Claremont School Board — June 17, 2026

MEDIUM Thirteen days out, the district's whole written record of the end of SAU 6 is a section heading about a logo

This is the last regular meeting before the date. The corpus has been tracking the question since February 18, 2026, when two officials referred to SAU 6 ending on July 1 as settled background and neither the agenda nor the minutes mentioned it; the June 3 page found the first documentary trace, an organisation chart whose top box changes from the SAU 6 School Board to the Claremont School Board. Here the district's paperwork finally uses the word, and this is all of it.

The incoming superintendent's written report to the board has five numbered sections. The fifth is headed "SAU separation from Unity", and it reads in full: "Starting July 1st, the central office will begin using a new logo, which is attached. If the Board wishes to conduct a redesign of the logo, we can do that at a future date, but this will meet our needs for the time being. I will ask Mr. Holt to explore the cost of changing the sign in front of the Dow building, looking for the most cost-effective solution as a temporary measure." Aloud he is careful to say it is not his: "Regarding your separation of the saw, that's really not my domain. But you are." The approved minutes reproduce it under the heading "Separation of SAU", and what they record is that "the district will want to develop their own logo at some point, but now is not the time." The only other reference anywhere in the evening is the interim superintendent's parting line: "I'm excited to look forward to July 1st. We shift over."

Neither agenda for June lists the item, and neither set of minutes records a discussion, a motion or a vote about it. The agenda masthead for this very meeting still reads SAU #6 Central Office Administration, and the mission statement printed above the business still commits the district to "every student in Claremont and Unity." The document that governs the change is RSA 194-C:2, IV, and it prescribes a visible sequence: a planning committee, an educational and fiscal analysis of the impact on the districts remaining, a plan, review by the state board of education "Within 60 days", and approval by "3/5 of the votes cast on the question in the withdrawing district". No part of that sequence appears in any Claremont agenda, packet or set of minutes this project has inspected, across the whole corpus.

Two consequences are live and neither is addressed anywhere in this record. The first is records. RSA 189:29-a puts the duty squarely on the board and not on the SAU: "Members of the school board shall establish a records retention and disposition schedule for all official records of the school district." The office that has held those records is the one being reorganised, in a district whose incoming superintendent has just told the board that "Last year's contracts are absent from many personnel files" and that institutional knowledge "much of it really has been lost." The second is the audits: three fiscal years are open, the reconciliation runs through accounts kept at the SAU level, and the comptroller told this board in February that he would pivot to the SAU's own trial balances after Claremont's.

Graded MEDIUM, and the reason it is not higher is jurisdictional. The withdrawal record is not solely the Claremont board's to keep — SAU 6 is a separate public body. That body's own record for its final month is an agenda, a draft calendar, no minutes and no recording located in the Cablecast gallery for its meeting of 28 May 2026. So the honest statement is not that no process occurred but that no part of it is publicly documented anywhere this project can reach. What would settle it is the warrant article and the State Board of Education's action on the plan under RSA 194-C:2, IV. This corpus ends here; nothing after this page will correct it.

Sources: RSA 194-C:2, IV (planning committee, fiscal analysis, 60-day state board review, 3/5 of votes cast; source note ends 2024, 250:1, 2, eff. July 1, 2024); RSA 189:29-a (the board, not the SAU, establishes the district's records retention and disposition schedule; 1983, 94:1, eff. July 23, 1983, unamended); Claremont SB report - June 17 2026, section 5; approved minutes, 6/17/26; 6.17.26 CSB Meeting Agenda; MAP.md section 120 for the 28 May 2026 SAU 6 meeting.

MEDIUM The minutes did not exist for twenty-seven days, they record no start time, and one vote is missing from them

RSA 91-A:2, II requires minutes to be "promptly recorded and open to public inspection not more than 5 business days after the meeting", and the section defines a business day as "the hours of 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Monday through Friday, excluding national and state holidays." Five business days from Wednesday June 17, 2026 runs to Wednesday June 24.

The Drive record for the minutes document shows it created on July 14, 2026 — twenty-seven calendar days after the meeting, and about the eighteenth business day. The measure is a fair one here and it can be checked against the same clerk's own practice a fortnight earlier: the June 3 minutes document was created at 6:23 p.m. on June 3, minutes before that meeting was called to order, and was linked from this meeting's agenda by June 10. What a creation timestamp cannot exclude is that the text was drafted in another application first and pasted in; what it does establish is that no such document was in the district's public share until July 14. Nothing on the record explains the gap, and nothing in the minutes acknowledges it.

