Claremont School Board, superintendent candidate forum — April 6, 2026

MEDIUM Nothing in the record says what body met, and the answer decides whether notice and minutes were owed

The test. RSA 91-A:2, I defines a meeting as the convening of a quorum of a public body, able to communicate with each other contemporaneously, for the purpose of discussing or acting upon a matter over which the body has supervision, control, jurisdiction or advisory power. The paragraph then excludes four things and only four: collective-bargaining strategy or negotiations; consultation with legal counsel; a caucus of members of the same political party; and the circulation of draft documents that formalise decisions already made in a meeting. A candidate forum is not among them, and the caucus exclusion is in any event unavailable to a New Hampshire school board, whose members are elected on a non-partisan ballot under RSA 671:30. Selecting the person who will lead the school system is plainly a matter within the board's jurisdiction. So the whole question is the quorum.

What the recording establishes, and what it does not. There was no roll call and no attendance list. Two of the seven members are identifiable: the chair, who convened and moderated and self-identified twice; and William Madden, whom she recognises by name at 1:09:03. A third, Loren Howard, told the 1 April meeting that he would be operating the camera. That is three. The only evidence of more is the candidate's own impression at 0:56:09: “I'm saying this in front of most members of your school board, I think are in the room right now.” He is a visitor who had met most of them for the first time that day, and he hedges the sentence himself. This page does not treat it as proof of a quorum, and no reader should.

The consequences run both ways, which is why this is unresolved rather than adverse. If a quorum was present, then notice of the time and place had to be posted at least twenty-four hours in advance under RSA 91-A:2, II and minutes had to be produced and open to inspection within five business days, carrying the names of members, the persons appearing, a brief description of the subject matter, the start and end times and the name of the person who produced them. None of that exists. If a quorum was not present, none of it was owed, and what the district gave the public — a televised eighty-minute interrogation of a named finalist — was a gift rather than a duty.

Two things point away from the board treating it as a meeting. The chair told the room at 0:36:57: “I have to tell you, it's so hard to sit here and not say anything.” That is a moderator's remark, not a member's. And her answer to the question about the board overstepping into operations, at 0:57:19, is “No comment.” A board deliberating would have deliberated; this board sat and listened.

What the absence actually cost. One thing of substance was transacted in that room: at 1:02:37 the chair put a term of employment to the candidate — whether he would relocate and whether he would be physically present daily, against a district policy she named — and he answered that it “is one of the things we're going to have to talk about”. Nine days later the board appointed him. There is no written record of that exchange anywhere.

Severity. MEDIUM on the second limb of this project's severity rule. The record is thin but not dark: the session was announced from the chair at a noticed, televised meeting five days earlier with its time, place and purpose; the district recorded it and published it; and the recording is a fuller account of a superintendent selection than any set of minutes in this corpus. It is not graded HIGH because the missing document is a formality whose function — telling the public what happened — was discharged another way, and because the threshold question of whether it was owed at all cannot be answered on this record.

What would settle it. An attendance list, a posted notice, or any district document characterising the evening. A single roll call at the start would have settled it in fifteen seconds.

Sources: RSA 91-A:2, I and II (¶I as amended 2023, 188:1, eff. Oct. 3, 2023; ¶II's start-time, end-time and minutes-producer clauses from 2025, 112:1, eff. Aug. 22, 2025); RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d); RSA 671:30 (1979, 321:1, eff. Aug. 21, 1979); the meeting of 1 April 2026 and its approved minutes, which announce the forum and name the candidate.

MEDIUM Every document in play was read aloud, none of them is on file, and the transcript records each one as the words of whoever read it

The attribution trap, stated first because it governs how this whole page is written. Three kinds of document were read into this room and nothing else was. The chair read nine questions submitted online; a questioner read the candidate's letter of application; and the chair, at the close, referred the public to a curriculum vitae she had not summarised. An automatic transcription attributes speech to whoever is speaking, so the dialogue file records the online submitters' characterisations of the candidate — that he has been “very clear in your support of school choice”, that his approach “introduces winners and losers among districts”, that staff “have reported instances of the school board overstepping” — as the chair's own statements, and records the candidate's letter as the questioner's. None of those are the reader's views and none of them is evidence of anything except that somebody wrote them. This project has recorded the same trap on the October 2025 vacancy recordings, where an applicant's biography read aloud by the chair very nearly became a fact about the chair. Every such passage on this page is marked with who wrote it.

The chair flagged one of them herself. Introducing the human-resources question at 0:57:24 she said: “The two major issues we face are HR and cash flow. That's someone's opinion.” Asked at 0:23:21 who had submitted the school-choice question, she answered “It was anonymous. Yeah.” Those two sentences are the only signposts in eighty minutes, and a reader working from the transcript alone would miss the rest.

And the underlying documents are not obtainable. The chair told the room at 1:19:35: “his, resume is online, and if anybody would like to take a look at that, they're certainly welcome to look at that.” No curriculum vitae, no letter of application and no set of submitted questions for this candidate is in the FY 2025-2026 meeting-documents archive, in the 2026 minutes folder, or anywhere else in the district's shares this project can reach; there is no packet for 6 April at all. RSA 91-A:4, I gives every citizen the right to inspect governmental records, and IV(b) gives a body five business days to produce them, deny the request or say when it will produce them; RSA 91-A:5, IV permits a body to withhold personnel material whose disclosure would constitute an invasion of privacy, but permits is not requires, and the chair's own statement is that this document is already published. The point is not that the law compelled publication. It is that the public was pointed at a document that cannot be found, so nothing the candidate said about himself can be checked against anything.

What that costs, concretely. The account of his own record at 0:50:48 is the evidentiary heart of the evening — a two-town system with three superintendents reduced to one, a shared-services agreement signed in 2021 or 2022, one assistant superintendent for curriculum hired three years ago, growth above the state average at the school that was furthest behind. It is entirely first-person and entirely unverifiable from here. The name of that system is not even recoverable: this transcription renders it Alderman Bart's, Alton, and Barnes did, farmsteads, Barnes stead, Bardstown and Barnes dad, six ways in eight minutes, and this page will not guess at it. What the recording does establish, because he says it in the first person and nobody contradicts him, is that he grew up in Warner and graduated from Kearsarge, that he began his career in vocational education, that he wrote a doctoral dissertation on principals' perceptions of relationships in their practice, and that he currently leads a New Hampshire system of about 1,300 pupils.

Severity. MEDIUM. The trap is a property of the source rather than a failure by the district, and this page's job is to disarm it. The missing documents are a real gap and a fixable one: a single folder for 6 April holding the candidate's letter, his curriculum vitae and the submitted questions would close it, and the district maintains exactly such a folder for every other special meeting in this period.

Sources: RSA 91-A:4, I and IV(b) (source note ends 2024, 49:1, 2, eff. Aug. 13, 2024); RSA 91-A:5, IV, which is permissive rather than prohibitory; MAP.md section 115, which records the two-stage search of the district's shares carried out on 28 August 2026.