claremont uses an engaged audit firm rather than elected auditors, so the section's locally-elected mechanism is not the operative one here and this page does not assert a breach of it; what the section supplies is the yardstick, an annual examination at each year's close. Against that yardstick the district is three cycles behind, and the officer carrying the work is simultaneously the interim business administrator, has absorbed payroll after the payroll clerk left for another district, and is fielding right-to-know requests that Crawford noted "take a significant amount of your time."

Graded MEDIUM, on the mitigated limb. The record does not leave this unexplained: the item was on the agenda by standing practice, the officer gave a candid account of the obstacle (tracing encumbrances across years to establish existence at year end), the board pressed for a date and got a refusal to give a false one, and Crawford put the competing demands on the record herself rather than leaving them to be inferred. The corpus grades an unmitigated records absence HIGH; this one is documented, discussed and owned in public. It is flagged because the exposure compounds: the payroll post, in the comptroller's words, "it's it's actually going to go away" under next year's budget model, the SAU that holds part of the reconciliation is expected to be wound up mid-audit, and a forensic audit is about to be laid on top.

Sources: RSA 197:25 (examination of the treasurer's and school board's accounts at the close of each fiscal year); RSA 197:23-a (treasurer's custody; payment only on orders of the school board); approved minutes, 2/18/26.

MEDIUM The manifest is a heading with no number, and no approval of it is recorded anywhere

The consent agenda's third item reads, in the agenda and again in the approved minutes, "Approval of Manifest:" — and stops. No amount follows it in either document. On the recording the chair says only that "we do have a small manifest this evening that board members are requested to review and to sign at the end of the evening," and the consent agenda is then taken by unanimous consent with no separate treatment of the manifest. Nothing later in the meeting returns to it.

RSA 197:23-a makes the manifest the instrument by which money leaves the district: the 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 signing described on the recording is that order. What is missing is any public record of it — no amount disclosed to the room, no approval minuted, and no way for a reader of either document to know what was authorised or whether it was.

Graded MEDIUM, on the mitigated limb, and the mitigation is real: a mechanism exists and was described aloud, members were to sign the document, and the practice of signing a manifest after the meeting is ordinary. What makes it reviewable is that the public record of a payment authorisation is a blank line in two documents, on a night when three years of audits are open and a forensic audit is starting.

Sources: RSA 197:23-a (payment only on orders of the school board or of empowered members); RSA 91-A:2, II (minutes to record subject matter discussed and final decisions); approved minutes, 2/18/26.

MEDIUM The nonpublic minutes were sealed for six months without the determination the statute requires

RSA 91-A:3, III makes disclosure the default: minutes and decisions reached in nonpublic session "shall be publicly disclosed within 72 hours of the meeting," unless two-thirds of the members present determine, by recorded vote in public session, that disclosure "likely would affect adversely the reputation of any person other than a member of the public body itself, or render the proposed action ineffective," or concerns emergency-functions preparation. The determination is the operative act, and it is the one thing missing.

Everything else is present and correct. The motion states its exemption on its face as RSA 91-A:3, I(b) requires. Both entries and exits are on roll call. The seal motion, second, roll call and six-month term are all in the minutes, and the minutes' "all present voting in favor" satisfies the two-thirds threshold. But neither the recording — the whole seal sequence runs from 1:47:02 to 1:47:31, twenty-nine seconds — nor the minutes records which of the statutory grounds the board found, or that it found any.

Graded MEDIUM, on the mitigated limb. The subject noticed on the agenda is RSA 91-A:3, II(a), the dismissal, promotion, compensation or discipline of a public employee, and a reputational ground is the obvious one; the six-month term is finite rather than the ten years this corpus has seen elsewhere; and the clerk demonstrated later the same evening that she knows the 72-hour rule and applies it. What a reader cannot do from this record is test the seal against the statute, because the finding that would have to be tested was never stated.

Sources: RSA 91-A:3, I(b) (exemption stated on the face of the motion; roll call), III (72-hour disclosure; 2/3 recorded vote; the grounds), IV(a) (review on a change of circumstances); approved minutes, 2/18/26.

MEDIUM The minutes record an end time and a minute-taker but no start time, and they reverse the order in which the two articles were heard

RSA 91-A:2, II was amended by 2025, 112:1, effective August 22, 2025, to require minutes to include the start time and end time of the meeting and the name of the person who produced them, alongside the existing requirements. Those additions are in force for this meeting. Two of the three are satisfied plainly: the minutes close "Consent adjournment 10:00pm" and are signed "Respectfully submitted by Noelle Kronberg, school board clerk."

The start time is not recorded. The document carries clock times, but they are the agenda's scheduled times reproduced verbatim — 6:30 PM, 6:35 PM, 7:00 PM — and they are demonstrably scheduled rather than actual, because the discussion and action block is printed at 6:55 PM after an item printed at 7:00 PM. Where the clerk records an actual time she appends it to the scheduled one, as at "Closing of Public Hearing 7:57pm." No actual time is appended to the call to order. The omission is easily cured and the true time is recoverable — the arithmetic in flag 4 puts it within seconds of 6:30 p.m. — but the document as filed does not state it.

A second defect is in the ordering. The minutes take the budget cap first and open enrollment second. The recording is the other way round: Crawford reads Article 7 at 0:01:57, and the chair closes it and opens Article 8 at 0:38:07. RSA 91-A:2, II requires a brief description of the subject matter discussed and the final decisions, not a chronology, so no rule is engaged by the ordering itself — but a reader matching the minutes to the tape will look for Article 8 in the first half hour and not find it, and speakers who took a turn on each article appear in the reverse of the order in which they rose.

A third, minor, and handled properly by the board. The copy of policy JIH linked from the agenda was not the copy the policy subcommittee had worked on the same afternoon — "we were working on it between 4 and 5:00" — because the agenda's links are static copies rather than live documents, as the clerk explained. The board's response was the right one: it declined to adopt on that footing and sent the policy to a second read. It is recorded here because it is the same class of problem as the permissions failure a resident reported during citizens' comments, and because the by-laws make posting the agenda's supporting material a clerk's duty.

Sources: RSA 91-A:2, II (names of members and persons appearing; subject matter and final decisions; movers and seconders; start and end time and the person who produced the minutes — 2025, 112:1, eff. Aug. 22, 2025); approved minutes, 2/18/26; 2.18.26 agenda.