Paul Dargie

Milford Voting Results 3/8/2011

2011-03-08T22:28:00.005-05:00

These are the results from the 3/8/2011 vote:

There were 2001 voters.

School Ballot

School Board
1224 Paul Dargie - elected
855 Kevin Drew - elected
798 Carolyn Magri Halstead
340 Jim Rumson

Question 1 Operating Budget yes 984 no 988 failed

Question 2 Collective Bargaining Agreement - MEPA yes 1318 no 641 passed

Question 3 Special meeting if question 2 is defeated yes 1364 no 559 passed

Question 4 Property Acquisition yes 616 no 1330 failed

Question 5 Creation of a joint services study committee yes 1531 no 416 passed

Town Ballot

Election of Officers

Selectmen
1245 Mike Putnam - elected
1224 Kathy Bauer - elected
673 Kevin Taylor

Cemetery Trustee
1576 Len Harten - elected

Trustee of the Trust Funds
1507 Ed Killam - elected

Library Trustee
1464 Sarah Philbrick-Sandhage - elected
1241 Michael Tule - elected

Water/Wastewater Commissioner
1618 Bob courage - elected

Article 2 - Zoning Questions (all questions passed)
1 Residential small structure setbacks yes 1248 no 624
2 Zoning Ordinance definitions yes 1464 no 370
3 Definitions: liquid petroleum products in groundwater protection district yes 1537 no 302
4 Residence A district special exception uses yes 1298 no 514
5 Residence B district special exception uses yes 1341 no 463
6 Residence R district acceptable uses and special exception yes 1292 no 508
7 Commerical district acceptable uses and special exceptions yes 1325 no 460
8 Industrial district uses and special exceptions yes 1391 no 428
9 LCB district acceptable uses and special exceptions yes 1364 no 443
10 ICI district acceptable uses and special exceptions yes 1367 no 436
11 ICI-2 district acceptable uses and special exceptions yes 1310 no 441
12 Special exception criteria for offices in residence A and B yes 1247 no 503
13 Sign ordinance definiitons yes 1283 no 478
14 Wall signs and price numbering signs yes 1170 no 591
15 Monument signs and price numbering signs yes 1215 no 538
16 Price numbering signs yes 1238 no 550
17 Off premise signs yes 1310 no 480
18 Event signage yes 1317 no 491
19 Electronic message centers yes 1038 no 782
20 Senior housing development definitions yes 1497 no 321
21 Wetlands conservation district yes 1285 no 486
22 Open space and conservation zoing district yes 1323 no 428

Article 3 Fire/Ambulance facility lands acquisition & vacant building demolition $530,000 (60% majority needed) yes 963 no 964 failed

Article 4 Fire/ambulance facility architectural & engineering plans $250,000 (60% majority needed)yes 810 no 1109 failed

Article 5 Water utilities department - sanitary sewer system rehabilitation $270,000 (60% majority needed) yes 1401 no 499 passed

Article 6 Union street water main replacement project $246,000 (60% majority needed) yes 1379 no 528 passed

Article 7 Operating budget $11,708,252 yes 868 no 1043 failed

Article 8 Wastewater treatment operating budget $1,735,642 yes 1406 no 501 passed

Article 9 Water department operating budget $1,381,757 yes 1393 no 486 passed

Article 10 Route 101A / Route 13 / Oval improvements grant $155,000 yes 1372 no 576 passed

Article 11 Public works tractor / loader / backhoe $135,000 yes 778 no 1147 failed

Article 12 Route 13 South / Emerson road / Armory road intersection improvement $90,000 yes 1136 no 771 passed

Article 13 Social Services $35,000 yes 1396 no 513 passed

Article 14 Non-emergency community transportation bus service $35,000 yes 1473 no 459 passed

Article 15 Pumpkin festival, holiday decoration and plantings $20,000 yes 1265 no 660 passed

Article 16 DO-IT operating budget support $20,000 yes 1212 no 691 passed

Article 17 Conservation lands fund $10,000 yes 1253 no 657 passed

Article 18 Summer band concerts $9,000 yes 1193 no 726 passed

Article 19 Memorial, Veterans & labor day parade town support $6,000 yes 1460 no 470 passed

Article 20 Establishment of the Brox properties public infrastructure improvement fund $0 yes 819 no 1048 failed

Article 21 Diversion of proceeds of sale of former police station property $0 yes 928 no 966 failed

Article 22 Modification of authorization for Selectmen sale of the Brox properties $0 yes 1390 no 476 passed

Article 23 Elderly exemption equalization to synchronize with town property assement revaluation $0 yes 1602 no 302 passed

Article 24 Joining Concord regional solid wate / resource recovery cooperative $0 yes 1284 no 599 passed

Article 25 Joining single stream recycling Co-op $0 yes 1237 no 648 passed

Article 26 Town forest lands - Tucker Brook town forest $0 yes 1617 no 275 passed

Article 27 Town forest lands - Mayflower Hill town forest $0 yes 1617 no 275 passed

Article 28 Joint services study committee - by petition yes 1362 no 486 passed

Milford Cost Per Student Trends

2009-06-28T20:44:00.003-05:00

The state recently published the cost per student data for the 07-08 school year. The data is published on the New Hampshire Department of Education - Financial Reports web page.

Milford reached a milestone with this latest report. Our cost per student for the entire District was below the state average for the first time in at least 11 years!!!

Shown below is a graphic that shows the data from the state site summarized for Milford. The first block shows the total spending per student for the past 11 years. We have been showing continuous improvement in our cost per student spending during the past 11 years. Our per student spending was 110% of the state average 11 years ago. The percentage has steadily dropped over the years, and we are now at only 98% of the state average.

This came about because our percentage growth in spending has been less than the state percentage growth over this time period. Our total spending per student has gone up 71% over the 11 years (from $6394 to $10,933), while the state average 's cost per student has gone up 93% (from $5780 to $11,135).

There are a lot of factors that go into spending for a school district that feed into the overall results. In my opinion, we have provided the right focus on our spending to provide good outcomes. The District is in much better shape than it was 11 years ago. We have gotten where we are by being consistent in our spending practices. We have been following the practice of trying to make continuous improvement each year, but in a modest way. We have avoided years of no progress due to severe cutbacks, and we have also not tried to do too much in any given year.

We have followed the teachings of the Tortoise and the Hare fable, where slow but steady wins the race. We have become a good Tortoise, where we move along at a steady pace each year, taking consistent steps towards an improved District. The only difference is that we do not have a finish line - we are just trying to do better all the time.

The spending area that contributed the most to our overall improvement was the elementary schools calculations. Eleven years ago we were at 111% of the state average, and now we are now at 91%. This is likely the result of going from operating out of three aging schools (Garden Street, Bales, and Jacques), and transitioning to newer schools (Heron Pond and renovated Jacques). We get economies of scale by operating out of a relatively large Heron Pond school. Most elementary schools in the state are much smaller, and they cost more to operate per student. We get by with fewer support staff members than a typical District due to the larger school size. There was additional savings when the Fifth grade was added onto Heron Pond, where we added about 200 more students with minimal additional overhead cost.

3/10/09 Voting Results

2009-03-10T22:12:00.000-05:00

There were 1683 ballots cast today in the Milford local elections.

School Votes

1302 Peter Bragdon, School Board

Question 1 Jacques School Addition to Implement Public Kindergarten
yes 943 (57%), no 713 (43%) - question failed as it needed a 60% supermajority to pass

Question 2 Operating Budget
yes 856 no 802

Question 3 Teachers Association contract
yes 932 no 721

Question 4 Special meeting allowed if question 3 fails
yes 1060 no 565

Question 5 Milford Educational Support Staff contract
yes 931 no 718

Question 6 Special meeting allowed if question 5 fails
yes 1055 no 583

Question 7 Deputy Treasurer
yes 1072 no 562

Town Votes

Article 1 Elections of Officers

Selectman ( two 3-year terms)

1128 Gary Daniels
637 Nathaniel Carmen
519 Frank Corey
387 John Cass, Sr.

Cemetery Trustee - 3 year term

1360 Mary Dickson

Checklist Supervisor - 1 year term

1362 Polly Cote

Trustee of the Trust Funds - one 3 year term

1039 Brad Chappell
356 Kevin Taylor

Library Trustee - three 3-year terms

1142 Tim Barr
1105 Edith March
1070 Kristie Popp

Water/Wastewater Commissioner - 3 year term

1342 Mike Putnam

Water/Wastewater Commissioner - 2 year term

1389 Robert Courage

Article 2 Zoning Questions

Vote 1 Definitions
yes 1218 no 267
Vote 2 Replace principal route of access with Class V or better
yes 1194 no 301
Vote 3 Yard requirements
yes 1048 no 450
Vote 4 Administrative wording
yes 1247 no 263
Vote 5 Expiration of variances
yes 1229 no 269
Vote 6 Growth management sunset date
yes 1095 no 396
Vote 7 Small wind energy system restrictions
yes 1139 no 373

Article 3 Curtis well facility improvements
yes 1121 no 495

Article 4 Operating budget
yes 879 no 755

Article 5 Wastewater treatment budget
yes 1213 no 412

Article 6 Water treatment operating budget
yes 1194 no 415

Article 7 Route 101a / route 13 / oval improvements grant
yes 1142 no 510

Article 8 Teamsters union collective bargaining agreement
yes 504 no 1114

Article 9 Social services
yes 1054 no 547

Article 10 Wastewater treatment facility wheel loader replacement
yes 989 no 598

Article 11 Pumpkin festival, holiday decorations and plantings
yes 956 no 667

Article 12 Reinstating library hours
yes 854 no 765

Article 13 DO-IT operating budget support
yes 925 no 676

Article 14 Fireworks
yes 692 no 920

Article 15 Summer band concerts
yes 889 no 732

Article 16 Memorial, Veterans, and Labor Day parade town support
yes 1195 no 430

Article 17 South street railroad crossing
yes 1155 no 442

Article 18 Distontinuance of a portion of Hartshorn Mill Road
yes 1261 no 305

Article 19 Authorization to expend funds to purchase interest in lands outside town boundaries
yes 897 no 687

Article 20 Adjustment to income and asset levels for elderly exemptions
yes 1383 no 226

Article 21 Authorize special meeting if collective bargaining agreement warrant article is defeated
yes 1008 no 539

Article 22 Authorization to selectmen to establish and amend town ordinances
yes 1008 no 539

Article 23 Grant of access easement to Saint Joseph Hospital
yes 1406 no 207

Article 25 Cable access revolving fund
yes 865 no 702

Article 26 Non-emergency medical transportation bus service budgetary funding request
yes 1122 no 490

Article 27 Railroad pond fishing age limits - McBriarty Memorial Fishing Derby
yes 1041 no 541

Article 28 Request for adoption of New Hampshire RSA 79-F Taxation of farm structures and land under farm structures
yes 952 no 548

High School Renovation Project 4/10/08

2008-04-13T21:30:00.002-05:00

General Comments

The MHS Project Management Advisory Committee met on Thursday 4/10/08 to review the status of the High School Renovation Project.

There continues to be good progress made on the project, and it is basically on schedule, will completion expected by the end of the summer.

Work on the track portion should resume in the next few weeks, when the loam piles have warmed completely, and have dried out a bit. They will then spread the loam, and install the sprinkler system. The sod will be put down after that, and allowed to sit for a while before it is used. Conduit to feed electrical and data feeds to the press box will be fed under the parking lot during the April vacation.

The actual track surface will not be installed until sometime in the summer. The top layer of track surface will bond better to the lower surface when the ground is good an warm. The warmer the better, so they will not do it until June or July. It will all be complete in time for start up of school in the fall.

The interior work is progressing, The music room is almost complete, and the students will move into it in a week or so.

Some of the interior rooms are nearing completion, and classes are moving into them, freeing up more rooms to be worked on.

Minor Problems

The committee reviewed and approved seven different change orders totaling $13,343. These are the typical types of change orders that arise during a renovation project. They included items such as the need for additional sprinkler heads in some new closets, adding sprinkler heads above the ceilings since the ceilings had to be lowered to accommodate piping changes, increasing the snow loading specification for the pressbox, etc.

Major Problems

Three issues have come up that are more serious due to the cost factors involved.

* We are adding new fire detection points to the fire alarm system. These points are being added to provide detection in various sections of the renovation project, including in the mechanicals in the music room and in various areas of room 4. It was not anticipated, but it was discovered that the fire annunciator panel at the front of the building has been maxed-out, and will need to be expanded to add new detection points to the system. It is important that the points be properly identified on the panel, to allow the fire department to quickly develop a plan of action when they respond to a call at the building.

