Financial audits reveal Claremont schools' long-term struggles

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CLAREMONT — After years of experience in corporate accounting, Tim Ball started work in public education finance in 2012, when he became business administrator for SAU 6, which then oversaw schools in Claremont, Cornish and Unity.

He quickly discovered he was in a different world from the propane companies he’d crunched numbers for in his previous job.

“I found there was a lot I needed to learn when I first got there,” Ball said in a recent interview.

SAU 6 Interim Superintendent Kerry Kennedy explains a proposal for consolidating schools in Claremont, N.H. during a Claremont School Board meeting on Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2025 in Claremont.
JENNIFER HAUCK / Valley News

The complexities of school finance are unlike for-profit business. Revenues come from a wide range of sources, federal, state and local, and federal grant funding requires a great deal of reporting back to state education authorities, who ensure compliance with federal law and rules.

It was daunting at first, Ball said, but he had help. Allen Damren, who’d been business administrator for 17 years that saw momentous change in Claremont’s schools, was his immediate predecessor, and was available for consultation. David Putnam, a longtime chairman of the Claremont School Board, was stepping down, but was still overseeing the books of the Stevens High School renovation.

Ball also was assisted by regular independent audits, including a “really thorough audit in 2013.”

“They helped me a lot in making sure the books were clean,” said Ball, who moved to SAU 88, in Lebanon, at the end of the 2013-14 school year.

It wasn’t long after he left that Claremont School District’s financial management and oversight started to decline.

Stevens High School students Caroline Collazo-Vega, left, Albany Amell, Chelsea Kowalski, and Tori Wilson-Howe prepare for the school’s holiday concert for Maple Avenue Elementary School students on Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2025 in Claremont, N.H. Earlier in the year, extracurricular programs like music were at risk of being cut to close a budget deficit. JENNIFER HAUCK / Valley News

A decade later, the Claremont School District’s finances are in disarray. It led to a liquidity crisis that made it unclear in August whether the district could open its schools as scheduled.

So far, accountants have discovered a $5 million gap between what the district thought it could spend and what it had on hand. This gap is attributable, school officials have said, to lax federal grant reporting that led the district to account for and spend federal funds it didn’t have or couldn’t be reimbursed for.

The School Board didn’t name a permanent replacement for Ball until January 2015, when it hired Michael O’Neill, an employee of Municipal Resources Inc., a consulting firm.

The audit for fiscal year 2015 wasn’t completed and delivered to the district until January 2019, and that audit highlighted problems the district has struggled to correct. From there, things seemed to stay on a mostly downward trajectory.

While several people who were in charge of Claremont’s school finances since 2015 either could not be reached or did not return messages seeking comment, a review of the available audits and state documents and interviews with present and former school officials reveal a broken system of financial oversight in a school district that can ill afford to mismanage its scarce funding.

Further, the district’s audits for fiscal years 2023 through 2025 have not been completed, and a forensic audit, to determine whether fraud has been committed, is ongoing.

While school officials won’t know for several months what those investigations might uncover, there is more than enough for them to sort out in the meantime.

Maple Avenue Elementary School teachers Alicia Simino, left, and Tammy Yates attend a Claremont School Board meeting on Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2025 in Claremont, N.H. Both women had been teaching at Bluff Elementary School before the district closed Bluff during the school year and moved them to Maple.
JENNIFER HAUCK / Valley News

The annual audit

Each year, every municipality and public school district in New Hampshire has its finances audited. State law is convoluted on this point, but the state Department of Revenue Administration interprets it to mean that audits are required and must be filed with the DRA, Jennifer Ramsey, tax policy counsel at the DRA, said in an interview.

It wasn’t until 2022 that state law authorized DRA to fine districts that didn’t submit an audit, Ramsey said.

School districts close their books on June 30, and the audit generally takes place in the fall or winter. The aim is to be able to present the audit of the past year as part of the annual report to the public in advance of annual meetings in March.

“An auditor, as a third party, comes in and makes sure you’re following the rules … and that your numbers make sense,” said Ball, who is still business administrator in Lebanon and also is president of the New Hampshire Association of School Business Officials, an organization that provides business administrator certification and training for school district financial staff.