Graded MEDIUM, on the mitigated limb, and the mitigation is the document itself. This corpus reserves HIGH for a meeting whose minutes do not exist at all. These exist, they are unusually full — they carry every figure a member dictated into the record, the mover and seconder of every motion, and an end time — and they were in place before the meeting that approved them. What is missed is the statutory deadline for the public to be able to read them, in the fortnight in which the fiscal year closed and the SAU was said to end.

No actual start time is recorded. The 2025 amendment to RSA 91-A:2, II — 2025, 112:1, effective August 22, 2025 — added the start time and end time of the meeting and the name of the person who produced them. Two of the three are satisfied: the minutes close with 8:52 and are signed by the clerk. The printed 6:30 PM is the agenda's schedule reproduced verbatim, which the same document proves by printing 8:30 PM for an adjournment it then records at 8:52. As flag 8 shows, the true start is recoverable from the district's own figures to within a minute; it is simply not stated. This is the same defect the February 18 and June 3 pages record, on the same template.

And one final decision is absent. The motion to empower a member to organise volunteer painting at the middle school appears in the minutes with its mover, its seconder and three lines of discussion — and then stops. The recording carries the vote: at 1:15:33 the chair puts it, the ayes are audible, and she announces "Opposed? Nay. Motion carries." RSA 91-A:2, II requires minutes to record "final decisions", and the decision on that motion is not in them.

Sources: RSA 91-A:2, II (minutes within 5 business days; business day defined; subject matter and final decisions; start time, end time and the person who produced them — 2025, 112:1, eff. Aug. 22, 2025); Google Drive file metadata for 6.17.26 Approved CSB Meeting Minutes (created 2026-07-14) and for 6.3.26 Approved CSB Meeting Minutes (created 2026-06-03).

MEDIUM A $10,563.11 cheque to the district was announced, applauded and never accepted by any recorded act

A New Hampshire school board's power to take in money that was not budgeted is not inherent; it is conferred, on conditions. RSA 198:20-b, I lets a district meeting adopt an article "authorizing indefinitely, until specific rescission of such authority, the school board to apply for, accept and expend, without further action by the school district, unanticipated money from a state, federal or other governmental unit or a private source which becomes available during the fiscal year." Paragraph III then attaches a publicity condition scaled to the amount. For sums of $20,000 or more it is a prior public hearing with seven days' newspaper notice. For sums below that, III(b): "the school board shall post notice of the funds in the agenda and shall include notice in the minutes of the school board meeting in which such funds are discussed."

The minutes limb is satisfied squarely. The approved minutes record the cheque, the amount and its character: that the bank "issued a check to the school district in the amount of $10,563.11, the exact amount of interest paid on the loan that was extended to the school district this year, effectively making the loan interest free."

The agenda limb is weaker, and the accepting act is missing altogether. The agenda's second item reads "6:35 PM Recognition" with two sub-items, the second of which is the bank's name. No amount appears, no funds are described, and nothing on the face of the agenda tells a reader that the district is about to receive money. The item is framed as thanks to a donor rather than as notice of unanticipated funds. And no motion to accept is made — the cheque is announced from the chair as a press release, applauded, and the meeting moves on. Nothing in either June packet identifies the RSA 198:20-b enabling article on which the board's authority to accept without further district action would rest.

One qualification a reader should weigh. A refund of interest already paid can be characterised as an adjustment to a loan rather than as a gift; on that reading RSA 198:20-b might not be engaged at all. The record supports the other reading — the chair calls it "Donating this money, this interest back to the community", and a lender under no obligation to return interest that has been earned is making a private-source payment the district had not budgeted. The safest statement is that the character of the payment is not determined anywhere in the record, and that on the reading the chair herself gave it, one of the two notice limbs is thin and the accepting act is absent. Graded MEDIUM, on the mitigated limb: the amount, the source and the purpose were all disclosed in open session and are in the minutes, which is most of what the section is for.

Sources: RSA 198:20-b — Appropriation for Unanticipated Funds Made Available During Year: ¶I the enabling article, ¶III(a) the $20,000 hearing threshold, ¶III(b) notice in the agenda and in the minutes below it (2005, 188:1; 2023, 38:1, eff. July 18, 2023); 6.17.26 CSB Meeting Agenda; approved minutes, 6/17/26.