The various people involved are looking at our alternatives at this point in time. One course of action would be to do the minimum amount necessary to get the planned changes identified on the panel. This would leave the panel in a maxed-out state, and require major changes if additional points were needed in the future.

Another alternative would be to expand the panel significantly to allow for future point expansion. This would require that the existing system be taken out and replaced by a completely new system. This will cost a lot more, but has the advantage of allowing us to change the technology that is used to allow for more open source technology, and multiple source sourcing.

The cost penalty for this issue is not known for sure, but it is being investigated. A rough guesstimate is that it is somewhere between $17K and $40K depending on which approach is chosen.

* The budget included $30K for the foundation work for the bleachers. This figure was based on typical foundations for similar bleachers.

It turned out that there are special problems with our particular installation, and a more costly foundation is needed. The basic problem is that there is very little room between the rear of the bleachers and the fence, and the elevation change is steep in that area. Because of this, the design engineer has specified that we install a retaining wall at the rear of the foundation concrete pad to insure that there is the proper support.

The first estimate for the more elaborate foundation was $75K, or $45K over the budgeted amount. We reviewed this issue in detail at the meeting. The final decision was that we asked the people involved to go back and see if they can come up with a design that uses a full size retaining wall at the rear of the press box, but uses a smaller or no retaining wall at all in the other areas of the bleachers where the distance from the structure to the fencing will be greater.

* We received a bill from the water utilities group for a new service entrance fee. This fee is based on anticipated annual usage, and was $22,691 for our filed irrigation system.

We spent a lot of time discussing this fee, and trying to find alternatives. We are going to look into the feasibility of installing a well to replace or supplement the town water service, with the expectation that this would reduce the entrance fee and/or reduce our annual water charges.

Mike Trojano had received a rough guesstimate of a typical well installation for a service of this type. The cost was $15K for the well or wells plus $5K for design/consultation services, for a total of $20K. In some cases, the cost could be higher if the well(s) need to be a lot deeper, if water treatment is needed, or if storage system(s) are needed to provide that the flow rates.

Several committee members questioned the feasibility of being able to get a well in this area that will have the needed gallons per minute flow capacity to meet the needs of the system. They are going to review the geologic maps of the area to get a rough estimate of the difficulties that can be expected to be encountered.

We are going to have another meeting in two weeks to review each of these issues.

Budget Summary

We were doing relatively well with the budget, until we hit these various cost adders. Business Administrator Mike Trojano will be putting together another cost roll-up for our next meeting, but this is where I think that we are based on a rough update of the previous roll-ups.

We had been at around $250K of unallocated contingency funds at the last roll-up. Subtracting out $13K for the approved changes, $35K for the annunciator panel, $30K for extra bleacher foundations, $5K for a negotiated water entrance fee, and $20K for a well for irrigation, leaves about $145K of unallocated contingency funds.

There is another large issue that is pending, and this is that many of the doors that we had thought had been included in the bid process were actually not part of the bid. The only doors that were included were ones that were attached or next to areas that were being worked on separately. Doors for rooms that were not otherwise being renovated were not included.

The cost for renovating these extra doors is still being scoped out. Many of them are very expensive to renovate since they are non-standard sized and new door frames are needed to get new doors installed.

It is my opinion that renovating the doors is one of the higher priorities of the overall project. The current doors cannot be locked from the inside, and in a school lock-down mode, the occupants of the room would have to go into the corridors to lock the doors, thus exposing them to any potential threats. Adding more doors for the project could be as much as $50K-100K.

This lack of unallocated contingency is getting very tight for this portion of the project, as there are still a few areas that have not even been touched as of yet. There may be more unanticipated problems to be found.

We are carrying $82K for parking improvements in the budget, and we have not tapped in to this at all yet. We have done no work so far in designing what will be done for parking improvements. This is an area that could be a safety valve if needed to accommodate unanticipated expenditures. If we have to cut something from the project, then this might be an area that could be attacked.

We should have a better idea on the overall project costs when we meet again in two weeks.

Milford School Board 4/7/08

2008-04-09T17:39:00.003-05:00

MESSA

The meeting started with Deb Hayes from the High School talking in public comment as a representative from MESSA (Milford Educational Support Staff Association). This is the bargaining unit that has been in negotiations with the School Board for a year and a half. The group had previously requested that the entire school board meet with them directly to negotiate the contract, and the board had subsequently turned down their request. Ms. Hayes reiterated their request and asked the board to reconsider the decision. Chairman Bragdon indicated that the board would probably bring this up at the previously scheduled non-public session that would be held at the end of the meeting.

Bob Willette Presentation

Peter Bragdon presented Bob Willette with a granite plaque as a memento of his five years of service on the board. Lorna Willette was also there to help with the ceremony.

Superintendent's Report

Bob Suprenant had these comments:

* The Middle School Math Counts team entered the Ultimate Math Competition, and the team achieved Gold Level status. This means that at least 12 members of the team scored 80% or higher on the test. There will be a banner posted in the school to commemorate the achievement.

* 16 High school students were named Granite State Scholars. They will be eligible to apply for scholarships if they meet certain criteria, such as attending particular state schools.

* There were 9 winners at the State History Day competition.

* 10 Students were in the New Hampshire Science day competition
Liam Hurley won first in the state Skills competition in the carpentry section, and he will be going to the national competition (which is usually in Kansas City, but I'm not sure about this year).

* 9 High School Students did well at the state FBLA Future Business Leaders of America competition, including Joe Stagnone who won 1st place in the accounting 2 competition.

* Libby Wehrle-Anderson is sponsoring a Teen Alcohol Use Forum on 6/9/08 at the Middle School.

* The Bales Study Committee is having a forum to receive public input regarding anyone's thought about potential futures uses for the Bales facility, to be held at the Selectman's room in Town Hall.

* Teachers and Administrators have been doing a lot of work at reviewing the NECAP test results. They are completing their findings, and Laurie Johnson will be presenting them at an upcoming meeting.

* The District job fair was held on 3/20/08. There were 101 initial interviews conducted at the fair, with follow-on interviews scheduled for some candidates. There are only 13 openings right now, which is a bit lower than what we have seen in the past few years. A few of the openings might be difficult to fill, with 3 in math and 2 in science at the high school.

* Bob Suprenant and Burt Becker went to Concord to testify on the subject of Senate bill 530 regarding education funding. They recommended that the funding for temporary classrooms be put back in the bill, and that new kindergarten construction aid be done at the 100% level instead of the planned 75% level.
The High School graduation will be held on 6/14/08 at 10:00 am in the Hampshire Dome since the football field will not be available this year. Thanks to Rick Holder of Hampshire Hills for making this happen - the Hampshire Dome will be a much better venue than the High School Gym which was the alternate choice.

Writing Across the Curriculum

Ms. Jackie Theriaque gave a presentation regarding the John Collins "Writing Across the Curriculum" program. This is a structured approach to try to incorporate writing skill improvement as part of all curriculum activities. For example, if a teacher is working with the class on a math unit, then she might include a writing assignment at the same time.

One aspect of this process is to include the concept of "Focused Correction Areas" FCAs for assignments. In this approach, the students are told in advance which particular portions of the writing assignment will be graded, and what the weightings will be. For example, one FCA might be proper capitalization with a weighting of 20%. The students will then know to focus on making sure that their capitalization is correct, and not worry about a non-graded area such as word choice. The FCAs are rotated during the year to insure that all grade level expectations are covered during the school year.

There are also permanent FCAs which apply for all writing assignments. These vary by grade level and for individual capability. They are set at a level where the student can be reasonably expected to be able to meet them at all times.

Committee Reports

There were few reports from the standard committees, except that Lori Pitsas made a summary presentation regarding the status of the MAFC Milford Athletics Fundraising Committee.

* April 17th, 7PM, at the High School cafeteria. This is being put on and being promoted by the High School Football Boosters group. Tickets are $8 in advance, or $10 at the door.

* Golf Tournament, Friday August 22nd, at Amherst Country Club.

* Road race in the fall, perhaps in early October near the date of the pumpkin festival

The fundraising group is continuing to look for donations of cash or in-kind items.

Lori mentioned that there are about 100 students on the track team at the Middle school, and about 70 on the track team at the High school.

Bob Suprenant mentioned that he had submitted Lori's name to the New Hampshire School Administrators Association NHSAA in nomination for the "Champions for Children" award for the Southwest district. Someone from Peterborough won the district nomination, but Lori was a well-deserved candidate.

CIP Capital Improvement Plan Committee

I was appointed as the School Board rep to the CIP. Peter Bragdon had been the rep on this committee for the past few years, but he felt that he could not fit it into his schedule this year. The purpose of the committee is to try to set up a unified capital improvement plan for the next few years (5?) to help in establishing priorities on capital spending.

After the meeting, I learned that there will be a more inclusive meeting set up this year to try to include most of the stakeholders in the discussion of capital planning. All 5 School Board members will be invited to the expanded meeting.

Water Utilities Entrance Fee Charge

We received a bill from the Milford Water Utilities for an Entrance Fee charge for the new irrigation system for the fields under construction. This is a fee that none of us had ever heard of before now, and it was not in the budget. The fee was assessed at $22,691, so it is not an insignificant issue.

We discussed this at some length, with the outcome that we directed the Superintendent to meet with the water utilities folks to see what our options might be.

Len Mannino suggested that we look into drilling a well to replace or supplement the water to be obtained from the town system. This might help with lowering the Entrance fee, and it should help with lowering the amount that we pay for water on an ongoing basis. This will be researched by the High School Renovations committee, along with the district administration.

Policy Review

Our ongoing review of policies continued, with policies relating to Instruction, School Calendar, and Length of School Day going to first reading, and Controvertial Issues not going to first reading. Some members wanted some more time to reflect on the Controversial Issues policy before moving it to first reading.

PEG Committee

John Parker was appointed to be the School Board rep to the PEG (Public/Education/Government) cable access committee.

School Board Goals

We reviewed the goals that were suggested at the previous meeting, and decided to create goals for these topics for the 08/09 School Board term.

* Develop a plan for a temporary solution for providing public kindergarten starting in the 09/10 school year. This should be completed in time to have it as part of the warrant for next year.

* Develop a plan for a permanent solution for providing public kindergarten, probably starting in the 10/11 school year. This should be completed in time to have it as part of the warrant for next year.

* Complete contract negotiations with the Teachers bargaining unit in time for a warrant article for next year.

* Complete contract negotiations with MESSA Milford Educational Support Staff Association in time for a warrant article for next year.

* Negotiate with Mason to provide educational support for their students on a tuition basis, probably starting in the 09/10 school year.

* Learn more about the standardized testing process, assess what we are doing, and decide if we need to do something different.

These items were also discussed, but were not set up as items to be tracked on a goal basis:

* Provide oversight on the high school renovation project.

* Develop action plans based on the results obtained from the Bales study committee which is expected to provide their final report at the second meeting in June.

* Provide oversight on the subdivision of the Heron Pond property.

* Modify the district policy manual to match the structure of the New Hampshire School Boards Association model policy manual.

* Investigate the impact of the increase of retirement account spending at the state level.

* Work to minimize the impact of gang development in Milford.

Milford School Board 3/17/08

2008-03-18T20:13:00.002-05:00

We held our first meeting of the new school board on Monday 3/17/08. Newly-elected member John Parker and I were sworn in prior to the start of the meeting.

I usually enjoy the first meeting of the year. Everything seems fresh and new, and we get to look forward to trying to make improvements. Much of the activity during the year is geared towards providing good choices for voters on the March ballot, and it is somewhat satisfying to finally finish the process. The final outcome is not always what I had hoped for, but it is good to have a completion of some type. The March elections are a bit like taking finals at the end of the year; you study and do the best you can during the year with the hope that there is confirmation of your work by doing well on the final test.

We held a "non-meeting" before the regular meeting to discuss contract negotiations. This type of meeting is specifically excluded from the right to know law, and the discussion is confidential.

Elections and Appointments

The first meeting of the year is an organizational meeting. We made the following elections and appointments:

Peter Bragdon - Chairperson
Paul Dargie - Vice Chairperson
No Secretary was elected; there is not much of a need for this position

No Truant Officer was appointed; we will search for a candidate

Paul - Professional Development Committee
Bert Becker - ATC Regional Center Advisory Committee
Paul - Technology Committee
John Parker - Wellness Committee
No appointment - PEG Committee
Paul - High School Renovations Committee
Paul - Athletics Fund-Raising Committee
Paul - Finance Committee
Bert - Finance Committee
Bert - Policy Review

Bob Willette, while no longer on the board, was kept as the board representative on the Bales Study Committee

Public Comment

Bob Willette spoke at some length discussing Milford's test scores.

