Claremont School Board (part 2 of 2) — December 6, 2017
Second part of the December 6 regular meeting, summarized from the CCTV recording and its speaker-attributed transcript; no agenda, packet or minutes are online, and the opening of the meeting is on separate recordings. The administration walked the board through its proposed reductions line by line: a security grant, an unfilled maintenance position, an elementary section, a school psychologist, special education teachers, Stevens English and world-language positions, and a $42,800 school resource officer line that had been left out. Administrators said the reductions would hurt; two resignations were accepted. Timestamps link to the same moment in the Cablecast recording.
Body
Claremont School Board (SAU 6)
Date
Wednesday, December 6, 2017. CCTV's record for this upload carries an event date of December 8 (MAP.md section 51); the content continues the December 6 meeting.
Start time
Not on this recording, which begins mid-discussion at 0:00:00 and ends at 0:57:30 during the vote on two resignations. A member says a nonpublic session was still to come (0:53:51).
Location
Not stated in any available record.
Recording
Cablecast: PART 2 OF 2 -- SCHOOL BOARD MEETING OF 12-6 (dialogue file runs 0:57:30). The same meeting is also in Cablecast shows 9495 (full) and 9496 (part 1), which this page does not cover. CCTV's show metadata was not fetched.
Minutes
None located in the district's public shares as of September 26, 2026; the shares' year folders begin in 2022 (MAP.md section 51). On December 20, 2017 the board approved "minutes from December 6th" with "an addendum" for the nonpublic session (Cablecast show 9507), so minutes were kept.
Board composition
Seven members: Brian Rapp (chair), Chris Irish (vice chair), Alex Herzog, Michael Petrin, Michelle Pierce, Frank Sprague, Rebecca Zullo (project roster). No roll call is on this part; Herzog and Zullo are not identified speaking, and two board voices remain unidentified.
Participants
Everyone in the record of this part. Names follow the dialogue CSV; where the CSV says Unidentified, this page says unidentified. Several identifications rest on content or floor control and are marked with the attribution report's confidence. ASR renderings are shown in code.
Name
Role
Participation
Brian Rapp
Chair (identification rests on floor control only; rated low-medium)
Asked administrators whether they were comfortable with the reductions; called the resignation vote.
Chris Irish
Vice Chair (rated medium)
Questioned the security grant, school psychologist costs and the SRO line; proposed another work session.
Michelle Pierce
Board member (rated medium-high)
Asked many questions on staffing, caseloads and online courses; spoke for taxpayers at the close.
Frank Sprague
Board member (rated medium)
Asked about class size and the A/B schedule; moved to accept the resignations (uncertain).
Michael Petrin
Board member (rated medium-high)
Asked about the psychologist shift to contracted services and the English cut.
Alex Herzog, Rebecca Zullo
Board members
Not identified speaking in this part.
Unidentified
Two board members
One mentions "my own grandson", another a 14-year-old at home; the attribution report could not name them.
Middleton McGoodwin
Superintendent, SAU 6
Framed each reduction; had sent a saturation study earlier that week.
Cory LeClair
Assistant Superintendent, SAU 6 (content-based identification, rated medium)
Explained grant limits, staffing and SAT costs.
Michael O'Neill
Business Administrator, SAU 6
Maintenance position, the SRO add-back, field and athletic lines.
Josh Malloy
SAU 6 technology (Joshua; surname per the roster)
Reported security grant applications.
Chris
SAU 6 special education administrator (surname not stated)
School psychologist, special education staffing and behavior needs.
Ben
Stevens High School assistant principal and special education coordinator (first name only)
Spoke to special education teachers and caseloads.
Melissa Lewis
Principal, Disnard Elementary
Explained the reduction of one grade from three sections to two.
Patricia Barry
Principal, Stevens High School (Pat Berry)
Identified the Stevens positions and their effects; accreditation reporting.
Christine
Staff member (first name only)
Spoke to reading intervention and the English position.
Charlie Gessner
Speaker on the A/B schedule (Charlie Jester; identification uncertain, role not stated)
Explained the schedule's effect on world-language enrollment.
Lexi Grenier
Student, Stevens High School
Gave a student view on schedules and online courses.
Order of business (reconstructed)
No agenda is posted in any district share, and the recording begins mid-item. This list is reconstructed from the transitions on this part only. Hover over (or Tab to) a clipped entry for the full text.
Ashley Kale (Valley Regional Hospital partnership) and Karen Corona, speech and language pathologist. "We accept the two resignations with regret." (0:56:34); carried on a voice vote (0:57:23).
Discussion timeline
Chronological, from the dialogue CSV. Each time is the start of the cited row, from the CSV's own second count. Hover over (or Tab to) a clipped cell for the full entry.
