Participants
Attendance and name spellings follow the agenda masthead and the draft minutes. The dialogue file names only four voices; where the minutes attribute a remark to a different member than the dialogue file does, both are given.
| Name | Role | Participation |
|---|
| Arlene Hawkins | SAU 6 Board Chair; Claremont School Board member | Presided. Asked about purchase-order coding on negative lines, delivered the auditor’s status report, raised the check-signature question and asked for an update by September. The dialogue file labels 82 rows with her name; the draft minutes give several of the questions in that cluster to Heather Whitney (see the method note). |
| Rocco Ruggeri | SAU 6 Vice Chair; Unity School Board | Per the minutes, moved the agenda amendment, approval of the April 10 minutes, entry into and exit from nonpublic session, and adjournment; reported on Unity’s separation RFP. The dialogue file labels these rows Unidentified (“likely Unity Chair Shannon Popescu or SAU 6 Vice Chair Rocco Ruggeri”); this page follows the minutes. The chair calls him “Mr. Ruggieri”. |
| Candace Crawford | SAU 6 Treasurer (elected April 10, 2025); Claremont School Board member | Read the year-end balance as positive; advised against changing policy DBJ; reported that a former board member is still the signer on the account; asked whether Unity’s RFP covers supervisory services. |
| Heather Whitney | SAU 6 Board member; Claremont School Board Chair | Seconded the agenda amendment, the April 10 minutes and the nonpublic motion (the chair names her as seconder at 0:23:08); moved to seal the nonpublic minutes, per the minutes. The draft minutes also credit her with the questions about line balances and policy DBJ, which the dialogue file labels Hawkins. |
| Frank Sprague | SAU 6 Board member; chair of the Superintendent Evaluation Subcommittee | Per the minutes, gave the evaluation subcommittee report and the November and January evaluation milestones. The dialogue file labels that voice Heather Whitney with an uncertainty note; the April 10 minutes name Sprague as the subcommittee’s head with Madden joining, which matches the speaker’s “Bill mad than me [Bill Madden and me]” at 0:17:29. |
| William “Bill” Madden | SAU 6 Board member; voucher reviewer (elected April 10) | Present per the minutes. Named by the chair as one of two members approved to review manifests and vouchers. No separately attributed remarks. |
| Michael Petrin | SAU 6 Board member | Present per the minutes; no attributed remarks. |
| Shannon Popescu | SAU 6 Board member; Unity | Present per the minutes; seconded the motion out of nonpublic session, which is not on the recording. |
| Marjorie Erickson | SAU 6 Board member; Unity | Absent per the minutes |
| Atonya Hart | SAU 6 Board member; Unity | Absent per the minutes (the roll call is transcribed “what’s on your heart”) |
| Loren Howard | SAU 6 Board member; Claremont | Absent per the minutes (transcribed “Laura”) |
| Christopher “Chris” Pratt | Superintendent of Schools, SAU 6 | Presented the FY25 transfers and encumbrances statement on behalf of the business administrator; explained purchase-order coding and the audit timetable. |
| Noelle Kronberg | SAU 6 School Board Clerk | Called the attendance roll and all three roll-call votes, per the minutes, which she submitted. The dialogue file labels her voice Unidentified. |
Named on the record but not present: Mary Henry, Business Administrator (on leave; her figures relayed by Pratt); auditor Michael Campo of Plodzik & Sanderson (transcribed “Mr. Campo”); and a former board member still on the bank account, transcribed “Hauschka” (see flag 3). No members of the public were present. Twenty-five rows of the dialogue file are labeled Unidentified and eight Multiple, most of them motions, seconds and roll-call answers.
Agenda
Items as posted in “SAU#6 School Board Agenda 6.12.25 .docx.pdf”, with the time each was taken up and its disposition from the recording and the draft minutes. Items V and VI were moved ahead of IV by amendment.