MathCounts Presentation

Mrs. Page made a short presentation to the board regarding the MathCounts team at the Middle School. She has been the coach for the team for a long time, and has done a great job with it. She had three current members of the team with her, and they each discussed an aspect of the team. The team recently competed at the Keene regional competition, and will be going to the Plymouth State College state meet soon.

My daughter was on the MathCounts team about five years ago, and I was able attend the Plymouth state meet. It was a great event - the kids were all excited about Math, which can be a difficult thing to get them excited about.

Superintendent's Report

* The district has started an internal newsletter called Milford Minutes. The first issue was distributed to board members.

* The annual job fair is this Thursday. This has been a great way to get quality candidates for anticipated openings.

* The workshop day on voting day went well. There were a variety of programs available including responsive classroom, personalized profiles, and CPR training.

* The recent 11th grade NECAP scores were reviewed, with a comparison to state scores. In summary, Milford's results were very close to the state average, but the scores for both seemed low, especially for math. It is not clear if the problem was that students in general are not able to complete work at grade level expectations, or if there was some sort of a problem with the test. I'm guessing that at least some of the blame is due to the test. For example, I find it very hard to believe that 17% of 11th grade students are proficient with distinction on Reading, but only 1% or 2% are proficient with distinction in Math. There is usually a much higher correlation between the two categories than that.

* Laurie Johnson announced some grants that had been won: $10K for e-portfolio development, $10k for various items such as professional development reading improvement, etc.

Calendars

We set up the school board calendar for the year, with all the standard events scheduled.

We approved the school district calendar for the 08-09 year. School starts on 8/27/08 and Christmas break is 8 weekdays: 12/24/08 to 1/2/09. The last day of school without snow days is Monday 6/15/09, which means that the real last day will be around 6/18/09 or 6/19/09.

School Board Goals

Each year the school board sets their goals for the year. Each member can bring up options at the first meeting of the year, and we set the goals at the second meeting. The final list is usually a subset of the ones that are first presented. These are the potential goals for the year:

* Develop plans for a 09-10 start-up for a public kindergarten program in Milford. This is likely to take the form of adding portables to Jacques to create the space needed for the program.

* Develop plans for the presentation of a warrant article on the 2009 ballot for the construction of permanent space for public kindergarten. This is likely to be a proposal that is similar to the one that was article one on this year's ballot.

* Negotiate with the Teachers bargaining unit and the Support Staff bargaining unit with the objective of agreeing to contracts that will be presented to the voters on the 2009 ballot.

* Develop action plans based on the final Bales Study report due in June.

* Do some sort of activity regarding the potential severe Retirement System cost problems.

* Do some sort of activity regarding the development of gangs in Milford. This might involve working with law enforcement professionals in some manner.

* Manage the High School, Track, and Bales Roof renovation projects.

* Subdivide the Heron Pond lots.

* Negotiate with Mason regarding having their Middle and High school students attend Milford schools on a tuition basis, perhaps starting in the 09-10 school year.

* Do some sort of activity regarding the poor test scores, especially the 11th grade math scores.

* Start a conversion of our district policies to match the model policy format used by the New Hampshire School Board Association.

High School Renovation Project

2008-03-14T18:12:00.002-05:00

The MHS Project Management Advisory Committee held their monthly meeting yesterday to review the status of the ongoing renovations at the High School. Everything seems to be moving along well, with the overall project appearing to be on budget and on schedule.

Track and Field Update

Good progress was made on the track and field portion of the project during the fall months. Most of the major field work was completed, the drainage was installed, some fencing was put up, old bleachers were torn down, excess loam was removed from the site, lights were moved, subsurface and base coat for the track were installed, and the foundation for the storage building was installed.

Work has stopped on the site for the winter, except that the ATC construction program will be starting to construct the storage building soon. When the weather improves, they will start up again. Some of the major activities to be done include finishing off the track surface, building an appropriate foundation and installing bleachers, installing the press box, electrical and data feeds to the press box and scoreboard, and installing sod.

Most of the work should be completed by late spring or early summer. The football field will be rested for a while to allow the sod to take. It is expected that the field will be in great shape in time for the next football season.

High School Renovations Update

There are a number of renovation activities that will occur in the High School. Some activities have occurred over the past couple of months and will continue through the school year, but most of the activity will occur during the next summer.

The band room renovation is coming along well. It was gutted, new walls put up, stage storage area was constructed, stage handicapped lift area constructed, drainage put in, and practice rooms were created. The instrument storage system will be installed soon.

There are several interior rooms that are in progress. We ran into a minor snag in a couple of the rooms in that the roof supports turned out to be inverted wooden trusses instead of steel as had be expected. Some rooftop units were being installed, so they had to figure out a way to beef up the support structure to handle all the loads. They did come up with an approach that is safe and relatively inexpensive.

Bales Roof

The contract for the replacement of the Bales roof was given to Turnstone Corp, the construction manager for the high school project. The work will be done next summer.

Financial Update

The high school project is largely a renovation project, and it is always difficult to be exact on the costs up front since you never know what you are going to run into. There have been some items that were more expensive than expected and others that were lower, but in total, our best estimate at this time is that we have roughly $200k that is not spoken for as of yet, out of the $4,900k total project budget. There are quite a few items that still have place holder values in the cost roll-up, so this is subject to considerable change as we go through the project. In very rough numbers, we have committed spending of about $4,400k so far, with another $500k remaining to be committed.

The project management committee has worked well at making decisions to keep the project on budget. Priority decisions have been made, and in my opinion, good choices have been made.

The project seems to be in good financial shape at this point, with the majority of the big cost items mostly set, with only minor activities still up in the air.

Kindergarten - What Now?

2008-03-12T21:09:00.002-05:00

With the failure of all three kindergarten articles, we now need to develop alternative plans on what to do going forward.

It is very likely that the current state mandate for providing public kindergarten starting in September 2008 will be pushed back to September 2009. It is also likely that there will be no more delays allowed beyond that date so, we need a solution to meet the mandate.

Our options for providing a public kindergarten program in 2009 are fairly limited. The most realistic and obvious approach is to add portable classrooms to Jacques to provide the needed space. It is likely that the state will pay 100% of the cost of portables for 3 years to help get programs going while alternative permanent solutions are developed. Adding portables should now be our plan for a 2009 start-up.

In parallel with planning to start the program with portables, we should also review our permanent solutions again with the goal of having a warrant article on the 2009 ballot for a September 2010 implementation.

Article 1 did fairly well this year by getting 50% of the vote. This is respectable considering that it was not supported by the school board, there were two other competing articles to confuse the issue, and the state funding details were not complete. As of now, I expect that the permanent solution to be presented next year will be similar to or identical to the plan that was presented this year.

One big difference is that there are now three board members that are generally in favor of public kindergarten, and it is likely that the proposal will have board support. There may still be competing petition warrant articles, but having board support should make some sort of a difference. Also, the state funding situation should be a lot clearer by then, so there won't be so much FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) going around on the subject.

Doing a construction project while the kindergarten program is active and the portables are on site will be more difficult, and we will need to be very careful about construction activity scheduling to make sure that there are no safety issues relating to the project.

The fact that article 1 failed is a set-back, but I think that it is only a temporary one. Most people are reasonable, and once they see the dust settle on the state funding issue, they will be more likely to support a cost-effective long term solution.

What Happened in the School Board Election?

2008-03-12T18:50:00.002-05:00

I was surprised by the results of the school board election. I had been expecting the Bob Willette and I would be re-elected, and that John Parker would come in third. My simplistic thought was that Bob and I are fairly well-known and thus we would get the most votes, and that John was somewhat of an unknown to most voters in Milford and would thus receive fewer votes.

Upon reflection, I have an idea as to what happened, and it relates to the way a three-way race for two positions can play out.

There are three types of voters for this school board race:
1. Status quo voters: ones that like the way things are going and want to stay with the current directions.
2. Conservative voters: ones that are relatively conservative and want to move the board to the right from the status quo.
3. Liberal voters: ones that are relatively liberal and want to move the board to the left from the status quo.

As a general rule, Bob is fairly conservative, and I am more liberal than him. John's political leanings are less well known, but my impression is that he is perceived as being somewhat in the middle relative to Bob and I. Whether that is true or not doesn't matter; what does matter when making a voting choice is the perception of the voters. Assuming the perceived positioning is correct, then:

* Status quo voters would tend to vote for Bob and I, to try to keep things moving in the same direction as today.

* Relatively conservative voters would tend to vote for Bob and John, since John is perceived as being more conservative than me.

* Relatively liberal voters would tend to vote for John and I since John is perceived as being more liberal than Bob.

This three-way arrangement is common for a three way race for two openings. The three choices are evaluated on some sort of a continuum (such as liberal-conservative), and then they are ranked according to the perception.

Each candidate is chosen in two out of the three possibilities. The number of votes that any one candidate gets is determined by the distribution of voters into the three categories, neglecting bullet voters that only vote for one candidate instead of two.

It seems to me that the candidate that is in the middle when the three choices are rank ordered will have an advantage since he will be the second choice for voters on both ends of the spectrum.

I think that there were somewhat fewer status quo voters this year, and that of the voters that were not leaning towards status quo, there were more liberal leaning voters than conservative leaning voters. This mix would end up with John getting more votes than he would normally get as an unknown candidate.

I'm sure that these types of electoral dynamics are studied in depth somewhere, but I could not find any studies with a brief google search. I would be interested in reading them if anyone has a link to a discussion somewhere on this topic.

2008 Milford Election Results

2008-03-11T20:30:00.006-05:00

This are the results from the March 11th, 2008 election. There were a total of 1723 votes cast.

School District Election

School Board
1033 Paul Dargie
906 John Parker
859 Bob Willette

School Treasurer
1381 Rose Evans

School Moderator
615 Peter Basiliere
578 Gary Daniels
259 Carolyn Magri Halstead

School District Clerk
1377 Joan Dargie

Question 1 Jacques addition for public kindergarten (failed)
823 Yes
838 No

Question 2 Brox stand-alone school for public kindergarten (failed)
228 Yes
1397 No

Question 3 Study private kindergarten options (failed)
661 Yes
980 No

Question 4 Operating Budget (passed)
1076 Yes
598 No

Question 5 Tuition Agreements (passed)
1226 Yes
439 No

Question 6 Subdivision Approval (passed)
1103 Yes
556 No

Question 7 Deputy Treasurer (passed)
1229 Yes
416 No

======================================
Town Election

Selectmen
1314 Mike Putnam
1173 Katherine Bauer

Cemetery Trustee
1407 Leonard Harten

Library Trustee
1320 Sarah Philbrick Sandhage
1116 Michael Tule

Moderator
1435 Peter Basiliere

Supervisor of the Checklist - 2 Year
1332 Gil Archambault

Supervisor of the Checklist - 6 Year
1377 Bobbi Schelberg

Trustee of the Trust Funds
1375 Bill King

Water-Wastewater Commisioner
1321 Peter Leishman

Zoning Changes - All 8 passed
All 18 Ballot questions passed

Zoning 1 - Offensive land use in residential districts
1304 Yes
312 No

Zoning 2 - Accessory Dwelling Units (ADU) definition
1224 Yes
362 No

Zoning 3 - ADU by special exception
1115 Yes
455 No

Zoning 4 - Corridor Overlay District
1358 Yes
254 No

Zoning 5 - Driveway paving permits
1285 Yes
309 No

Zoning 6 - ADU special exceptions for Zoning Board
1126 Yes
430 No

Zoning 7 - Storage of goods in home occupation space
1170 Yes
391 No

Zoning 8 - Growth management restriction revisions
1352 Yes
252 No

Question 3 Operating Budget
1209 Yes
449 No

4 Wastewater budget
1368 yes
278 No

5 Water Department
1310 Yes
308 No

6 Route 101A Oval Improvements
1327 Yes
349 No

7 Cemetery Building
1030 yes
629 No

8 DPW Dump Truck
1129 Yes
532 No

9 Social Services
1302 Yes
338 No

10 Pumpkin Festival
1207 Yes
453 No

11 DO-IT
1163 Yes
485 No

12 Fireworks
1121 Yes
536 No

13 Band Concerts
1245 Yes
413 No

14 Parades
1387 Yes
280 No

15 Patch Hill Open Space
1241 Yes
386 No

16 Beech Ridge Lot
1392 Yes
233 No

17 Transportation Needs
1332 Yes
315 No

18 Property Tax Resolution
1311 Yes
292 No

2008 Milford School Warrant - Recommendation Summary

2008-03-01T22:52:00.003-05:00

Here is a summary of my recommendations for this year's warrant articles:

1. YES - Jacques addition for kindergarten

2. NO - Brox stand-alone building for kindergarten

3. NO - Study private kindergarten

4. YES - Operating budget

5. YES - Tuition agreements

6. YES - Subdivision approval

Warrant Article 6 - Subdivision Approval

2008-03-01T22:41:00.002-05:00

This article will give the school board the authorization to sell off two building lots from the Heron Pond site. These potential lots abut Brookview Drive.