Matt Angell, interim business administrator for the Claremont School District, discussed the district’s proposals for school consolidation on Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2025 in Claremont, N.H.
JENNIFER HAUCK / Valley News

Ball’s predecessor, Damren, served the district from 1995 to 2012. Damren said he generally ensured an audit was completed by February or March and in the hands of the School Board before the end of the school year.

If “you’re not having an audit done from year to year, then you’re missing things,” Damren, who went on to serve on the City Council, said in a phone interview. He declined to talk about the current financial problems, but agreed to speak generally about how school finances are managed.

An audit looks at a school district’s finances broadly, he said. “People need to understand that an audit is not going to examine every single transaction that comes through a school district business office,” he said. Such a review “would cost a fortune.”

The aim of an audit is to make sure a public body has proper financial controls in place and has properly accounted for public funds for the year under scrutiny. They were routine enough in the Claremont School District that they escaped the notice of even longtime board members.

“I don’t remember reviewing audits, even in my earlier time on the board,” said Brian Rapp, who served on the board from 2010 to 2017. “The audits came in, everything was good,” he said. “I don’t remember the board being that involved.”

Damren said he benefited from having an office of four or five experienced people, including accounts supervisor Ann Dieter, who reported to him, a general accountant who reported to Dieter, and two people handling accounts payable and payroll.

Handing off the completed audit to the school board is an essential part of the process, both Damren and Ball said. The business office is accountable to the school board. And the school board is accountable to voters, who also should examine audits of the public bodies they oversee.

Stevens High School music teacher Taylor Trudeau leads her students in “Frosty The Snowman” during a holiday concert on Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2025 in Claremont, N.H. The concert was at the high school for students from Maple Avenue Elementary School. JENNIFER HAUCK / Valley News

Audits delayed

The SAU 6 office was unable to locate the audits from 2012 to 2014, but the audit from 2015 showed an adverse finding.

Any adverse finding on an audit is a serious matter, Ball said, something the business office should work quickly to rectify, and that school board members should be overseeing.

“If I was a school board member, I would want an action plan for how you were going to correct it,” Ball said.

The adverse opinion involved how the district accounts for health care costs for retirees.

“(M)anagement has not updated the valuation of the long-term costs of retirement health care costs and obligations for other postemployment benefits,” the audit says. As a result, the impact of those costs on the district’s balance sheet was “not readily determinable.”

Every audit for fiscal years 2015 to 2022 features an adverse finding in this area. It is not entirely clear whether the School Board looked at those audits, all of which were delivered nearly three years after the school district closed its books on the fiscal year under audit.

The 2015 audit included other troubling findings. The fund for the Stevens High School renovation project was overspent by around $420,000. SAU staff were not reconciling the district’s books on a monthly basis, which could lead to “unreliable financial reports” and open the door to “misappropriation of funds.” (There is no evidence that funds were misappropriated.)

Four of the five people in the business office in 2015 were recent hires, the audit noted, and they were implementing fixes to the district’s financial processes, though it’s worth recalling that the fiscal year 2015 audit wasn’t delivered to the district until January 2019.

The turnover around this time went deeper than the business office. Superintendent Jacqueline Guillette had stepped down in 2011 after nine years, and was replaced by Middleton McGoodwin. School Board Chairman David Putnam ended his 17 years on the board in 2013, and longtime Stevens Principal Paul Couture retired in 2012.

Michael Herrington, the principal of Stevens High School scans the QR code for the district’s proposals for consolidation of schools in Claremont, during a school board meeting on Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2025 in Claremont, N.H. Beside him on his left is his wife Michelle Herrington, the Director of the Sugar River Valley Technical Center. To his right is State Rep. Hope Damon, D-Croydon, who has been following the situation in Claremont. JENNIFER HAUCK / Valley News

The loss of expertise and continuity amid the turnover was considerable, Putnam said. And the turnover continued in both the business office and on the School Board.

While professional staff are responsible for the district’s finances, elected School Board members are the district’s final authority when it comes to financial oversight. Claremont School District’s accounting firm, Plodzik and Sanderson, addressed its audits directly to the School Board.

In prior years, the annual audit was “always presented to the board in a public meeting,” Putnam said in a phone interview. As chairman, he also met with the auditors every year to hear their findings.

Though the books were generally well managed, Putnam said, the auditors also noted that the business office staff was too small and there was “too much multitasking.”

