Claremont School Board — April 15, 2026

MEDIUM The district’s encumbrances were read to the public as four million dollars less than they are, in the one place the public heard the number

The business administrator was on vacation, so the chair read his written report aloud. At 0:29:49 she read: “Encumbrances were a 7,223,276, and the amount for of appropriations remaining is 3,825,000 851, or about 9.63%.”

Three district documents give the figure as $11,223,276.10. The written report reproduced in the posted agenda; the same text in the approved minutes; and the general-ledger exhibit itself, CSD 03.31.2026 Expenditures.pdf, whose Fund 100 total line reads budget $39,714,564.00, expended $24,665,436.56, encumbrances $11,223,276.10, available balance $3,825,851.34, 9.63 per cent remaining. Those three columns foot to the appropriation exactly: $24,665,436.56 + $11,223,276.10 + $3,825,851.34 = $39,714,564.00. With the spoken figure they foot to $35,714,563.56, four million dollars short — and the 9.63 per cent read out in the same sentence is only true of the written number. The revenue exhibit closes the loop: its Fund 100 total is the same $39,714,564.00, with $35,601,097.63 collected and $4,113,466.37 uncollected, which is the 10.36 per cent read a moment earlier.

Two smaller inaccuracies in the same four minutes. The written report says “Medicaid revenue of $33,866.97”; the chair read “Medicare revenue of $33,866.97”, which names a different federal programme — school-district revenue of this kind is Medicaid to Schools, and the ledger line is captioned Medicaid Reimbursement. And the ledger gives that line as $33,886.97, so the written report itself carries a two-digit transposition, evidence that the narrative was retyped rather than extracted. Separately, all three “notable revenues” in the report — the adequacy grant, the city assessment and the Medicaid line — are the ledger’s March column, not year-to-date figures, and the report does not say so: the Medicaid line’s year-to-date total is $350,187.60 against a $200,000 budget.

Graded MEDIUM, and the mitigation is substantial and should be stated first. No statute was broken. The correct figure was published with the agenda before the meeting, is in the packet twice as a spreadsheet and a PDF, and is in the approved minutes; a resident who reads the documents gets the right number. What makes it reviewable is that this was the district’s only oral account of its own finances that night, delivered because the responsible officer was away, on a recording that is how most residents follow this board — in a year in which three fiscal years of audits are open, a forensic audit has been commissioned, the opening balance for the year is unknown (see flag 11), and the projected deficit is between one and 1.6 million dollars. A four-million-dollar understatement of committed obligations is a large error to leave standing in the public record uncorrected, and nobody in the room caught it.

Sources: CSD 03.31.2026 Expenditures.pdf (Fund 100 total line, page 59); CSD 03.31.2026 Revenues.pdf (Fund 100 total line, page 2, and the Medicaid Reimbursement line); 4.15.26 CSB Meeting Agenda (the written report); 4.15.26 Approved CSB Meeting Minutes; RSA 91-A:2, II (minutes must record a brief description of the subject matter discussed and final decisions).

MEDIUM No motion to seal the nonpublic minutes appears anywhere — so the 72-hour disclosure duty attached, and no nonpublic minutes for this date have been located

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 taken in public session, that disclosure would adversely affect a person’s reputation, render a proposed action ineffective, or concern emergency-functions preparation. Sealing is the exception and it requires an affirmative act.

Everything else about this session is correctly done and should be said. The subject was noticed on the agenda. The motion states its exemption on its face as RSA 91-A:3, I(b) requires — the agenda and the approved minutes both give RSA 91-A:3, II(b), the hiring of a public employee, which matches the staff-rehire vote taken immediately afterwards. Both the entry and the return were on roll call, and the minutes give both clock times, 7:40pm and 7:57pm, with movers and seconders. What is absent is any motion, vote or mention of sealing, in the minutes or on the recording. On the tape the entire interval between the entry roll call at 1:10:05 and the return motion at 1:10:23 is eighteen seconds.

Consequence. With no seal, the nonpublic minutes were required to be publicly disclosed by about 7:57 p.m. on 18 April 2026. No nonpublic minutes for 15 April 2026 have been located in the district’s 2026 Meeting Minutes folder or its Unsealed Minutes subfolder.

A companion fact from the same evening. At 0:16:35 the chair told the room that the minutes of the board’s nonpublic session of Monday 13 April “will be made public. They are public now.” That is exactly what RSA 91-A:3, III requires of an unsealed session, and the disclosure she then made — the 5–2 count and the two dissenters’ names — is the statute working (flag 7). But this project’s meeting-to-documents map records, verified on 28 August 2026, that the district’s FY 2025-2026 archive holds a special-meeting folder dated 4.13.26 while the 2026 Meeting Minutes folder carries approved special-meeting minutes for 3.26, 3.30, 4.9 and 4.17 — and not for 4.13.