| Taken up | Item | Agenda text / disposition |
|---|
| 0:00:00 | I. Call to order & Pledge | Agenda: “6:30PM Call to Order and Pledge of Allegiance.” The recording opens on the chair’s call to rise. |
| 0:00:27 | II. Roll call | Draft minutes: present Crawford, Madden, Petrin, Popescu, Ruggeri, Sprague, Whitney, Hawkins; absent Erickson, Hart, Howard. Eight of eleven. |
| 0:00:55 | II. Agenda amendments | Hawkins: “I’d like to move items, Roman numeral six. Other business on the future dates and future agenda items to Roman numeral four to occur before moving into nonpublic.” Motion at 0:01:16; draft minutes: Ruggeri moved “to move V and VI to be before IV”, Whitney seconded; voice vote, all present in favor. |
| 0:01:31 | II. Minutes of April 10, 2025 | Motion “as presented” at 0:01:39; draft minutes: Ruggeri moved, Whitney seconded; voice vote, all present in favor. The April 10 draft is the minutes document filed in this meeting’s packet. |
| 0:01:54 | II. Citizens’ comments | “I don’t see citizens in the audience present to comment, so we’ll move right to the discussion.” Minutes: “none”. |
| 0:02:05 | III.1 Financial report: transfers and encumbrances, FY25, per policy DBJ | Discussion only. The chair: “It’s it’s information for the board. It’s not an action item.” Packet document SAU6 Financials June 2025_0001.pdf. No vote. |
| 0:14:09 | III.2 Update on financial audits per policy DIE | SAU FY23 audit “almost complete”; auditor status relayed by the chair; the check-signature question left open with an update asked “by September”. No vote. |
| 0:17:17 | III.3 Subcommittee reports | (a) Policy: “We have no report.” (b) Superintendent evaluation: process complete, the next cycle starts “in a couple of months”, a Unity volunteer sought and none offered at 0:18:22. Minutes attribute the report to Sprague. |
| 0:18:46 | VI. Other business: meeting dates 2025–26 moved ahead of IV | Consensus at 0:21:06: “We have three meetings next year November, January and May. The second Thursday of the month.” No vote. The board in fact met again on September 4 and September 11, 2025 (Cablecast shows 16820 and 16833). |
| 0:21:25 | VI. Update on Unity separation / SAU needs for Unity | Ruggeri, per the minutes: an RFP is out and Unity is waiting on responses. No action. |
| 0:22:12 | V. Future dates | Agenda: “SAU meeting in Sept.”; no Claremont meetings in July; Unity School Board July 15 (added on the floor at 0:22:19). |
| 0:22:34 | IV. Nonpublic session, RSA 91-A:3, II (a & c) | The chair names the grounds, “Under Rs 91-A column, three comma, two A and C”; motion at 0:22:54, second at 0:23:06, roll call at 0:23:08. Minutes: Ruggeri moved, Whitney seconded, roll call by Kronberg, all present in favor; entered 6:54 p.m.; out at 7:33 p.m. on Ruggeri’s motion, Popescu seconding, by roll call. See flag 6. |
| 0:23:58 | Motion to seal the nonpublic minutes | The recording resumes mid-motion: “For one year”, a second at 0:24:00, then single “Yes” answers. Minutes: Whitney moved “to seal the minutes for 1 year”, Ruggeri seconded, roll call by Kronberg, all present in favor. No finding recorded. See flag 1. |
| 0:24:14 | VII. Adjournment | Motion at 0:24:16, second at 0:24:18, where the recording ends. Minutes: Ruggeri moved to adjourn at 7:34 p.m., Whitney seconded, all present in favor. |
Discussion timeline
Chronological topics. Quotations are from the dialogue transcript as transcribed; bracketed text is an insertion or correction. Speaker names follow the draft minutes where the two disagree.