This land is not really suitable for any district function. It is property that is behind the playing field at Heron Pond, and can not be easily used for any extra function such as parking.

The property is best used for building lots, so that is what we want to do. Although it is not certain, it is likely that the lots will be used in the building construction program. They will build houses on the lots over a couple of years per house. This will probably start in the 09-10 school year, since we are not set up to do it next year. We need to allocate construction money in the budget to make the program work.

We are not sure how much the lots will generate in terms of profit. There will be a cost associated with making the subdivision. They need to be surveyed, and a road and associated utilities needs to be provided.

Please vote in favor of article 6.

Warrant Article 5 - Tuition Agreement

2008-03-01T22:11:00.003-05:00

Warrant Article 5 will allow the school board to enter into a tuition agreement with other towns such as Mason. We had developed a preliminary draft of an agreement with them a few years ago, but they were unable to get out of their agreement with Mascenic.

It now appears that they will be able to withdraw from Mascenic and contract with another district such as Milford. They have roughly 90 students in grades 6 through 12 that would come to Milford. This is roughly 12-15 students per grade level, and we should be able to absorb them without too much in the way of additional spending.

The tuition agreement would be very straight-forward. Mason would pay a per student fee for the students to attend Milford. The fee is based on a formula that starts with our total per pupil spending, subtracts out some items such as special education costs, some transportation costs, and a few other items. Mason will be responsible themselves for the excluded items.

The idea is for the Mason students to become unified with Milford students. They would be eligible for all extra items such as co-curricular activities, clubs, and sports on the same terms as Milford students.

Mason would not have a seat on the school board or any other similar rights; this would be a straight tuition agreement.

This would raise perhaps $700k-$800k in revenue, depending on the number of students and the formula for the tuition. The spending that will be needed is harder to estimate. There will be some spending for consumable items such as workbooks and books and other variable costs, but the big issue as usual will be if we will have to hire new employees for any area. It is possible that there will be some grades or subjects where we are right on the edge of needing a new teacher, where the addition of 12-15 students in the grade might require that we hire another person where we would normally not have done so. In any event, it is expected that the total extra spending will be much less than the additional income.

It is important that we try to find additional revenue sources as much as possible in order to try to minimize the amount of money that we need to raise by local property taxes. The addition of Mason students to Milford would be a big help.

Please vote in favor of article 5.

Warrant Article 4 - Operating Budget

2008-03-01T21:14:00.002-05:00

The district administration, school board, and budget committee spent a lot of time going over the budget this year (as usual), and have come up with a responsible budget that I support.

The operating budget spending is less than I would actually prefer from a programs perspective, but the impact on taxes is high due to low state adequacy aid, that we need to be very tight this year.

We follow a process for budget development that seems to work fairly well. These are the main steps of the process:

* The school board decides whether to set a bottom-line number up front, or to wait to see what is presented before deciding on a number. We have chosen to use the wait and see approach in recent years, and this has worked well since the administration has made good faith efforts at developing responsible budgets.

* Administrators responsible for various areas of the budget develop their first pass at the budget. The Superintendent gives them guidelines to follow while developing their budget. The budgets are built using a bottoms-up approach, where the planned spending for each cost account is individually developed. Any new positions or programs are included in the overall numbers, but are separately identified for ease of discussion.

* The individual budgets are loaded into the system, and then reviewed in total by the Superintendent. The Superintendent will then remove some items from the budget. New positions and new programs are areas that get the greatest scrutiny.

* The budget is distributed to the school board and the budget committee. It is reviewed in detail at an all-day Saturday meeting so that everyone involved has a common understanding of the issues.

* The school board then gives a reduction task to the administration to achieve a bottom line number. The administration revises the budget to meet the task amount. It is reviewed again to see the impact of the cuts. This process may be repeated as we home in on an appropriate bottom line number.

This year there were three iterations of the budget that occurred over several meetings. The first request made by Peter Bragdon was for a $400k reduction. The second request made by me was for a $180k reduction. The third request made by Len Mannino was for a final $50k reduction.

The progression of budget reductions was fairly typical, except for the fact that it took more time than usual. Each cut was more painful than the previous one, and it was more difficult to find areas to cut that would not have direct impacts on education delivery.

The final budget number we ended up at was $32,618,179 as compared to the default budget of $32, 455,230. The default budget is a calculation based on last year's budget plus spending changes that are legally mandated by law or contract, minus special items. Since there are some items that are excluded from the default budget that make sense to include, the fact that we are so close to the default budget shows that we are holding tight on the spending this year.

Some of the larger items excluded from the default budget but included in the proposed budget are things like raises for employees not part of a bargaining unit, and new equipment. We typically try to include raises each year for everyone to keep up with inflation. We also try to spend money each year on curriculum improvement as part of our planned improvement cycle where each major area is refreshed on a regular schedule that results in relatively level loading of improvement spending.

On a side note, Bob Willette had made a motion to reduce the budget by $50k just before Len's motion, but his was geared toward making the cuts in specific areas such as co-curricular activities. It is my philosophy to try to just manage to a bottom line number and not try to second guess the Administration as to the priorities for the spending. We all have our pet projects and areas, so it would be slippery slope if we start doing the cutting on a line item basis. One board member might want to preserve spending in one area and another member may have a totally opposite viewpoint. Once we start picking and choosing, then we would have trouble coming to an agreement on the items. Bob's motion failed due to lack of a second, so it appears that most other board members share my opinion on this.

I urge everyone to support the operating budget.

Warrant Article 3 - Study Private Kindergarten Options

2008-02-26T21:52:00.002-05:00

Warrant Article 3 requests that the School Board investigate contracting with Public or Private Kindergartens.

The ability for a school district to contract with another public or private kindergarten is governed by RSA 198:48-a Alternative Kindergarten Programs.

There is a key section of this RSA that seriously limits the possibility that enough viable programs will be found that meet the requirements.

RSA 198:48-a II. states that "An alternative kindergarten program shall satisfy the same criteria established for public kindergarten programs in the New Hampshire standards for school approval." This means that the alternative program will have to meet all the standards found in Ed 306 Minimum Standards for Public School Approval"

The alternative program needs to be non-sectarian, be staffed by qualified teachers, and provide for accessibility of students with disabilities, among many other requirements.

There is a grandfathering section in the article that exempts programs that had been contracted prior to 1999, but that does not apply for Milford, and we have to meet all the requirements.

Based on this RSA rule, it is almost certain that there will not be enough programs in the nearby area to meet all the needs of the district. There may be some programs that will meet the requirements, but we will have to provide for the rest of the requirements by having some in-district classes.

If we are going to have to provide for a large portion of the requirements internally in any event, then it makes sense to me to just handle all the requirements internally and not try to split them up. If we have a split program where there are some in-district classes and a few private kindergarten classes, then we will have a problem when we assign students to the various programs as there will be a fairness issue that will need to be addressed. I would prefer to avoid the whole issue and put everyone on an even footing.

There really is no harm in conducting a study, other than the fact that it will consume the efforts of the district administration for a period of time. It doesn't matter if this article passes or not, but I plan to vote against it to minimize the distractions.

Warrant Article 2 - New School at Brox

2008-02-25T22:47:00.003-05:00

Article 2 on the Milford school warrant authorizes the construction of a six-classroom stand-alone building on the Brox property.

This article has several problems, and in my opinion, is not a good choice for Milford.

Requires 100% State Funding

The article requires that the state fully fund all the costs of the facility. That is nice in concept, but the practical matter is that the state adequate education costing committee is recommending that the funding be at a 75% level. As I detailed in a previous posting, it is my opinion that the state meets the requirements of article 28-a of the state constitution that bans unfunded mandates.

If the state only provides 75% funding, then this article does not allow the construction of a building since no local money is allowed to be used for the project.

Locks in Extra Overhead Spending

The fact that this is a stand-alone school results in the need for additional overhead spending to make it operational and safe. There are several extra positions that are needed to operate a stand-alone school as compared to an addition as proposed in article 1.

The district administration has estimated the the additional overhead spending will be in the $200,000 per year range. This is due to the need for extra positions such as custodians, nurse, office support, lead teacher stipend, etc. This corresponds to perhaps $30 or $40 per year in extra taxes for a $300,0o0 house.

There is no need for these extra positions, and we should strive to keep our overhead spending as low as possible.

Commits to a Brox Strategy

The Brox master space allocation diagram has reserved space for schools in a broad concept without any specifics. There is a basic understanding that there will be a need for space for schools some time in the future, but the specifics of that need won't be obvious until we closer to the time of need.

Keeping the school portion of the Brox site in unbuilt status keeps our options open for future development. It will be better if at the time of need of a new school that we are able to start with a fresh site and build it out in a manner that meets the needs the best.

If we construct a kindergarten on the site, then we will have locked in that portion of the site to a kindergarten or early learning facility. It would be difficult to use it for later grades such as a middle school since the needs are so different.

In our space needs discussions in the past, we have discussed various potential options for future needs. One concept was that if the overall enrollments in town grew quite a bit, then we would convert the current middle school to extra classes in support of the high school, making the high school a campus arrangement. This concept would require the construction of a new middle school to replace the grades moved out of the current middle school. The Brox property would be a good location for this type of school.

Another option that has been discussed would be the construction of a new school that would be a K-2 school. In this scenario, Jacques would be converted to a K-2 school and Heron Pond would be converted to a 3-5 school. This is more of a mid-term possibility (as compared to the high school expansion scenario), as it would come into play if the there was a more modest increase in enrollments in town. I don't see the need for this within 10 years, but it may happen someday.

It would be better to keep our power dry, so to speak, on the use of the Brox property with regards to schools. Let's leave the space alone and wait until the future needs become clearer.

Vote No on Article 2

The budget committee voted 1 in favor and 7 against this option. The district administration does not favor this article. The school board is split on this article: Len Mannino and Bob Willette (opposed to public kindergarten) are in favor of it, Paul Dargie and Bert Becker (in favor of public kindergarten) are against it, and Peter Bragdon abstained (personal financial conflict).

Please join me in voting against article 2.

Warrant Article 1 - Four Room Addition to Jacques

2008-02-25T19:09:00.002-05:00

There are three warrant articles that deal with the subject of public kindergarten. This post concerns article 1.

This article authorizes the razing of the Bales annex, and the construction of a four-room addition to the Jacques school to allow for the integration of a half-day kindergarten program into the building. The addition will be on the east end of the building.

The kindergarten program will actually be located in the west end of the building, since each of the rooms in that end of the building have in-room toilets as specified in kindergarten facility requirements. The newly constructed rooms will be used for alternate requirements such as first grade classrooms. The actual configuration of the building and allocation of rooms to specific functions will be done at a later date when there is a better understanding of the specific enrollments.

This proposal for providing space for a half-day kindergarten program has several distinct advantages that (in my opinion) make it the best option for the Milford school district.

Unified Programming

Having kindergarten and first grade in the same building will help the staff to collaborate and coordinate their efforts. They will be able to easily discuss issues to insure that the programs are aligned and that they are working towards a common curriculum. There are a lot of benefits from the informal discussions that will happen every day in the staff lunchroom.

Fewer Transitions

Starting school for the first time can be a very scary time for students. Going to a new school, meeting new teachers, meeting new support staff, learning the physical layout, and learning all the new rules can all be difficult. It will be much easier on the students for them to start kindergarten in one building, and then to transition to first grade in the same place. They will have a new teacher, but most of all the other elements will be familiar. They will be able to more quickly adjust from the half-day kindergarten program to the full-day first grade program.

This is especially helpful for those students with the greatest needs. If a student is receiving additional help for some issue in kindergarten, then it is likely that they will be receiving the same help from the same person in the same room or facility in the first grade. It is hard to put a specific value on this, but in some cases, this can be huge.

Lower Overhead

Building a four-room addition to Jacques will help to minimize the overhead associated with the new program. Most of the overhead functions should be able to handle the increased student load with a minimal impact. There are a few areas that will need additional help, but these are relatively few. There will be a need for an extra half-time custodian, and the office will need some more secretarial support.