MEDIUM An item noticed for a vote that nobody in the room could identify — and two more the agenda promised and never produced

The agenda lists, under Discussion/Action Items, "Administration Contract (discussion/vote)". No document is attached to it. When the chair reaches it the exchange is four lines long: "What is the information? I don't have any information on this." — "One is not mine." — "All right. Mine either. Okay. I'm going to pass on this one and just table. Just eliminate that. No follow up." The approved minutes print the heading and nothing beneath it. A member of the public reading either document is told that the board was to discuss and vote on an administration contract, and is given no way to learn what it was or what became of it.

It was not a late insertion. The June 3 agenda's future-dates block already listed four items for June 17: the closure of the Bluff student activity funds, the administration contract, a communications proposal and a by-laws update. Of those four, one was transacted, one arrived with no material and was tabled, one — the communications proposal — never appeared on the June 17 agenda at all and is not mentioned in the minutes, and the by-laws update was pulled to July at the consent stage. The by-laws have been pending since at least June 3, when a member described them, on the recording of that meeting (Cablecast show 17397), as documents "either hopefully going to get approved soon by a lawyer or ones that are referenced."

A third item in the same family has now gone two meetings unanswered. The certification a truant officer would need in order to drive students under McKinney-Vento was given as the reason a board decision of November 19, 2025 was not carried out. On June 3 a member could not find the follow-up in any set of minutes. On June 17 Howard reports he could not find the requirement published anywhere: private trainers advertise it, but "not public facing government entity. I could find." The answer he gets is that the incoming superintendent will tour the operation the following week. The rule that disqualified an employee is, on this record, still unnamed.

Graded MEDIUM. RSA 91-A:2, II requires minutes to carry "a brief description of the subject matter discussed and final decisions"; a heading with nothing under it does neither for the item that was tabled. The board's own by-laws make posting the agenda's supporting material a duty of the clerk, which is the hook for material that never arrives. The mitigation is real — nothing was decided, the item was dropped rather than voted on blind, and the board declined to act on a document it did not have.

Sources: RSA 91-A:2, II (brief description of the subject matter discussed and final decisions); 6.17.26 CSB Meeting Agenda; 6.3.26 CSB Meeting Agenda (the four items promised for June 17); approved minutes, 6/17/26.

MEDIUM A closed school's student activity fund is emptied with no ledger, no policy, a headcount formula, and forty-four cents left over

The staff report is candid about all three gaps. The fund is "a separate bank account from the District and is managed by the Building Principal". When it was handed over, "a ledger of how the funds were allocated (ie, by grade level) was not provided." And on the disposal: "Usually there is a policy that discusses this process; however, I could not find one in this instance." It names the two policies that do govern such funds — JJE and JJF — and neither covers closure. In place of a policy the report proposes what its author has done elsewhere: divide by the number of Bluff pupils who went to each receiving school, and pay the shares into the receiving principals' accounts.

The arithmetic in the packet is exact and the arithmetic that was voted is not. The staff report gives a balance of $6,567.44 and an allocation of $2,295.93 to Disnard on 43 pupils and $4,271.51 to Maple on 80 — about $53.39 a head, and the two shares sum to the balance to the cent. What the board was told aloud, and what the approved minutes record, is "$6567.00 to be allocated, $2,295.00 to Disnard (43 students) and $4,272.00 to Maple (80 students)." Those round in opposite directions — Disnard 93 cents down, Maple 49 cents up — and they sum to $6,567.00. The motion authorises the closure of the account and the allocation "as recommended", so the packet's figures are presumably the operative ones; but the only figures in the public minutes are forty-four cents short of the fund being closed.

The custody question is worth stating even though this page does not resolve it. RSA 197:23-a provides that "The treasurer shall have custody of all moneys belonging to the district and 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." Student activity funds are conventionally treated as money held for pupils rather than money belonging to the district, which is why they sit in principals' accounts; the treasurer-custody rule is not obviously engaged by their ordinary operation. What is different here is that the board is exercising district authority over the money — voting to close an account and to redirect the balance to two other schools on a formula of its own choosing — while the underlying ledger that would show whose money it was does not exist. What would settle it is policies JJE and JJF read against the New Hampshire Financial Accounting Handbook's treatment of fiduciary funds; neither is in this packet.

Graded MEDIUM, on the mitigated limb. The gaps were disclosed by the officer who found them, in writing, a fortnight before the vote; the destination is a fund for the same purpose; and the board was asked rather than told. What is not mitigated is that money raised by and for the pupils of one school is redistributed by headcount because the record of who raised it is gone.