| Time | Topic | What was said | Flags |
|---|
| 0:02:21 | No line-to-line transfers | Pratt, relaying Henry: “we don’t have any transfers from line item to line item. We don’t balance it out that way. We just keep it as is. So that’s why, you know, when you take a look, you’ll see negatives”. At 0:02:46: “if you stop moving transfer money from one line item to another, it’s really tough to gauge where you came up short or where you didn’t spend the money.” | POSITIVE |
| 0:03:57 | A positive bottom line | Pratt: “the ones in the red is where it’s negative. It’s negative for that line item because we don’t transfer between them.” He reads a total transcribed “1288 70” at 0:04:11; the packet statement’s “Estimated FY25 Totals” row shows a budget balance of $128,870.56 after $148,090.18 of encumbrances, on a $2,489,151.00 budget. Crawford at 0:04:12: “it shows a positive balance at the end of the year, which is really good.” | |
| 0:04:48 | Using line balances to budget | Crawford: “you’ve got school board, contracted services, you had $10,000 budgeted and we haven’t spent any.” The statement confirms that line at $10,000.00 unspent. Pratt at 0:05:15 averages two or three years of actuals when he budgets. | |
| 0:07:26 | “criticized by the auditors” | A member the draft minutes identify as Whitney (the dialogue file labels the voice Hawkins) asks whether policy DBJ should be modified: “we have been criticized by the auditors for not doing our due diligence, quite frankly.” Crawford at 0:08:03: “I don’t think you should change the policy at this point. I think the policy is fine as is.” | |
| 0:10:18 | Overspending a line | Pratt: “in order to, you know, overspend the line item, there processes in place, checks and balances to make sure that, you know, there’s more than one set of eyes on it.” At 0:11:08: “Mary is the only one that can can say we can overspend this”. At 0:12:29: the system “leaves a digital trail”. | POSITIVE |
| 0:13:04 | Miscoded purchase orders | Pratt: “That was one of the things that Mary and her crew had been taking the past year and a half doing is because things weren’t coded correctly”. Hawkins at 0:13:44: “So they changed the code. It’s to go into an account that had a balance.” Pratt: “Yeah, that was one of them.” Hawkins: “That’s inappropriate.” | POSITIVE |
| 0:14:09 | Audit status | Pratt: “our FY 23 audit is almost complete. And we’ll then then we’ll move forward with the FI24. And additionally the 25 will be completed on time.” Hawkins at 0:14:22, from her talk with the auditor: “in the fall there will be additional audits, and they hope to have everything up to date by 26.” At 0:14:43: “unity 2023 should now be complete, and Claremont 2022 should have just gone out”. | OBSERVATION |
| 0:14:43 | Nobody signing the checks | Hawkins: “in April, there was a discussion with Mr. Campo about the treasurer’s role in electronic signatures and reviewing the check register. And it was our understanding at that time that whoever was the treasurer would sign the checks.” At 0:15:16: “afterward we were told that it cannot be a member of the board who signs the checks. So we don’t have anybody currently signing the check.” | MEDIUM |
| 0:15:53 | A former member still on the account | Crawford: “What I discovered was Hauschka was the signer on the account still”; “he hasn’t been on the board for two years, and he’s still his signature is what’s on the checks and on the account, and that needs to be straightened out.” At 0:16:27: “But I haven’t gotten any update.” Hawkins at 0:16:29: “can we get some kind of an update on that by September?” | MEDIUM |
| 0:16:52 | Voucher reviewers without a procedure | Hawkins: “Mr. Madden and Mr. Ruggieri had been approved to review manifests and vouchers.” At 0:17:01: “So I guess we need direction on how that happens.” Pratt at 0:17:10: “If you want to send me an email. I’ll have it to you before then.” The minutes do not record this exchange. | MEDIUM |
| 0:17:29 | Superintendent evaluation | Sprague, per the minutes: “Our process is complete. So, second year in a row that we have managed to to pull it off”; a new cycle starts “in a couple of months”; “if there’s anyone on the unity board that would like to join us, it’s Bill mad than me [Bill Madden and me].” Asked for a volunteer at 0:18:18, a member answers “Nope.” | OBSERVATION |
| 0:18:46 | How often to meet | Hawkins: “This year we only met every other month. We have a budget so we don’t have to do any budget work because the saw is being dissolved as of July 1st of 26.” At 0:19:16: “I don’t see a need to work on policies.” Crawford at 0:19:33: “Since there’s no budget process to go through.” At 0:20:05: “we could have the audits presented in November as well.” Settled at 0:21:06: November, January and May. | OBSERVATION |
| 0:21:25 | Unity’s separation RFP | Ruggeri, per the minutes: “we put a RFP out and a request for proposal, and we’re waiting on, responses from that as a timeline. So due diligence is in progress.” Crawford asks if it is for supervisory services; the answer at 0:21:53: “It’s for all the services that we would need.” | |
| 0:22:34 | Into nonpublic session | The chair: “Under Rs 91-A column, three comma, two A and C.” The motion at 0:22:54: “I’ll make a motion to move into a non public session per RSA 91-A colon three section two sub A and C.” Roll call at 0:23:08; the answers are captured as overlapping clusters. | POSITIVE |
| 0:23:58 | Sealed for one year | All the recording keeps of the motion is “For one year” and a second, followed by the roll-call answers at 0:24:04–0:24:11. No finding under RSA 91-A:3, III is heard or minuted. | MEDIUM |
Items flagged for review
These flags are a reviewer’s aid. They are not findings of violation and not legal advice. Each flag cites the rule it rests on; an Observation rests on no confirmed rule.