Malloy: "everything that I've applied for, it's about 683,000 from the state, 819,000 from feds and 195 local." Irish: "technology will not make them safer." (0:01:11).
Lewis: "we could reduce three sections to two sections"; "It would not this cut would not impact any current designer teacher, because we expect that we could cover that cut through attrition." (0:03:48).
Petrin: "So you go from 106 to 55." (0:09:48). McGoodwin: "I've been in central office 17 years. I have never experienced the intensity and frequency of little boys and girls behavioral issues that we now have in our community." (0:09:52).
McGoodwin: "Two spent teachers at Stevens High School. In our preference it would only be one." Ben: "our obligation is to provide a free and appropriate public education by law to kids with disabilities." (0:16:34).
Rapp asked whether they would "actually feel comfortable reducing one of these positions". Ben: "I think we can get by and continue to provide a free and appropriate public education. If we reduced by one." (0:23:20). Chris: "I'm responding to a to a directive and and it and it hurts." (0:23:33); "I don't recommend it." (0:24:16).
McGoodwin: "Earlier this week, I sent you a saturation study after looking at your November 29th school board budget study session." Three Stevens teachers were on the table; "our adjustment would be to reduce by two staff."
Barry: "English is one I got, the foreign language is another. And the third would be the social studies sped position that has been vacated through a resignation."
Barry: the English cut "would have the least impact"; "We've eliminated virtually all electives in the English department." (0:39:11). Christine on reading intervention (0:37:15).
Barry: the "substantive change policy" requires reporting reductions, which may lead the accreditor to "determine whether they still feel we should maintain our accreditation".
O'Neill: "The next line item is actually an ad back"; "it's basically a school resource officer of 42,800." "I didn't put the budget in that line. So I'm just putting it back in." (0:47:07). Irish: "Mike missed it. We'll go with that." (0:48:17).
Irish: "I think we should have a meeting next week." "I'm kind of seeing our next meeting is more or less another work study" (0:52:45). Chair: "Try to get some dates? Yeah. That'll work. And send them out to the board" (0:55:34).
Pierce: "I've heard a few times, people mentioned that with the cuts, it's only going to be, you know, $200 a year"; "$200 a year could make a big difference for people." (0:56:58).
Items flagged for review
Flags are a reviewer's aid generated by comparing the meeting against the state law in force on December 6, 2017. They are not findings of violation and nothing here is legal advice. Each flag cites the rule it rests on; where no verified rule applies, the flag says so and is recorded as an observation. No HIGH or MEDIUM flag was found. Because this recording is only part of the meeting, matters on the other recordings (call to order, roll call, the nonpublic session) are not assessed here.
OBSERVATION No agenda, packet or minutes are online; the record shows minutes were kept and approved two weeks later
RSA 91-A:2, II, in the text in force for 2017, required minutes including "the names of members, persons appearing before the public bodies, and a brief description of the subject matter discussed and final decisions", open to inspection within five business days, and notice of each meeting at least 24 hours ahead. None of the agenda, the administration's reduction document the members are reading from, or the minutes is in the district's public shares, which begin in 2022; that is a limit of what the district posts online, not evidence they did not exist. On December 20 the board approved the December 6 minutes with an addendum for the nonpublic session (Cablecast show 9507). The work session members proposed here (0:52:45) would itself be a meeting needing notice; scheduling it through the superintendent (0:55:34) is logistics, not deliberation. Graded an observation under the project's rule for missing records.
POSITIVE Administrators set out each reduction's effect in public, gave the board the underlying study in advance, and corrected their own error openly
The board received a saturation study before the meeting (0:27:49), and principals and program heads explained, position by position, what each reduction would do, including when they did not recommend it (0:23:20, 0:23:33, 0:24:16, 0:36:19). The business administrator disclosed that a $42,800 school resource officer line had been left out of the document and restored it on the record (0:47:07). No statute located for this page requires this level of position-by-position disclosure at a budget work session; it goes beyond the minimum that RSA 91-A:2, II's minutes requirement and RSA 32:5's single public hearing secure, and it gives voters a public record of the trade-offs before the hearing.
Other recordings of the same meeting: Cablecast show 9495 ("SCHOOL BOARD MEETING 12-6-17", the full meeting) and Cablecast show 9496 ("PART 1 OF 2 -- SCHOOL BOARD MEETING OF 12-6-17"), MAP.md sections 49 and 50.
No agenda, packet or minutes for this meeting is in the district's public Drive shares, whose year folders begin in 2022 (MAP.md section 51, checked 9/26/26).
Related page: December 20, 2017 (these minutes approved; budget voted).
Project files (the dialogue file is linked; the others are not published with the pages)