Sources: Staff Report - Bluff Elementary School SAFs (packet; the $6,567.44, $2,295.93 and $4,271.51 figures and the reference to policies JJE and JJF); RSA 197:23-a (treasurer's custody of all moneys belonging to the district; payment only on orders of the school board or of two or more empowered members; source note ends 2023, 36:2, eff. July 16, 2023); approved minutes, 6/17/26.

MEDIUM Sixty-two minutes called "Negotiations" under two exemptions that are not the negotiations provision, sealed with no determination

The label and the citation point at different devices. The agenda heads the item "Non-Public Meeting: Negotiations RSA 91-A:3, II(a&c)" and reproduces the full text of II(a) beneath it. But collective bargaining is dealt with elsewhere in the chapter and not as a nonpublic session at all: RSA 91-A:2, I(a) excludes "Strategy or negotiations with respect to collective bargaining" from the definition of a meeting. A body using that exclusion holds a non-meeting — no motion, no roll call, no minutes and no seal. A body using RSA 91-A:3 holds a meeting behind closed doors, with minutes that must be kept and disclosed within 72 hours unless sealed. The board did the second, which is the more transparent of the two, and produced a record it was not obliged to produce. What it did not do is match the ground to the subject.

And the choice between II(a) and II(c) is not neutral. II(a) covers "The dismissal, promotion, or compensation of any public employee or the disciplining of such employee" and carries a right for the person concerned: the exemption applies "unless the employee affected (1) has a right to a meeting and (2) requests that the meeting be open, in which case the request shall be granted." II(c) is the reputational ground and carries no such right. The public business immediately before the session was one departed administrator's moving stipends and a second contract "like this one" that the interim business administrator confirmed exists and offered to discuss privately — which is compensation, squarely II(a). The board cited both, so the employee's right is at least formally in play; nothing in the record shows it being considered.

The seal. RSA 91-A:3, III makes disclosure the default within 72 hours unless two-thirds of the members present determine, by recorded vote in public session, that divulgence "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 minutes record the motion, a second, a roll call, and a term — "until July 1, 2026". They record no determination of any ground. The February 18 and June 3 pages record the same omission on the same board, and it is graded the same way each time. The term itself is short and finite, which is the mitigation; it expires on the day the fiscal year and the SAU do, and no disclosed copy of those minutes has been located in the district's unsealed-minutes share.

The clock, and why this one is a positive control. The excision is undetectable from the transcript — the largest gap anywhere in the 552-row dialogue file is 1.5 seconds, and the recording carries a minute of ordinary board chatter after the roll call before it cuts. But the minuted times check. Entry at 7:41 p.m. against the motion at 1:10:56 puts the call to order within seconds of 6:30 p.m. Carrying the return at 8:43 p.m. forward across the join, the chair's last words fall at about 8:51:40 against a minuted 8:52. The whole evening reconciles to under a minute — which is exactly what the June 3 page could not do with the same clerk's figures a fortnight earlier.

One loose end. Before the consent agenda the clerk asks "Request to add a nonpublic." and, told there is already one at item four, answers "But I think we're adding another." The chair's reply is "It's for A and C right. We will note. We'll note that when we go into nonpublic." Only one nonpublic session appears in the minutes. Whether a second was contemplated and folded into the first, or dropped, is not determinable from this record.

Sources: RSA 91-A:2, I(a) (strategy or negotiations with respect to collective bargaining excluded from the definition of a meeting); RSA 91-A:3, I(b), II(a), II(c) and III (2023, 189:1, eff. Oct. 3, 2023); 6.17.26 CSB Meeting Agenda (which reproduces II(a) in full); approved minutes, 6/17/26; Cablecast API for show 17418 (total run time 4,885 seconds).

MEDIUM Two million dollars of federal money is still unclaimed for a year that ends in thirteen days, and five years of grant records have to be rebuilt

The disclosure is the incoming superintendent's and it is made in writing as well as aloud. His report: "for several years the school district has not successfully claimed all the federal funds to which it was entitled," and "Claremont has about $2 million available for 2025-2026 that can not yet be claimed, but we can realistically expect to receive those funds if we pay attention and meet our obligations over the next few months." The reason it is recoverable at all is that federal grant periods run past the state fiscal year — "you can actually incur costs under these programs beyond the 30th of July. Most of them you can incur costs through September 30th" — and the reason it is not simply a matter of filing is that reimbursement runs month by month through an approval queue: "Then you have to wait for them to review and to prove that submission. Then you can submit the next month so you can't do it all in one day."