This is not the case with a stand-alone building as outlined in warrant article 2. If kindergarten is in a stand-alone building, then there are many duplicate support functions that need to be provided. It needs to be scoped out to see if it can be pared back, but an initial estimate by the district administration showed extra overhead costs that are above the baseline costs for the Jacques addition proposal of about $200,000 per year. This includes costs for things like extra custodial services, a nurse, extra office personnel, lead teacher stipend. Perhaps this could be parred down some, but it is unlikely to go below an extra $150,000 per year to support a stand-alone building. This is roughly $0.10 to $0.14 per year on the tax rate, or $30 to $40 per year for a $300,000 house.

The school board and the school administration work closely together to try to provide a quality learning environment for our students while minimizing the tax impacts of the choices that we make. I hate to see us waste money on needless overhead functions since it means that we are not being effective stewards of the taxpayers money.

Money is tight, and we need to focus our spending on areas that make a difference to students. If we were to choose to spend an extra $150,000 to $200,000, then I would much rather spend it where it can do some good. I'd much prefer to spend it on curriculum or teachers or some other area with a direct influence on students. I hate to see it spent on extra custodians, or for an extra nurse when the need for these positions can be easily avoided.

Having good custodians and nurses and other similar positions is very important to a quality experience for students, but if we can structure our organization to keep these positions to a minimum, then we need to do that.

Low Cost

Article 1 authorizes local tax spending of no more than $462,054 for the addition. The balance of the construction spending will come from the state kindergarten construction program. This will be bonded over 10 years, and equals about $0.04 on the tax rate, or about $12 a year for a $300,000 house. This is a modest amount for the benefit of having a nice permanent facility.

This is based on the assumption that the state will fund 75% of the construction as recommended by the state adequate education costing committee. Normal building aid is only 30% of the cost of construction, so we will be getting much more bang for our buck than is normally expected. If we don't take advantage of the kindergarten construction aid soon, then it will run out and we will be back to the 30% match level.

There is a slight chance that the state will increase their funding to 100% of the kindergarten construction cost. If that happens, then the state would fund the entire project, and there would be no construction cost for this option. In any event, there is not a huge difference between $0 per year and $12 per year per property.

Medium Term Solution

Over the past few years, I have tried to find methods to better predict where our school enrollments are heading. This is important since the school board adopts enrollment projections each fall that form the basis of the budget for the next year.

We normally predict enrollments for grades two through twelve by comparing the average cohort survival rate for the past few years, and use that to predict the next year. An example would be if there were on average 200 students in grade three each year and an average of 202 students in grade four the following year, then there is an average pick up of 1% when going from grade three to grade four. If we have 190 in grade three this year, then we would expect to have about 192 in grade four next year.

This approach seems to work well, and is simple to implement.

The problem comes when we need to predict the enrollments for the initial grades where there are no cohorts to compare to. We have been using the birth rates from five or six years earlier, and factoring them up by an average amount to get this years number. A typical calculation would be that 150 births 6 years ago correlates to 200 first grade students this year. This seems to work to some degree, but there are wider variations on the correlation than the cohort survival method since the data is more suspect, and there is a longer period of time between events.

This method does not allow us to go beyond a five or six year forecast, so some other method is needed to forecast for longer periods. Peter Bragdon brought the following report to my attention. The Housing and School Enrollment in New Hampshire: An Expanded View report is a study that was published in 2005 that helps to understand the basic demographics that are driving school enrollments in New Hampshire. The study does not discuss Milford in particular, but it looks at overall demographic trends in the state, especially as they relate to numbers of students per dwelling unit.

One key forecast of the study is found on page nine of the report. There is a chart that shows that the total school age population in New Hampshire grew by 39,700 from 1990 to 2000, it is expected to grow 5,500 from 2000 to 2010, and it is expected to decline 13,600 from 2010 to 2020. The theme of the report is that this overall demographic forecast is the main driver in school enrollments, not the number of new dwelling units as is commonly believed.

This makes sense to me. You can compare this to tides raising and lowering the overall level of boats, while waves, wind, and other local conditions have a supplementary effect. The tides are the key factor and the waves are a secondary factor.

We have seen an easing of enrollments in Milford, and we should see declines in the future as some of our larger class sizes age out of the system. It is my belief that the overall demographic trends of lowered enrollments in New Hampshire for the next decade or so will also apply to Milford. Based on this, I expect that the addition to Jacques will handle our first grade and kindergarten needs at least for the next decade. This assumes that we don't have a disruptive event such as the combination with another school district or the change to full-day kindergarten. I doubt that there will be a statewide move to full-day kindergarten any time soon since we are just now moving to implementing a half-day program.

Trying to forecast out even 10 years is difficult at best, and trying to go beyond that is probably hopeless. But based on everything that I know, we should be set for a while.

Vote for Article 1!!!

It is my opinion that article 1 is by far the best choice for providing space for a public kindergarten program in Milford. The key factor is that it saves $150,000 to $200,000 per year in unnecessary overhead costs associated with a stand-alone building. That is real money that needs to be preserved.

This article is also the one that is favored by the school district administration. The budget committee voted 8-1 in favor of this article. The school board was split on it, with Bert Becker and myself in favor of it (both public kindergarten supporters), Len Mannino and Bob Willette against it (both opposed to public kindergarten), and Peter Bragdon abstaining (he has a personal financial conflict of interest).

Please vote for Article 1 on the March 11th ballot, and bring a quality public kindergarten program to Milford at an affordable cost.

State Mandate for Public Kindergarten is Fully Funded

2008-02-24T14:34:00.003-05:00

I haven't posted for a while, but I am going to try to get back into it. I want to cover various topics relevant to this year's vote on March 11th.

The key issue on the school side this year is the subject of public kindergarten. There are three petition warrant articles on the ballot that each have a different point of view on the subject. I will discuss each of these in additional posts.

I first want to summarize my understanding and viewpoint on the background of the legislation that governs the situation.

Court Decision

In October 2006 in Londonderry School District SAU #12 v. State of New Hampshire the State Supreme Court held that the previous state education funding schemes were unconstitutional. There is a long history of court cases that preceded this recent case, but this is the one that is currently being implemented.

There were four specific actions that were required based on this decision. They were:
* Define an adequate education , by 2007,
* Determine the cost, by 2008,
* Fund it with constitutional taxes,
* Ensure its delivery through accountability.

These four mandates comprise the state's duty to provide an adequate education. The state's duties do not extend beyond adequacy.

Step 1 - Define an adequate education

In June 2007, the legislature passed an update to RSA 193-E that defines an adequate education. There were a number of changes to this law, but one notable change is that it now appears to include half-day kindergarten as part of an adequate education. There is a bit of controversy on that since the language is not 100% clear, but it is likely that there will be some clarifying changes to make it clear. Certainly, everyone is going on the assumption that half-day kindergarten is included in the definition.

Step 2 - Determine the cost of an adequate education

The legislature set up a committee to determine the cost of an adequate education. The committee issued the Final Report and Findings of the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee Pursuant to 2007 Laws Chapter 270 a few weeks ago. The report details the findings of the committee.

The report found that the universal cost of an adequate education was $3,456 per student. Additional funds will be added to this for:

* Students that are English language learners (ELL) ($675 per ELL student)
* Special education students, ($1,798 or $3,610 per special ed student depending on category)
* Economically disadvantaged students and students in schools with significant concentrations of economically disadvantaged students. (They did not quite finish their work in this area. Funds will be allocated based on a formula based on the percentage of students receiving free or reduced price lunches. This aid could go up to $3,456 depending on the formula, which was not available in time for the final report.)

Half day kindergarten will be funded at half the regular adequate education aid level. This equals $1,728 per student plus half of the other applicable funding items.

Section X of the final report was a special section that discussed the findings of the subcommittee that identified "Transitional Assistance for Kindergarten" for the 11 districts in the state that do not currently have public kindergarten. These were some of the key recommendations in this section:

* Implementation of public kindergarten may be delayed to September 2009 from the September 2008 date originally specified in the updated RSA 193-E.
* Full funding of portable classrooms will be made for 3 years.
* The kindergarten construction aid program will be reauthorized. This program pays 75% of the construction cost for kindergarten facilities.

The report will now be reviewed by the full house and senate, and a final definition of the cost of an adequate education is expected in June 2008.

Article 28-A of the State Constitution

In 1984, Article 28-A was added to the state constitution. This article states: "The state shall not mandate or assign any new, expanded or modified programs or responsibilities to any political subdivision in such a way as to necessitate additional local expenditures by the political subdivision unless such programs or responsibilities are fully funded by the state or unless such programs or responsibilities are approved for funding by a vote of the local legislative body of the political subdivision."

There have been very few actual court cases that test the scope of article 28-A, but these are the keys aspects of it as relates to the implementation of public kindergarten.

* Half-day public kindergarten is a new state mandate that has come into existence after 1984. As such, article 28-A applies and the mandated new spending needs to be fully funded.

* The court mandate is for the state to supply full funding for an adequate education, not to fully fund all aspects of public education. This is a key point in determining whether the state is funding the mandate or not.

* There are two types of funding associated with this new mandate. The first is start-up expense, and the second is ongoing operational expense.

* By definition, if the final costing formula for an adequate education is deemed constitutional (and is fully funded), then the portion that relates to public kindergarten will be constitutional and will be fully funded. Therefore, the ongoing operational expense aspect will be fully funded and passes the 28-A test.

* The state is offering to pay for all expendable start-up expense, and they will also pay for portable classrooms to provide the space for the new programs. This covers all the start-up expense at a minimal level, and meets the requirements of fully funding an adequate education. There is one point in that the state is expected to only offer to pay for portables for three years, but the portables could be purchased on a three year lease-to-own basis which would convert the three year time frame to a permanent time frame.

* The offer of 75% funding for permanent classroom construction is in excess of an adequate education funding level, and in my opinion, will meet the requirements of 28-A.

The public kindergarten mandate is fully funded and 28-A does not apply

In my opinion, the fact that the state is paying 100% of the start-up expense at an adequate level, and that they are paying 100% of the cost of an adequate education on an ongoing expense basis, then the new public kindergarten program is fully funded on an adequate education basis, and article 28-A does not apply.

In my opinion, a lawsuit against the state to require additional payments for new public kindergarten programs is doomed to failure and would be a waste of money.

The last phrase of article 28-A in essence states that a favorable vote by the political subdivision will negate the application of 28-A. In my opinion, this is a moot point since the requirements of 28-A are met by the proposed funding levels, so there is no point in applying the second test.

Milford School Board 11/19/07

2007-11-20T16:42:00.000-05:00

The meeting was delayed by a half-hour because we had a "non-meeting meeting" with Attorney Bill Drescher before the regular school board meeting, and the non-meeting ran longer than expected. A meeting is technically defined by NH RSA 91-A:2, and according to 91-A:2 (c), consultations with legal counsel are by definition not a meeting, so It's not appropriate for me to discuss what was reviewed in the non-meeting.

The regular session was a rather lengthy meeting, and covered a variety of hot topics. We skipped the Superintendent's report this week due to time constraints.

Vote Regarding Sale of Bonds - We passed a formal motion to authorize the sale of bonds for the High School renovation project. We had some trouble a month or two ago where the bond bank had some problems with the wording of the warrant article, but those are all resolved now. Passing this motion will enable the sale of bonds to go forward.

High School Renovation Project - The Phase I track portion of renovation project is progressing well. The first course of pavement was laid this week and the field work is on schedule. We processed a change order to revamp the way the electrical and data feeds to the field are arranged.

Bids were received for the main building renovation portion, or Phase II of the project. We awarded the mechanical and electrical bids at the previous meeting, and we awarded about a dozen additional bids during this meeting. Netting everything out, it appears that we are on budget for the project, with about $250K of contingency still available. This is needed since you never know what you will run into on a renovation project, and we need to be able to cover whatever problems arise during the project.

Policy Reviews - Bert Becker was appointed to the policy committee, replacing Bob Willete who will focus on the Bales study committee. We reviewed 8 policies, moving 4 to a first reading and 4 to a second reading and enactment.

We passed new policy 5095 on Searches of Students, Student's Property and School Owned Property. This policy was modeled after the NH School Board Association model policy. The policy documents current practice, and provides details on what procedures are allowed.

We also passed revised policy 6030 Computer Software and Hardware Policy. The major changes in the policy relate to the use of non-district owned equipment within the district. The main point is that anyone wishing to use non-district equipment must first gain the approval of the Technology Director.