Graded MEDIUM rather than HIGH, and the reason is a limit on the evidence, not on the facts. The absence of a seal is a positive finding from two documents and the recording, and it is solid. The absence of the nonpublic minutes is a negative, and the Google Drive search interface used here demonstrably under-reports these shares — during this build an enumeration of the FY 2025-2026 archive returned thirty folders and silently omitted four that the map records. A reader who reads this as an established absence would be going further than the evidence allows; a reader who treats it as a question the district can answer in one sentence would be right.

Sources: RSA 91-A:3, I(b) (exemption on the face of the motion; roll call), II(b) (hiring of a public employee), III (72-hour disclosure; sealing by recorded vote of 2/3 of the members present taken in public session) — 2023, 189:1, eff. Oct. 3, 2023; RSA 91-A:2, II (minutes of all such meetings, including nonpublic sessions); 4.15.26 Approved CSB Meeting Minutes; MAP.md section 117 and the archive inventory note.

MEDIUM The board voted to pay counsel three to five thousand dollars to repair by-laws that are demonstrably broken — and the chair read two rules aloud from a copy that does not match the one the minutes link

This is the evening’s only contested vote, and the page can show exactly what counsel will find.

The document served today has no rule 2.02. Chapter 2 runs 2.01, then 2.03, 2.04, 2.05, 2.06, 2.07, 2.08, then 2.09 twice — one an amendments rule, one an agenda-itemisation and publication rule — then 2.10 through 2.16. Any citation to by-law 2.09 is therefore ambiguous on its face, and a citation to 2.02 has nothing to point at. This project’s earlier notes recorded the live copy as numbering a temporary-staff rule 2.02; in the copy served today, last modified 23 March 2026, 2.02 is simply absent.

Rule 1.11 contains a citation that names no section. Its first bullet reads: “Set and warn meeting times and include appropriate administrative personnel per RSA 91-A:II.” RSA 91-A has no section “II”; the provision meant is RSA 91-A:2, II, which is what the chair spoke aloud at 0:03:17 as “Dash A two, part two.” Claremont’s paperwork has a documented history of this: by-law 4.03 heads the clerk’s minutes and posting duties “per RSA 671:20 and RSA 671:25”, both of which are ballot-preparation provisions that say nothing about minutes; SAU 6 policy BBBH-S cites RSA 194:4, which is district borrowing; policy DIE attributes a filing duty to RSA 671:5, which contains none.

And the rule she read is not the rule in the document. At 0:02:40 the chair read 1.11 as requiring that minutes “must be recorded and available for public inspection on the SA website within five days of the meeting” and that “Minutes should include the names of board members present and a brief description of the subject matter discussed under RSA 91.” The copy the approved minutes hyperlink says neither of those things: its bullet reads “Delegate or compile minutes and ensure they are posted within 5 days”, with no website and no minutes-content sentence. The approved minutes then print a third version, adding a sentence — “Committee Chair will ensure minutes are written and posted on the SAU6 website” — that appears in neither. Three renderings of one rule in one evening. She also cited the decorum rule as “section 2.3”; the document numbers it 2.03.

The vote. Moved by Lavalette, seconded by Whitney, on counsel’s estimate of “ten hours or less” and “3 to $5000”. Howard proposed a fifteen-hour reporting limit; the chair restated it at ten and asked “Is that fair?”, and ten is what the approved minutes record. The chair then took a voice vote with an audible dissent and declared, at 0:59:42, “Okay. I think the motion carries.” No count was taken; the minutes supply the dissenter’s name.

Graded MEDIUM. No statute governs a board’s internal by-laws, and by-law 2.15 subordinates them to state law in any event, so nothing here is unlawful. It is flagged because the board is about to spend public money on a review, because the specific defects above are checkable in ten minutes and are worth the reviewer having in front of him, and because a presiding officer reading a governing rule aloud from a copy nobody can identify is the same records problem in a different form. Which copy is in force on a given date is not determinable from here, and this page therefore says which copy it read and when that copy was last modified.

Sources: Claremont School Board By-Laws, the Google Doc hyperlinked from the approved minutes, read 29 August 2026, last modified 23 March 2026 — rules 1.09, 1.11, 2.01, 2.03, 2.04, 2.09 and 2.15; RSA 91-A:2, II; RSA 671:20 and RSA 671:25 (ballot preparation, not minutes); 4.15.26 Approved CSB Meeting Minutes.

MEDIUM Sixty-one right-to-know requests closed since November, eleven open, four staff, and over ten thousand dollars of legal fees in one month

The interim superintendent gave the fullest account of the district’s right-to-know load that this corpus contains, and she stated the law correctly. RSA 91-A:4, IV(b) requires a public body, within five business days of a request, to make the record available, deny the request, or provide “a written statement of the time reasonably necessary to determine whether the request shall be granted or denied”. Her version at 0:54:13: “And so you have five days to get the information or at least respond with, you were going to need a 30 day extension, a seven week, whatever it is extension.”