The mechanism by which the money was lost is described precisely, and it is the mechanism behind the deficit. Broadrick's worked example: a post is filled and paid against a grant, but "What Claremont didn't always do in the past was write the grant activity right, get it approved and receive the $100,000" — so "if you spend the money against an anticipated revenue and then you don't get the revenue, you overspend your." Whitney states the same thing from the board's side: "part of our issue is, is that we were counting revenues that we weren't receiving." His June 3 report gives a live instance: two social workers working in Claremont's schools as contracted services for whom the group "was unable to confirm funding sources", with no approved grant activities in the grants management system, and — because "there is no history of all contracts having to be submitted to the central office for a purchase order and signature" — no certainty that the money had been encumbered at all. It had been, on checking. The absence of that control is what RSA 32:7's encumbrance exception and RSA 32:8's bar on agreeing to pay without an appropriation both depend on.

The backlog behind it is five years deep. The comptroller: "for the prior years, the state has actually requested me to try to rebuild all the grants from 2021 to the present. And that is a monumental task," and of recovering earlier costs, "the records back then are disaster." And a control the board had already been told was fixed is not: told that grant-compliant language is now being added to the time-card system, Whitney answers that this "has been a reoccurring finding from when we've had the fiscal monitoring reports and we have addressed that", and that "we've been assured that it's been done and we've been assured that those will be signed off on."

Graded MEDIUM, on the mitigated limb, and the mitigation is that all of this is being said out loud by the people responsible, with a date attached — "My goal is that by the 1st of August, we are only submitting monthly reports and getting reimbursements." What keeps it flagged is that on the last night of the fiscal year's last regular meeting, a district with a five-million-dollar deficit and three unfinished audits is carrying two million dollars of receivable federal money whose recovery depends on work that has not been done yet.

Sources: Claremont SB report - June 17 2026, section 3; Claremont Board Report - June 3 2026, section 1 (the social-work funding review); RSA 32:7, I and RSA 32:8; approved minutes, 6/17/26.

MEDIUM Money leaves the district on signatures the public record does not describe, including a $10,000 retainer and a $20,000 relocation term nobody voted

RSA 197:23-a is the instrument: 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 manifest is that order. On both June agendas the consent agenda's third line reads "Approval of Manifest:" and stops — no amount in the agenda, none in the minutes, and no separate treatment of it in either meeting. Both June agendas print it that way, as the February 18 agenda did before them.

Two payments discussed at this meeting show what turns on it. The forensic auditors' retainer: "They want $10,000 up front. That's going to be on a manifest that I'm going to make. I'm hoping it's in the manifest here. If it's not, I'm. I'm going to have a bunch of, manifests that I need to have the school board, get two signatures on." The two-signature mechanism is exactly what RSA 197:23-a contemplates and it is described accurately. What the public record does not show is the amount of the manifest that was in fact before the board that night, or whether the retainer was on it. The chair recalls an authorisation of "up to 50,000" for the forensic audit and does not get a confirmation; the engagement is to run "month to month" with the firm reporting back "to see if, how how far they want, how far the school board wants to go."

The relocation terms. Lavalette's figures — $8,461.53 and $9,230.76 in moving expenses and a further $4,365.39 stipend on top of a $90,453.60 administrator salary — are explained as artefacts of one person moving between buildings, plus a differential between an elementary and a middle school principalship. But the contract term behind them is not an artefact: "if they had worked the whole year, there was a $20,000 moving. Right. Statement." Asked whether the board approved it, the chair says "It was not because."; the minutes render it "it was unique and it was not Board approved." Asked whether any other contract carries the same kind of term, the answer is that there is one more, to be discussed privately. A twenty-thousand-dollar contract term the board did not approve, and a second live contract like it, are on this record only because a member read a public salary schedule and asked.

Graded MEDIUM, on the mitigated limb. A lawful mechanism exists and was described aloud; members were to sign; the administrator answered the question directly and volunteered that there is another. What is reviewable is that the public account of how money leaves this district — in the fortnight in which a forensic audit is retained — is a heading with nothing after it, twice.

Sources: RSA 197:23-a (treasurer's custody; payment only on orders of the school board or of two or more empowered members); RSA 91-A:2, II (subject matter discussed and final decisions); approved minutes, 6/17/26; 6.17.26 agenda and 6.3.26 agenda (the manifest heading in both).