Matt Ballou will soon be installing equipment that will automatically identify new equipment that is added to the network to help to curb any unintentional or intentional violations of this policy.

Budget Items - This was the meat of the meeting. We held a joint meeting with the budget committee on Saturday where the administration reviewed all aspects of the budget. We followed the basic flow that we have developed over the years, and we were able to gain good insight to the budget during the day.

The main problem is that there were a lot of special situations this year, and the budget was higher than desired.

Kindergarten - We first reviewed Kindergarten in some detail, since that is a topic that has a lot of influence on the overall budget. The state committee that is addressing the cost of an adequate education had made some preliminary decisions, and these were discussed at the meeting by Peter Bragdon. Some of the more significant proposals.
- The state will allow districts to delay implementation of public kindergarten by one year. they will need to present a plan to the state showing how they will be implementing it in the following year.
- Kindergarten construction will be eligible for 75% state aid for the portions of the building that are actual classrooms or connecting corridors.
- Kindergarten students will be eligible for 1/2 the adequacy money that is made available to full-time students. This amount is still to be determined, but will be at least $1200 per student according to Peter Bragdon. The Telegraph reported today that it will be at least $1900.
- One of the key drivers of how the state will calculate adequate education cost is the cost of teachers. Some members of the state committee want to set it at the cost of the lowest paid teacher in the state, and others want to set it at the average salary of new teachers in the state. In either case, this will be much less than the average cost of teachers in the state since only a small portion of teachers are new teachers.
- The state authorized 100% of portables for three years to help get the programs started.

Kindergarten delayed - I made a motion to delay the implementation of public kindergarten until 2009. There was some confusion about the motion, and it was not initially supported. We changed the wording slightly, and the motion passed.

Kindergarten Bond Issue - The main issue with implementing kindergarten in Milford is that we need to have a facility to provide the program. There are several options, but the one that makes the most sense to me at this time is what is known as option 3, where we tear down the Bales annex and add a four room addition to Jacques. This is the option that is supported by the district administration.

The advantages of option 3 are that it is relatively low cost ($1.8M), and gets the kindergarten and first grades under the same roof. This eliminates the issues relating to moving across the parking lot to get to the annex as would occur in option 2 (renovating the annex). The downside is that there is little upside space options, and a sustained upturn in enrollments may require a new construction fix at some time in the future. The space looks like it will meet our needs for the near term, and I don't see anything on the horizon that would indicate a large upturn in enrollments. The trend in New Hampshire in recent years has been for declining enrollments, and this should continue, at least for a while.

I had been originally in favor of constructing a new building at Brox (option 4) as the preferred choice for two main reasons. One is that it is the option that provides the most future flexibility. If we get an upturn in enrollments, then we would still have the option to add four classrooms to Jacques to handle the first grade enrollments, and we would be able to add classrooms to the Brox building to handle the kindergarten increases.

The second reason that I supported the Brox construction option is that it is likely that we will get 75% building aid now, but we will only get 30% if we build the same project in the future. The difference in state aid is roughly $2M on the $4.5M Brox construction project. Our portion of the increase from option 3 (Jacques addition) to option 4 (new Brox construction) is roughly $700K. It seemed to me that spending an extra $700K now would be a good investment to save $2M at some time in the future (perhaps 10-15 years down the road. Another way to look at is that we would get four extra classrooms plus some other supporting functions for only $700K. (The Jacques addition is for four classrooms, and the separate Brox building would be eight rooms).

The point that changed my mind on this is that the administration brought some new information to us at the budget meeting last Saturday. It turns out that there a several additional people required to run a separate building instead of just adding on to an existing building. I knew that there would be an additional expense, but I did not expect it to be so high. Adding all the additional support staff for a separate building adds roughly $250K to the operating budget each year. Over 10-15 years, this would add up to $2.5m to $3.8M in additional operational costs, which is more than the $2M savings. Since it is a negative number, we might as well go with the lower cost option and save the money.

There has been some discussion about what will happen if sometime soon we change to full-day kindergarten instead of half-day kindergarten. My response to that is that in my opinion it is very unlikely that the Milford voters would approve a move to full-day kindergarten on their own any time soon, so we should not plan on that as a viable option. On the other side, if the state mandates that we move to full-day kindergarten, then that would be a new mandate, and they would provide funding at that time at some increased level (perhaps the same 75% that is offered now). We would be in the same position as we are now, so there is no reason to plan for it.

I doubt that the state will mandate full-day kindergarten any time soon either. The cost to the state would be very high since there are very few districts currently providing full-day programs. As a rough estimate, if there are 15,000 kindergarten students in the state, and it costs $2500 in adequacy aid to upgrade them from half-day to full-day, then that is an extra $38M for the entire state. They are struggling to make the current situation work, so I doubt that they want to make the cost problem $38M worse.

I made a motion to choose option 3 as our method for implementing public kindergarten in the 09-10 school year. Bert Becker appeared to support the motion, but it did not look like anyone else would support the motion at this time, so I withdrew it. We have some parliamentary rules that make it more difficult to pass something that had already been defeated once, so it is not helpful to have a losing vote on the record.

I am hopeful that we will be able to come up with some sort of a plan that can be supported by a majority of the board. The issue is that we are now legally obligated to provide public kindergarten, and if we choose to ignore that legal requirement, then we could be liable to pay penalties if we are sued by an aggrieved party.

Operating Budget - The administration has done another fine job this year with developing the first draft of the operating budget. They reviewed all the costs and provided forecasts based on reasonable expectations. Their first draft was based on the assumption that we would continue along the same path as we have been following where we make continuous improvements each year with respect to curriculum and programs. The district as a whole has been on the right track for several years, and we have gotten better each year, perhaps not at a rate that everyone would like, but at least at a steady pace that yields positive improvements.

The problem was that the first pass of the budget came in too high relative to what we can afford. A rough rule of thumb that we frequently use is to keep our cost increases to a level not to exceed the inflation rate as measured by the CPI plus the net change in enrollment. The current trailing 12 month CPI is 3.1%, and we expect an enrollment increase of 1.4% for a total target increase of 4.5%.

Peter Bragdon made a motion to bring the increase down to 4.9%. There are some additional special education costs expected next year, with the need for three additional one-on-one associates to meet IEP requirements. Special education costs are mandated by federal law, and we are required to fulfill them. It seems reasonable to allow a slightly higher increase when there are significant increase in special education costs. The net effect of this motion was the creation of the need to identify $400K of cuts to be made to the proposed budget. The administration was tasked with coming back to the next meeting with a prioritized list of cuts to meet the $400K requirement, with the proviso that the cuts not come out of debt service, food service, or fund transfers. The motion passed 5-0.

Even with these cuts, this increase results in a large tax increase. The main factor is that the state had their big increase in adequacy aid this past year, and unless the rules change, the adequacy aid will be the same next year. Since there will not be an increase in state aid, all of the increase in costs will have to be borne by local property taxes. Since the increase will be divided by a smaller base, the percentage increase is higher. The adequacy aid and other revenues source are excluded from the local tax rate calculation.

Now, the state is currently going through their adequacy costing formula and there could be huge shifts in adequacy aid which throw this out the window. We will have to wait and see.

My philosophy is to watch the actual spending closely since that is what we have the most control over. If we manage our spending, then the corresponding taxes will tend to follow over time. Sometimes we make out with revenue sources, like last year where we ended up with a decrease in taxes due to increased state aid. Other times we lose out, such as this year were it looks like there will not be an increase in aid.

Default budget: We received our first draft of the default budget. I haven't had a chance to review it in detail yet, so I don't have a comment on it at this time. As presented, it does not include kindergarten funding. It is not clear to me if kindergarten funding should be in the default budget this year or not since the legal status of the kindergarten mandate for this year is murky at best. It was mandated for the o8-09 school year by the law that passed in June, but the adequacy aid group has indicated that they plan to ask for it to be moved to the 09-10 school year. The question is, do you follow a course of action based on the rules as they currently exist, or do you follow a course of action based on how you think that the rules will end up?

I think that it is clear that it will need to be in the default budget next year since it is very likely that the law will mandate it for that year.

Milford School Board 10/15/07

2007-10-16T21:11:00.000-05:00

Superintendent's Report

* The Volunteer New Hampshire Organization named Milford a 2007 Spirit of New Hampshire Program Award Winner. The award will be presented on November 7th at the Grappone Center in Concord, and Governor Lynch will attend the ceremony.

The Volunteer Program Champion Awards recognize outstanding volunteer programs that provide the infrastructure for volunteers to be successful in their service. Awards in the Volunteer Program Champion category recognize excellent program management, fund development efforts that sustain volunteer programs, and commitment of time/resources to engage employees in community volunteer roles.

* Reading information night will be held at the Jacques Memorial School on Thursday 10/18 at 6:30. This will be hosted by the early education literacy team.

* The open houses at each school were completed and all were well attended. The Global Connect telephone messaging service was used to notify parents of the nights, and the notification system seemed to work well.

* Rivier College is sponsoring a professional development program titled "Developing Teacher Leaders of Elementary and Middle School Science" for some of the science teachers in the District.

Project Management Committee

Tom Hurley (Committee Chair) gave an update on the various issues that were addressed at the committee meeting on Thursday. Tom updated all the items that were described in my previous posting. The board approved the fencing and the bleacher recommendations.

ATC Curriculum

Rosie Deloge (Director of Technical Studies) presented the ATC curriculum that was recently developed. This book was the result of a lot of work by various individuals throughout the state. The objective was to develop a common curriculum for many of the ATC's (Applied Technology Center) around the state. Previously each ATC developed their own curriculum for each program, which led to an inability to compare the results from each school.

The new curriculum seems quite good. Each of the 12 program areas has a defined curriculum that is in a structured format.

Kindergarten

The school administration presented the results of their studies on the feasibility of various kindergarten options that are available to us in our efforts to implement public kindergarten as is now required by state law.

Laurie Johnson (Assistant Superintendent of Schools) was the lead presenter of the information, but everyone chimed in as needed.

State Funding

There was a lot of discussion about what are the potential funding sources for the programs from the state. We will not know for some time as to what portions will be funded by the state. Len Mannino seemed pessimistic about the potential for state funding, but based on what I have read about the subject, I am much more optimistic that we can expect to receive significant funding levels for implementation.

The old formula for construction aid for kindergarten start-ups was 75% kindergarten construction funding for the project plus 30% building aid for the portion not funded, for a total of 82.5% aid. It is my opinion that we can expect to receive at least that level of funding, and there is a possibility that it could be even greater.

While there is some debate on this topic, the feeling of many people is that an adequate portion of public kindergarten costs is a new state mandate, and the state constitution requires that all new mandates be funded by the state. I expect that the legislature will decide to 100% fund an "adequate portion" of new kindergarten programs, and that they will be generous with support of construction projects.

Peter Bragdon, who is on the state committee that is working on the funding aspects of an adequate education, seemed to agree with my assessment of the situation, and that there would be some significant level of funding.

Five Options

Five construction options were presented. The start-up costs and annual operating costs for each option were estimated, and the resulting tax impact was also estimated based on various assumptions. Options one to four were for half-day kindergarten and option five was whole-day kindergarten.

We identified some relatively minor items would need additional costing review prior to submitting a warrant article, but the options were developed in enough detail where we can get a fairly good estimate of the tax impacts of the choices.

The four half-day options have similar ongoing costs of about $0.22 per 1,000, or $55.80 for a $250k house. This is net of state adequacy funding of $1,200 per student. The whole-day option is $.86/1,000, or $176.00 for a $250k house.

The main differences in cost are for the construction costs for each option.

These are the options (with tax impacts based on continuation of existing state funding):

1. Jacques 2 Portables - Add two portables containing four classrooms to the rear of the Jacques school. This is the least cost option, but did not get support from any board member. My opinion is that this version is OK as a stopgap measure to enable us to get the program implemented next year if needed, but is not suitable as a long-term solution. Portables are OK when future needs are uncertain, but when it appears that you have a long term need, then it is less costly in the long run to have a long term solution. The construction cost is $190k, or an extra $0.01 on the tax rate for five years, or $2.50 for a $250k house.

2. Renovate Bales Annex - Construction is $1.3M or $0.05 on the tax rate for ten years, or $12.50 on a $250k house. The is the option that I have discussed in the past. It is the least cost option for a semi-permanent solution. The total cost (start-up and operating costs) for this option is about $0.27 per 1000, or $68.30 on a $250k house.

3. Four-room addition to Jacques - This would include tearing down the Bales Annex, and adding a four-room addition to the front end of Jacques. This has the advantage of putting all the students under one roof so they don't have to go outside to move to other areas of the building. The traffic patterns may be better also, but I'm not sure of that. Construction is $1.8M or $0.07 on the tax rate for ten years. Total cost is about $0.29 per 1000, or $73.30 for a $250k house.