Frank Sprague, a School Board member first elected in 2016, said he didn’t know why the audits weren’t performed annually after 2014.

“I had no sense of why it was put off,” Sprague said in a phone interview. “I think it was just one of those things where it was just an oversight.”

As volunteers, Sprague said, board members generally believe professional staff when they say that “everything’s OK.”

Usually, audits are scheduled a year in advance, Ball said. When the audit firm is on site, they often will ask if the business office wants to schedule for the same week next year, he said.

O’Neill, the SAU 6 business manager from 2015 into 2019, could not be reached for comment. Municipal Resources declined to put a reporter in touch with O’Neill.

Maple Avenue Elementary School third-grader Kashton Kirk watches the Stevens High School holiday concert on Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2025 in Claremont, N.H. After a large shortfall in the school budget, programs like music were at risk of being cut.
JENNIFER HAUCK / Valley News

Financial problems began to crop up more visibly in 2019, not long after the 2015 and 2016 audits were delivered. Claremont missed out on two years’ worth of federal school lunch reimbursement, totaling $350,000, an oversight that led to O’Neill’s departure. The district hired Richard Seaman, a former Claremont School Board chairman and former business administrator at the Windsor Central Supervisory Union (now known as Mountain Views Supervisory Union), in October 2019.

A detail from when Seaman was hired illuminates the financial reality behind the Claremont district’s struggles. There were four vacant positions at the SAU at the time, and Mike Tempesta, who became superintendent in July 2019, said that two of them would not be filled. He and Seaman would share the human resources director position between them.

The savings from not filling those jobs would enable the district to hire a social studies teacher and a science teacher for Claremont Middle School, so students could get a full year of each subject.

Putnam said he did not want to absolve the local leaders who lost track of the district’s finances, but the state’s inequitable school funding system should take a share of the blame.

“One of the responsibilities here is the state’s responsibility for funding education,” he said. “The state is just as complicit in this.”

Erica Abbey speaks to the Claremont School Board during a meeting on Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2025 in Claremont, N.H. Abbey, who has a daughter with Down syndrome at Stevens High School, feels the school district has not been inclusive in the treatment of her daughter.
JENNIFER HAUCK / Valley News

If the auditor was concerned about multitasking during Damren’s tenure, what would it say now, with the business administrator also acting as part-time human resources director?

In finding that the district still wasn’t reconciling its accounts monthly and wasn’t presenting payment manifests and expenses to the School Board regularly, the auditors noted in the 2019 audit (which is dated July 14, 2022) that, “The SAU has gone through significant staffing changes since the 2017-18 school year.”

The most recent audit

Audits are written in a dry, bureaucratic language that can be hard to interpret and absorb. By this year, though, when Plodzik and Sanderson delivered the audit for fiscal year 2022, less varnish was applied. The portrait the document paints of the district’s finances is of a complete shambles, too disorganized to properly audit, including: A budget that didn’t reflect “expected actual revenues and expenditures”; no interim financial reporting to the School Board; inadequate record retention; account balances unsupported by financial records; and gaps in grant reporting.

“Specifically, extensive turnover in management and those charged with governance during and after the audited period resulted in the absence of individuals with knowledge of the financial activities and record-keeping for that period,” reads the draft audit, which is available on the SAU 6 website. “In addition, inadequate or missing documentation existed to support material account balances and transactions. These circumstances prevented us from verifying the accuracy and completeness of the financial information provided and from performing necessary audit procedures.”

The draft 2022 audit, completed this year but not dated, found that the district had applied around $1 million in unassigned fund balance from the previous year to the 2022 budget. But the district did not have that money. The actual fund balance was negative: The district was $29,000 in the hole. Officials made a similar miscalculation the following year, deepening the deficit.

The 2022 audit also makes clear that SAU 6 did not have effective financial controls in place to manage compliance with federal grant requirements.

The strings attached to federal funding are numerous and complicated, Ball said. A school district has to report in great detail to the state how federal money was spent. The increased aid to schools during the COVID pandemic only made these requirements more burdensome. The understaffed SAU 6 office appeared unable to keep up, both the 2022 audit and state records show.