The load, as she gave it: 61 completed since 1 November 2025; 11 in progress and “very in depth”; four people with access to the tracking document; a minimum of ten minutes per request and hours for some; “some have all 8000 emails to be reviewed”; requests reaching into former staff members’ inactive mailboxes and document folders. And the cost, at 0:53:54: “Over $10,000 of requests from legal fees and things too. So this is not insignificant.” The approved minutes put it as “Last month, Claremont/ SAU #6 was billed over ten thousand dollars for RTK requests alone.” She also noted the work “isn’t necessarily in our regular job descriptions”.

A member then proposed publishing what it costs. Lavalette had looked at three other New Hampshire public bodies and at the city of Claremont, which he described at 0:55:17 as having “a nice box” showing “everyone who who’s requested it, the date, what they requested, staff time spent and legal fees.” His reasoning at 0:55:46: “I think it’s not fair to put teacher salaries out there with what they cost and then not also put what these costs. And I am not against 91 A, I am all for it. However, if there’s a cost and it’s substantial, the public deserves to know that.”

Two limits on that proposal a reviewer should have in front of him. RSA 91-A:4, IV(d) allows a public body to charge “the actual cost of providing the copy” and provides that “No cost or fee shall be charged for the inspection or delivery, without copying, of governmental records” — so staff time and legal review are not chargeable to a requester, and a published cost table is a disclosure, not a fee schedule. And a table naming who requested what is itself a disclosure about identifiable people exercising a statutory right; the city’s practice is not authority that a school district should follow it. Graded MEDIUM because the operational facts are serious on their own terms: eleven in-depth requests, four staff, a hiring freeze and a projected deficit, with the statutory clock running on each request.

Sources: RSA 91-A:4, IV(b) (five business days: make available, deny, or state the time reasonably necessary), IV(c) (a denial must state the specific exemption), IV(d) (actual cost of providing a copy; no charge for inspection) — source note ends 2024, 49:1, 2, eff. Aug. 13, 2024; 4.15.26 Approved CSB Meeting Minutes; RSA 91-A:5, IV (exemptions; permissive, not prohibitory).

MEDIUM The Unity withdrawal update is accurate about what happens and silent about how it is authorised

What the chair told the public is right, and it corrects an error that has circulated in this corpus. At 1:13:18: “The essay six will continue. It will just be a Claremont, of school district in the six. And and so we are going through the procedure of unity withdrawing from saw”. The approved minutes: Unity will be withdrawing “and it will only be Claremont in the SAU as of July 1, 2026”. SAU 6 is not being dissolved; one of its two districts is leaving it. The SAU 6 board’s chair said the same thing six days earlier, correcting a member who had used the word dissolving.

What is not said is where the authority comes from. Withdrawal from a school administrative unit runs through RSA 194-C:2, IV: a planning committee that studies advisability, estimates costs, prepares an educational and fiscal analysis of the impact on the remaining district, prepares “a proposed plan for the disposition of any school administrative unit assets and liabilities” and a reorganization plan with “a transition plan and timeline”; at least one public hearing not less than fourteen days before submission; review by the state board of education within 60 days; a vote requiring three-fifths of the votes cast in the withdrawing district; and effect on the date the state board issues its certificate. RSA 194-C:2, I requires notice of every planning-committee meeting to be posted in all districts in the unit — which means in Claremont — and time for public comment at all of them.

None of that appears in this board’s record. No planning-committee notice, agenda, membership or minutes has been located in the Claremont packet or minutes shares; nor a fiscal analysis; nor a plan for the disposition of assets and liabilities; nor any state board decision. The item ran about eighty seconds. What the board was given instead is a private instrument: at 1:14:49 the chair says “I got a copy of this agreement. That withdrawal from the saw, to review. It’s it’s pretty standard. There’s nothing here that is unusual”, and that she and the Unity chair will take it to counsel “to execute this”. That agreement is in no public share located by this project, and no board vote on it is scheduled or minuted. The companion page for the SAU 6 meeting of 9 April sets out the same absence from the other side, including counsel’s advice that the instrument be a memorandum of understanding and the SAU 6 chair’s own uncertainty about whether it will be voted on at all.

Graded MEDIUM here rather than HIGH, and the divergence from the companion page is deliberate. The statutory sequence is the SAU 6 board’s and the withdrawing district’s to run; Claremont is the district that stays. What this board owed the public on this item is an accurate account of what is happening, and it gave one. What is flagged is narrower: a document that will govern the division of a public corporation’s assets and liabilities was described to the board as unremarkable, offered for private review, and is not published anywhere.

Sources: RSA 194-C:2, I and IV — source note ends 2024, 250:1, 2, eff. July 1, 2024; RSA 194-C:5, III (apportionment of salaries and benefits; certification to the treasurers and the state board of education); RSA 91-A:1-a, VI(d); 4.15.26 Approved CSB Meeting Minutes; companion page SAU 6 Board, April 9, 2026.