4. Stand-alone building on Brox property - This is an eight room stand-alone building on the Brox property near the Heron Pond school. This would include six rooms for kindergarten and two for pre-school. Construction cost is $4.5M, or $0.17 per 1000 on the tax rate for 20 years. Total cost is about $0.39 per 1000, or $98.30 for a $250k house.

5. Full-day stand-alone building on Brox - This is similar to option 4, but is a 14 room building to allow for the full day programs. Construction cost is $10.4M, or $0.39 per 1000 on the tax rate for 20 years. Total cost is about $273.50 for a $250k house.

Options 2 and 3 are lower cost options that provide a solution for the nearer time periods, say perhaps 10 years. At some point the enrollments will rise and further solutions would be required. They do save money in the near term, and it may even extend to longer periods if enrollments rise slowly.

Option 4 costs more now, but provides a longer term solution. It leaves open the option of expanding Jacques or renovating the Annex at some time in the future if the first grade enrollments expand, and the Brox building will be designed to be easily added to if needed.

Option 5 costs the most, but provides for a full-day kindergarten program which is educationally desirable.

In my opinion, although a full-day program is desirable, I think that we should stick with a half-day program for now. We need to walk before we can run, so lets move forward with a half-day program and leave the full-day program discussion for future times.

I think that it probably makes sense to go with the complete new building instead of the renovation/addition options. The stand-alone building gives us more flexibility for future changes. There is also the chance that the state will pay for most or all of it at this time, and this might be a one-time shot at a high funding level for construction. The cost adder of $25 or $30 per household for this option seems like a good value for the future flexibility.

Enrollment Projections

We went over the enrollment projections for next year. We do this at this time each year in preparation for the budget development process. We use average cohort survival rates for most of the estimating, but we use a different process for the R-1 grades. The cohort process seems to work well, but we are less successful at estimating the numbers of students that are enrolling in R-1 for the first time. We reviewed the numbers, and we will formally adopt them at the next meeting.

High School Renovation Project

2007-10-12T16:19:00.000-05:00

The MHS Project Management Advisory Committee met last night to review the status of the Milford High School renovation project.

Schedule

Leighton White is making excellent progress on the field work. The weather has been favorable, and the on-site materials have been relatively easy to work with. Everything seems to be tracking on schedule to this point. They are going to go as long as they can before the weather turns against them. They expect to have most of the significant site work done before winter. A couple of big items that will hold until the spring are the top surface on the track and the sod for the fields. One item that might get done this fall or it might wait for the spring is the rough surface underlayment for the track. This will depend on the weather.

Bleachers

The committee reviewed the bids that came in for bleachers. We had long discussions on the pros and cons of the various alternatives, but in the end, we decided to recommend to the School Board that we purchase the seven-year-old used bleachers that came from Adelphi University that are currently being stored in New Jersey. They are available from Seating Solutions. The company is headquartered in Commack, NY, but the bleachers are being stored in Newark, NJ.

As of now, the configuration will consist of seating for roughly 1,000 people on one side only with no visitors side. This is not a final decision, but based on cost issues, it seems like it is the right thing to do. Once we have a better handle on the overall costs for the project, we will revisit this since the general consensus is that breaking up the bleachers into a home and a visitors side is a better alternative.

We have $210k in the budget for bleachers and press box, and this alternative will be about $179k. This savings will help to make up some of the overages that we have seen elsewhere.

Fencing

We received three bids for fencing, and the committee voted to recommend to the School Board that the work be awarded to the low bidder for $47,525. Penney Fence from Londonderry was the low bidder, but I did not find a web site for them.

The fencing budget was $40k, so we are over budget in this area. There were some significant changes to the plan recently where the state environmental review required us to add more fencing around the detention pond and a 12 foot swing gate into the area.

Change Orders

The committee approved two change orders.

1. The water line going down West street is on the west side of the road instead of the east side of the road as shown on the town plans. Leighton White now has to cut across the road to tie into the main to feed the irrigation system. This extra work is going to cost $5,991.

2. The School District decided that we need to increase the size of the manhole access cover to the below ground sprinkler system shut-offs. The old design was a 32" circular egress and the new design is a 36" square opening. The cost for this change is $1,627.

Engineering Oversight

We are not going to hire a clerk of the works for the project (to avoid a $54k cost), and try to seek alternative less expensive options to achieve the same results. Mostly this will consist of Mike Trojano and Bill Cooper spending more time overseeing the project at no added cost, but their knowledge is limited in some areas. We are going to hire Bill Davidson from Meridian Land Services to oversee various aspects of the field construction, including the drainage. They would be doing some of this work as part of their normal part of the process, but this is for additional work that is excluded from their normal scope. We will pay him by the hour, and we capped the expense for him at $6k for now.

Interior Work

Most of the work that will be done on the interior is out for bid now. The bids are due back next week, and the committee will meet again on October 25th to review all the bids. We expect to get bids on all the major items such as mechanical and electrical, but there may be some items that get no-bid by everyone. This is a renovation project that will be a pain for some trades to do because of the timing or access issues that have to be dealt with.

We should have an excellent overall view of the cost of the program at our next meeting. We all have our fingers crossed that the bids will come in low, and we will be able to complete the project as originally planned.

Milford School Board 10/1/07

2007-10-10T17:57:00.000-05:00

Superintendent's Report

* Marc Maurais (Athletics Director) announced that Milford High School was one of 24 schools that received the NHIAA/ National Federation of State High School Association Award of Excellence for the previous school year, recognizing that the school did not receive a game disqualification by a player or a coach. The Milford football team also received the Division III Sportsmanship Award, which was selected by the NH Football Officials Association.

* The adult education classes were starting, with 8 to 14 enrolled in Spanish, Photoshop, Excel, and Word. We are restarting adult education this year, and this will be our trial run to see how much interest there will be in the classes.

* The evening classes for High School students in need will start later in the year, perhaps after the holidays. It takes a few months for students to recognize that they need the extra help to make good progress.

* The Freshman Transitions program was held in late September, and was well received by all. Parents and students attended a variety of classes that addressed common problems encountered by students in High School.

High School Renovations

Field work and earth moving by Leighton White has moved into high gear. The weather has been good, and they have made significant progress towards the field portion of the project.

There will be more loam available than originally estimated. This will be discussed at the next Renovations Committee meeting to be held on 10/11, but it is likely that there will be a proposal to sell off some of the excess material. We are going to store some of it on the Brox property for future use, but the amount that will be available will be more than we expect to use in the near future.

2006-2007 Test Scores Presentation

Laurie Johnson (Asst. Superintendent of Schools) gave a very informative presentation on the results from standardized testing during the previous year. The tests that were reviewed were:

NECAP - New England Comprehensive Assessment Program. This is the test used by Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Vermont to calculate the No Child Left Behind scores. It is administered to grades 3-8 and 11 in Reading, Math, and Writing in October, and Science in the Spring. It can take months to get the scoring for this test.

NWEA - North West Evaluation Association. This is a computerized adaptive assessment program that Milford administers in grades 3-8 and in the Sage School, usually 2-3 times per year. There are two tests, one in Reading and one in Math. The results are available right after the test is taken, and this test can be effectively used by teachers to personalize educational plans for students.

SAT - Scholastic Aptitude Test. College entrance exam taken by Juniors and Seniors.

Core Performance Assessments - Local assessments created by Milford teachers to insure that uniform core competency is learned across the various classes that are offered in a subject.

Laurie provided detail explanations on all of these tests, but here are some of the highlights.

No Child Left Behind. The NCLB test results for Milford were generally good for this past year, with one exception. Milford met "Adequate Yearly Progress" (AYP) in all areas except the Reading portion of the Heron Pond Special Education subgroup. If any Heron Pond subgroup does not meet AYP in Reading next year, then Heron Pond will be designated as a school in need of improvement. There are specific actions that will need to be taken if that occurs.

The NECAP scores that are used to calculate AYP were fairly good this past year. Milford's scores were higher than the state average in all areas except for 3rd grade reading.

NWEA - Milford scored above the national average in Reading, and well above the national average in Math. We are guessing that this indicates that the math curriculum that we instituted several years ago as the first implementation of our ongoing curriculum coordination program has been working well. The reading program is much newer and has not had a chance to work yet.

SAT - SAT scores in 2007 were either at or above the NH state average scores and the National average scores.

Core Assessments - These are new rubrics that are are being created for many classes. There are a few tests in existence today, and they expect to have a full complement by next year.

Jacques Summer School Program

Johanna Johnson (Director of Special Studies) and John Foss (Jacques Memorial School Principal) presented an overview of the summer school program that was held this year for students that were entering Readiness or First grade this fall and who were classified as in need of strategic or intensive support.

The DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) test was used to identify students in need. This is a test that enables a very quick assessment of the relative abilities of early learners. Identified students were given two levels of support. The lowest level was the District provided learning kits to parents to work with their children at home. The kits had various elements, but typically contained games that help students to learn things like letters, shapes and colors.

The more intensive program was a summer school program where the students came to the Jacques School for 1- 4 days per week for about a month.

Johanna and John gave a very detailed review of the activities and results of the summer school which I won't go through here. But netting it all out, it appears that the program was very successful at raising the literacy level of the incoming students. Learning to read is critically important to students, and we need to do all we can to get them started on the right foot. Many of the students were at very low levels of literacy after kindergarten, and after having gone through just one month of intensive summer school, they had made significant progress towards meeting the benchmark levels.

Mason Withdrawal Letter

The town of Mason is still trying to leave the Mascenic School District, and they asked for the Milford School Board to provide a letter indicating our support of the proposal. We voted 5-0 to send a letter stating that we would probably be willing to ask our voters if they would support Mason coming to Milford.

Deanna (Dee-Dee) Carter came to the meeting and expressed her strong disapproval of this idea. She discussed the history of Amherst coming to Milford, and then eventually leaving to go on their own. She warned us to be careful, as there is a lot of undeveloped land in Mason and their population could skyrocket in just a few years.

In my opinion, this is a different situation than what was encountered with Amherst. Amherst was about equal to Milford in size, and Mason is only about 5% the size of Milford. They are currently at about 100 students in grades 6-12, and we should be able to absorb the 12-15 students per grade without too much added cost. They will pay tuition based on a formula that will be roughly $8K per year, and our real added variable costs will be much less than that, perhaps only about half as much. This would be very favorable to the Milford taxpayers.

Report of the Schools Document

This has been finalized and will be distributed. Copies are available at the SAU office if you want one. This is a nice folded document that provides summary information about various items of interest about the District.

Bales Study Committee

Rodny Richey and Lorraine Marchildon were appointed to the Bales Study Committee. They join previously appointed members Ron Carvell, Paula Durand, and Bob Willette.

Pavilions are Popping Up All Over

2007-09-30T19:35:00.000-05:00

There are two new pavilions being built in Milford right now, and another one was built last year. These are great examples of projects that get done in town behind the scenes by dedicated citizens, often without town funding.

1. The old pavilion at Keyes field was in bad shape and was torn down a couple of years ago. Through the work of a group of people and the donations of a few, a new pavilion was built and dedicated this year. Some of the key organizations and people were the Trustees of the Keyes Memorial Trust, Milford Lumber Company, Granite State Concrete, Skip Gautier, and Jerry Guthrie. Thanks everyone!

2. The Lions Club is building a pavilion at the MCAA fields on North River Road based on the same plans that were created for the Keyes field pavilion. A major portion of the cost of this pavilion was donated by Peter Leishman in memory of Muzzy Morell. This is the bio of Muzzy that was published in the 2006 town report:

"Arthur J. “Muzzy” Morell Jr. - “A life long resident who gave back to the community he loved so much”
We all mourn the passing of a friend who has touched so many people in this wonderful town. His generosity was felt by so many and went unnoticed by those who honored him with the 2006 Citizen of the Year.
One of the founding members of the Milford Community Athletic Association (MCAA) and was instrumental in creating the Keyes Field Recreation Complex. He was a coach, mentor, friend and Dad who loved sports. He also volunteered many hours to the SHARE program and was known as the “guardian angel”.
Muzzy was a member of the American Legion, Knights of Columbus and the Milford Lions Club who honored him with a Melvin Jones Fellow. He was an Army veteran having served during the Korean War. Over the years he served on various Town committees.
A graduate of Milford High School class of 1947 and a self employed electrician for more than 40 years, you could always find him in service with a smile. His dedication of service and friendship will be surely missed by all."