Letters from the New Hampshire Department of Education from 2021 to 2025 take an increasingly stern approach. On May 5, 2023, a letter from then-Commissioner Frank Edelblut to Tempesta noted that federal grants worth nearly $5 million were due to lapse if the money was not reported on and spent by Sept. 30. An attached spreadsheet shows more than $12 million in unspent grant funding at the time.

“There are 25 grants that are 100% unspent and it is unclear, despite multiple attempts by the department to reach out to the district business office and administration as to the reason the district is not submitting financial reports for payment,” the letter says.

The spreadsheet also noted the lack of completed audits for fiscal years 2020 through 2022.

After the SAU 6 board fired Tempesta in January 2024, the state’s letters were addressed to then-interim Superintendent Chris Pratt, who was in place until he resigned in September 2025.

In April 2024, the DOE told Pratt that the Claremont district’s “failure to comply” with federal reporting requirements meant that the DOE was “required to withhold federal funding as a remedy of noncompliance” until the district could document how federal funds are being spent. The district submitted corrective action plans, but on Aug. 5, 2024, the DOE wrote back to say that those plans were insufficient.

By October, the state had accepted the action plans, and warned the district that it had until Dec. 30, 2024, to implement them.

State compliance officials met with SAU staff in February 2025 and issued a 60-page report on July 7 that lays out in painstaking detail the work required to come into full compliance. Many of the points are similar to what the 2022 audit found, such as proper record retention and accounting for wages paid with federal money.

Mary Henry, who was hired in 2023 to replace Seaman, filed several corrective action plans with the state on July 21. A month later, after the deficit came to light, Henry was placed on administrative leave. She negotiated a termination agreement with the SAU in November.

Messages left for Henry were not returned. Specific questions to the state DOE this week about how much federal money Claremont was unable to recoup were met with an anodyne statement about how the state is supporting the city during its financial crisis.

Plodzik and Sanderson declined to put a reporter in touch with Michael Campo, the auditor working with Claremont school officials.

It’s possible that after a decade of relatively steady leadership through 2014, school district officials had grown complacent about the rigors of financial oversight.

Rapp, the former board member, said that during his time on the board, the focus was on trying to improve the district’s test scores. Financial discussions centered not on the nuts and bolts, but on what the district could improve with its limited resources, he said.

“I know that the cost to the taxpayers was always on our minds,” he said. The news of the deficit shocked him, he said. One of his children is still a student in the district, and the new financial constraints are troubling.

“You don’t have enough teachers to do the classes that you want,” Rapp said. Students are “not going to get that time back.”

A way forward

Candace Crawford served on the Claremont School Board from 1991 to 2002, and was chairwoman for six of those years.

After a couple of decades away, she started attending meetings again four or five years ago to oppose a plan to cut the leadership of the Sugar River Technical Center to part-time, a plan the district dropped.

She noticed that the board wasn’t getting year-to-date reports on the budget and wasn’t looking at spending manifests, basic responsibilities for school and municipal government boards.

“Other board members hadn’t had the experience of seeing those,” Crawford said in a phone interview.

She also started asking for audit reports. It was not clear to her whether the board had examined them.

Crawford, who has an MBA from the University of New Hampshire and had a long career in banking, wanted to know more about the district’s finances. She returned to the board in 2023 and now chairs its finance subcommittee.

Though there is more to discover, she is more focused on how the district moves forward. The lax oversight created a dark void at the heart of the district, one that invites wild speculation, and there’s no shortage of it on social media.

In interviews, she declined to speculate about what the future holds. The remaining annual audits, for 2023 through 2025, should be done in the next three to six months, she said. There’s no timetable for the forensic audit.

Digging out of this hole is going to be long and labor-intensive.

Matt Angell, the interim business administrator, is working seven days a week, including on politically difficult budget proposals that would further consolidate the district’s schools. He declined an interview request.

The district put out a statement on Nov. 19 that outlines the financial controls the district is implementing, including dual authorization for all bank transactions and an automated accountability system for payments.

District officials, including the School Board, are taking advantage of training opportunities, Crawford said, which are available through the state and through organizations such as the New Hampshire School Boards Association.

“I’m less focused on finding out who did what and more on how we can put systems in place to eliminate that from happening again,” Crawford said.

Financial audits reveal Claremont schools’ long-term struggles

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