MEDIUM The nonpublic minutes were sealed for a year with no statutory finding on the record
RSA 91-A:3, III requires nonpublic minutes to be disclosed within 72 hours unless, by “recorded vote of 2/3 of the members present taken in public session,” the body determines that disclosure would likely affect adversely the reputation of a person other than a member, render a proposed action ineffective, or pertain to terrorism. The board took the vote in public by roll call, which satisfies the procedure. Neither record contains the determination: the recording keeps only “For one year” at 0:23:58, and the draft minutes read “Heather Whitney made a motion to seal the minutes for 1 year, Rocco Ruggeri seconded the motion” with the roll call and nothing more. Ground (c), reputation, was among the two grounds for the session, so a finding may have been intended; the record does not say so. The year ran out on June 12, 2026. MAP.md lists no released copy of the nonpublic minutes.
Sources: RSA 91-A:3, III (seal only by recorded 2/3 vote in public session with a stated determination; 2023, 189:1, eff. Oct. 3, 2023); draft minutes, item IV.
MEDIUM The earliest copy of these minutes in the district’s share is dated five months after the meeting, and both copies are still drafts
RSA 91-A:2, II requires minutes to be “open to public inspection not more than 5 business days after the meeting.” This meeting’s own packet folder holds the April 10 minutes, not these. The June 12 minutes appear only in two later folders: a Google Doc in 10. SAU6 9.11.25 and a PDF in 12. SAU6 11.13.25. Drive records both files as created on November 12, 2025, 153 days after the meeting and the day before the November 13 meeting; the Doc sits in a September folder although it was created in November. The minutes existed earlier in some form: at the September 4 SAU meeting the chair postponed approval of the June 12 minutes because members had received them electronically and had not reviewed them (Cablecast show 16820), and they were tabled again on September 11 (show 16833). This page applies the MEDIUM limb of the project’s missing-records rule: the meeting was noticed and packeted, and minutes exist; what the record does not show is public availability within five business days. A Drive creation date can reflect a re-upload, so it is evidence of late filing, not proof. No approved version was located; both copies are marked DRAFT.
Sources: RSA 91-A:2, II (minutes open to inspection within 5 business days; 2023, 188:1); Drive metadata for the two minutes files, read 2026-09-25; SAU 6 Board, September 4, 2025; SAU 6 Board, September 11, 2025.
MEDIUM No authorized check signer, a former board member’s signature still on the account, and voucher reviewers with no procedure
In April the auditor had advised that, because the board meets irregularly, an electronic signature was sensible provided the treasurer reviews the check register, and the business administrator said the person on the account “will be the treasurer” (April 10 draft minutes). By June the board had been told “it cannot be a member of the board who signs the checks”, leaving, in the chair’s words at 0:15:16, nobody “currently signing the check.” The treasurer then reported at 0:15:53 that the signer of record is a former board member who “hasn’t been on the board for two years.” The transcript renders the name “Hauschka”; the project’s ASR glossary records “Hauschka” as a rendering of Steven Horsky, elected SAU 6 chair in March 2023 and gone by that summer, which fits the timing, but no document names the signer. The two voucher reviewers elected in April had no procedure (“we need direction on how that happens”, 0:17:01). The board asked for an update by September and adopted no interim control. RSA 194-C:5, I requires the SAU board to choose a treasurer, which it did; no located statute prescribes SAU disbursement controls, so the school-district rule is offered as the governing principle: district money is paid out “only upon orders of the school board” or of members it empowers. Six days later the Claremont board’s finance subcommittee brought forward a policy DGA revision requiring an annual report of authorized signers (see the June 18, 2025 page).
Sources: RSA 194-C:5, I (SAU board chooses a chairperson, secretary and treasurer); RSA 197:23-a (district treasurer pays only on orders of the board or its empowered members); 4.10.25 DRAFT SAU6 Board Meeting Minutes (1).pdf.
OBSERVATION SAU audits years behind, with no statutory deadline in force
The report at 0:14:09–0:14:43: the SAU’s FY23 audit “almost complete”, FY24 next, Unity’s 2023 audit “should now be complete”, Claremont’s 2022 “should have just gone out”, and the auditor “wants everybody to be current by 2026.” In April the auditor had presented the SAU’s FY2021 audit. RSA 194-C:4, II(a) lists audits among the services an SAU must provide, but on this meeting date no located statute set a deadline for an SAU audit: RSA 21-J:19 is permissive and names towns and school districts, not SAUs. From July 1, 2026, 2026 N.H. Laws ch. 272 (SB 586) reenacted RSA 198:4-d so that ¶VI requires independent audits of SAUs and ¶VIII requires the audit report “within 9 months of the end of the fiscal year”; that law postdates this meeting and is noted only as context. The board planned to hear audits in November; in fact it met again in September.
Sources: RSA 194-C:4, II(a) (audits among SAU services); RSA 21-J:19 (permissive; towns, school districts, village districts); 2026 N.H. Laws ch. 272 (SB 586), approved July 2, 2026, eff. July 1, 2026.
OBSERVATION The board planned three meetings for Unity’s last year, reasoning that the SAU was “being dissolved”
The chair’s reasoning at 0:18:46 was that no budget work was needed “because the saw is being dissolved as of July 1st of 26”, and the draft minutes record “since the SAU is dissolving, there is no budget process to go through.” The legal mechanism any record identifies is Unity’s withdrawal under RSA 194-C:2, IV, approved by Unity voters in March 2025; at a later SAU 6 meeting (April 9, 2026) the chair said on tape that the SAU is not dissolving and would continue with Claremont alone. The plan of November, January and May meetings (0:21:06) would have left the check-signer and audit items in flag 3 and flag 4 without a board meeting for five months, and the evaluation subcommittee without a Unity member (0:17:29). The plan did not hold: the board met on September 4 and September 11, 2025. No located rule sets how often an SAU board meets beyond the annual meeting in RSA 194-C:5, I.
Sources: RSA 194-C:2, IV (withdrawal from an SAU); RSA 194-C:5, I; draft minutes, item VI.
POSITIVE The nonpublic motion stated its exemptions, the vote was by roll call, and the minutes print the grounds in full
RSA 91-A:3, I(b) requires the motion to “state on its face the specific exemption under paragraph II” and the vote to be by roll call. The chair named II(a) and (c) before the motion (0:22:34), the mover repeated them (0:22:54), and the clerk took the roll (0:23:08). The agenda and the draft minutes print the text of both subparagraphs. Exit and sealing were also by roll call.
Sources: RSA 91-A:3, I(b), II(a), II(c); agenda and draft minutes, item IV.
POSITIVE Year-end line variances shown rather than moved, with a packet statement that ties to the spoken total
The administration presented the FY25 statement with overspent lines left negative instead of covered by transfers (0:02:21), so the board can see where each budget line missed. The spoken total at 0:04:11 matches the packet statement’s $128,870.56 budget balance, and the board’s one example, the unspent $10,000 school-board contracted-services line, matches too. The superintendent described a year and a half of work correcting purchase orders that had been coded to whatever line still had money (0:13:04), with overspending now approved by the business administrator and leaving a digital record. The board’s own policy DBJ is the standard; the practice supports the audit catch-up in flag 4.
Sources: SAU6 Financials June 2025_0001.pdf; draft minutes, item III.1.
Appendix — source files
Official and public sources
Project files
Working files this page was built from. The dialogue file is linked; the others are not published with the page.
Dialogue/16596 SAU6-061225.mp4.CSV (193 rows)Input/Videos/16596 SAU6-061225.mp4Input/Transcripts/16596 SAU6-061225.mp4.jsonInput/SupportingDocuments/MAP.md, section 87
Laws and rules cited on this page
- Right-to-Know: RSA 91-A:2, II (2023, 188:1); RSA 91-A:3, I(b), II(a), II(c), III (2023, 189:1, eff. Oct. 3, 2023)
- SAUs: RSA 194-C:2, IV; RSA 194-C:4, II(a); RSA 194-C:5, I (1996, 298:3)
- School money and audits: RSA 197:23-a; RSA 21-J:19
- Session law (context only; postdates the meeting): 2026 N.H. Laws ch. 272 (SB 586), RSA 198:4-d, VI and VIII as reenacted