The construction project is headed by John Miller who has spearheaded all aspects of the project, and has done a great job. Joe Stella has contributed a lot, and a few other Lions have helped out. There will be a dedication ceremony on Sunday October 22nd. Thanks John!

3. Matt Clemens(a senior at Milford High) is building a stage at Keyes field for his Boy Scouts Eagle project. The stage is between the pool and the other pavilion that was recently built. This is an ambitious project for a young man like Matt, and it is a real test of character. He had to decide what to do, develop the plans for the project, gain the proper approvals (which was especially difficult due to all the red tape in town), fund raise all the money for the project, beg for help from lots of people, and do a lot of the work. He is about 75% done on the project, and is planning a dedication concert on Saturday October 21st in the afternoon. Great work Matt!

Manifest Educational Hardship

2007-09-23T21:27:00.000-05:00

I've been doing some work on the school district policies, and there is one obscure one that I just reviewed I'd like to bring to your attention. This is Milford School District Policy # 5090, Manifest Educational Hardship.

In general, resident students of a New Hampshire school district are assigned to a public school within the district by the Superintendent or his designee.

However, in unusual and extraordinary circumstances, parents or guardians may request a change of assignment to another public school within the district, or to another public school in a another district. When the parent or guardian believes that the assignment which has been made will result in a manifest educational hardship to the student, the School Board will consider these requests, according to the procedures in the policy.

This policy is based upon New Hampshire RSA 193:3 Change of School or Assignment; Manifest Educational Hardship or Best Interest; Excusing Attendance.

There are a bunch of details on how this works, but basically, the idea is that if a student has a problem with their assigned school, then there is a mechanism for the student to move to a different location.

Normally, the sending school board (where the student is first assigned) will review that case and decide whether they will support the change in venue for the student. If the move is approved, then the Superintendent for the sending location will contact a Superintendent for a proposed receiving location to see if the receiving district is willing to accept the student. If the school board for the receiving district approves the request, the the student will move to the new district. The sending district would then pay full tuition to the receiving district for the student.

This is a rare event, but has the potential for being very important to an individual student. Students can have major difficulties with interactions with a particular peer group where a complete divorce from the situation is the best course of action.

It is good for people to know that this process exists. You never know when the need to apply it will arise. A student may have drug, alcohol, or relationship problems that are best addressed by a completely new environment.

Stellos Stadium

2007-09-20T21:28:00.000-05:00

I went to the Milford High School "Home" football game last weekend that was held at Stellos Stadium near Nashua South High School. I had heard about Stellos Stadium on many occasions, but I had never been there before this game.

I left the game with that dreaded disease, (first described by Freud?), commonly known as "Stadium Envy". Stellos is a great football stadium with every amenity that is needed for a local football game. It has great parking, stands, concessions, lighting, and artificial turf.

The stands in particular were noteworthy. The home stands appear to hold about 2500 people and the visitor stands hold about 500, for a total of about 3,000 seats.

We are upgrading the Milford football facilities, but they will not be anywhere near the class of Stellos. We are hoping to get stands with seating for a total of 1,000 people. This is a far cry from the 3,000 at Stellos. Our field will be sod, which will be an upgrade from the dust bowl that we had previously, but it is not as nice as artificial turf.

Well, I'll just have to get over my Stadium Envy and be happy with what we are getting in Milford. The new track and field will be light-years ahead of what we had before and will be a wonderful improvement for the town. (I can still dream though...)

Milford School Board 9/17/07

2007-09-18T20:47:00.000-05:00

Superintendent's Report

* Liz O'Hare and Toby Tarnow are offering a new course for students at the High School that is geared toward creating radio drama shows. The course is called the Riverbend iTheater, and they will be creating radio theater productions at the Amato Performing Arts Center at the Boys and Girls Club. More information on the program can be found if you click this link.

* NECAP testing will occur during the first three weeks of October. A summary of last year's NECAP test results will be presented to the school board within the next month.

* There has been some developments on the issue of the windows at the Heron Pond School. Some of the windows in the original portion of the building are difficult to open, and we have been trying to figure out what to do about the problem since the building was originally built. I have tested roughly 15 windows in different rooms, and I have found that I can open all of them, but they are somewhat difficult to operate. Some of the women teachers do not have the physical strength to open some of the windows since it takes a bit of force, and you usually have to lean over a bit to apply the force. We had determined several years ago that the windows were within spec, but were still more difficult to open than we wanted. Recently I have heard that there are at least a small number of windows that are more difficult to open than others, and they may be out of spec.

The manufacturer of the windows, Mannix Windows from Brentwood, NY, has agreed that the windows are in warranty, and that they are guaranteed to be within opening force specifications, which is a pull of 45 pounds. By coincidence, they have a company representative in the area this week, and he will come to the school and do an inspection on all the windows to see if they are within spec or not. If they are out of spec, then Mannix will bring them back within spec.

The company representative will also provide training to District personnel as to how to adjust the windows. They will also provide information on kits that may be available to retrofit windows that are within spec but still harder to open than what is desired.

* The Mason School District is still looking to leave their current arrangement and send their students to Milford schools instead. They are asking for a letter from our District to the Dept of Education that indicates that we want to have them. We had looked at this in some detail a couple of years ago, and this is a win-win situation. They have slightly less than 100 students in grades 6-12, and we should be able to accommodate them in Milford with minimal impact. They would pay tuition based on a formula, and the tuition payments would be in excess of our incremental costs for educating the students. It is likely that at our next meeting we will authorize the administration to issue the letter that Mason is looking to receive.

Potential Warrant Articles

At the beginning of the budget preparation period each year, we try to identify all the potential warrant articles that may be on the March ballot. Putting this list together helps to insure that we consider each item during the budget preparation, but it does not mean that we will necessarily have each of these warrant articles. These are the potential articles, in no particular order.

* Asking for authorization for Mason or other school districts to send tuition students to Milford schools

* One or more construction requests for the creation of Kindergarten facilities. Possibilities include the renovation of the Bales Annex, new construction on the Brox property, and/or purchase/lease of other unidentified facilities.

* Purchase of the property next to the High School on West Street for use as a parking lot.

* Authorization to sell two building lots off of the Heron Pond site. These lots would be used to build houses by the building trades ATC program.

* Potential contract with classified staff bargaining unit.

Bales Study Committee

Ron Carvell and Paula Durand were appointed to the Bales Study Committee. Bob Willette is the School Board Rep.

High School Renovations

The board voted to award the track surfacing bid to Maine Tennis and Track for $203,045.

Leighton A. White has started construction in a big way on the field. They have torn down the bleachers and have started the dirt work.

Our construction management firm, Turnstone Corporation, is looking into the availability of some used bleachers from Adelphi University on Long Island. They have some bleachers that are relatively new that they have taken down because they are building a new stadium. A lot of details need to be worked out, but if it dows work, then there is the possibility that we could get larger bleachers for the same money they we were planning on spending on new. It is unusual to be able to buy used bleachers in good condition, so it is not even something that we had originally planned on investigating.

Milford School Board 9/4/07

2007-09-04T21:52:00.000-05:00

Superintendent's Report

The new school year started last week, and it went very well. The staff was in on Monday and Tuesday with start-up activities, grades K-9 started on Wednesday, and grades 10-12 started on Thursday.

They held the District-wide meeting on Tuesday. Bert Becker and I were able to attend the meeting, and it was quite good. I was impressed with the positive outlook that everyone exhibited during the meting. Everyone seemed to be really looking forward to a new school year and the influx of new students. It is difficult to positively motivate large organizations, and our District appears to have excellent morale. There are a lot of factors that go into this, but I think that some of the major ones are our Superintendent's performance, and the fair contracts that we have with our bargaining units.

The three largest classes in the district are the 6th, 9th, and 10th grades, with all of them over 240 students. The formal enrollment numbers will be presented at the first October board meeting, with the board setting the enrollment projections for the next year's budget at the second October meeting. The numbers can fluctuate during the first few weeks of the year, which is why the state waits until October first summarize the enrollment figures for the entire state.

The calendar that was created by Sue Asselin was distributed to the board. Sue has been creating these calendars for a couple of years, and does a great job of it. She raises the money to produce the calendars by selling ads in the calendars, and she prints enough of them to enable all students in the District to get one. The calendars list all the standard school events for the year, and they are a wonderful tool for keeping track of school activities. We use them at our house, and they work great. Thanks Sue!

Beth Powers (High School English Teacher) received the Champion of Human Rights award about a month ago from the NEA. This was partially due to her support of the Peach jam program in Milford.

The district had received written notice from the state that they felt that our ballot question was not detailed enough, and that we might not be authorized to sell bonds for the high school renovation project. Additional information was provided to the state, including the voter guide that was mailed to all residences in town, and the state decided to allow us to sell bonds. We will need to be more critical with the wording of future articles to insure that we do not get into similar situations.

Adequate Yearly Progress

Laurie Johnson gave a brief overview of the AYP results that had been announced by the state last week. She is going to do a much more in-depth overview within a month or so once she has all the detailed data to summarize.

In short, the District made AYP but the K-8 Reading program did not make AYP. The Heron Pond educational disability sub-group did not make AYP for Reading, and as a result, the entire K-8 program did not make AYP for Reading. If the K-8 Reading program does not make AYP next year, then it will be designated as being in need of improvement.

Buildings and Grounds Reports

Bill Cooper gave his annual report summarizing the B&G activities that occurred during the summer break. He passed out a four page report detailing all the actions, but these are some of the highlights:

* Replaced carpeting and painted in the Front Office areas of the High School, Middle School, and Jacques.

* Remediated Asbestos in 15 rooms in the High School in preparation of the renovations that will mainly occur next summer.

* Installed guard rails at the Middle School and Bales.

* Installed a second culvert at Heron Pond to help drain the pond during very high water events.

* The ball field at Heron Pond is in great shape with new fencing, loam, and seeding. It will be rested this fall and go into heavy use starting next spring. It is expected that the MCAA will be allowed to use it in addition to various school uses.

* There were a series of security camera improvements at most schools.

Budget Process Guidelines and Parameters

Peter Bragdon submitted the budget guidelines that we used last year, with a few slight modifications to make some needed corrections.

We changed it during the meeting to add a reference in the voters guide section that the guide should not include political advertising, except that a free candidate profile section would be allowed, similar to the voters guide that was produced last year.

Labor Day Parade 2007

2007-09-03T21:00:00.000-05:00

The VFW did their usual fine job with this year's Labor Day Parade. The weather was perfect, everything went on time, and there were no big gaps between groups.

The funding for the parade was limited this year due to the VFW gambling crackdown that occurred earlier this year, so they were not able to afford the out-of-town bands that usually show up for the parade. I like having the extra bands, and I hope that they find a way to fund them next year.

There are a few events that go on each year that really make a difference in Milford. These are things like the pumpkin festival, the Fourth of July fireworks, and the Labor Day parade. These are all key contributors to improving the spirit of the town, and as such, they indirectly help to increase the economic vitality of the town. Because they are so important to the town, I think that we should support them at least partially though taxes rather than though private funding. I would be in favor of putting at least partial support of the Labor Day parade on the ballot as a separate warrant article next year to see if others in town agree. It would be a shame if the parade were to disappear due to lack of private funding.

There was a good selection of politicians this year since it is a Presidential primary year. I like having the politicians in the parade, and I'd like to see that continue. There are some people that really don't like having the pol's around, but I think that they add a lot to the mix.

We had two top tier presidential candidates with Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, a second tier candidate with Chris Dodd, our Congressman Paul Hodes, and Governor John Lynch as the Grand Marshall of the parade.

I sat in an area with a mix of residents ranging from little kids to seniors. Everyone in our area seemed to really enjoy themselves.

Barack Obama came over to our area to shake hands, and it was really interesting. You could feel the electricity in the air when he came by, with just about everyone getting excited. Mitt Romney also shook hands in our area, but the response was much more muted.

Milford School Board 8/27/07

2007-08-28T21:33:00.000-05:00

High School Renovation Project

The school board met in a special meeting on Monday to review the recommendations of the High School Renovation Committee regarding the bids for the track and field site work.

The board discussed the status of the project and the budget implications of the bids that were higher than expected. Tom Hurley (Committee Chair) updated the board on all the discussions that had gone on at the building committee meeting and the background on all the issues. After all the discussions, the board held two votes.

The board voted 5-0 to award the site work project to Leighton White as per his bid. It is expected that Leighton will start work soon after labor day. Mike Trojano and Bill Cooper will look into the feasibility of doing something with the visitor bleachers (such as moving them to the soccer field), and if it seems viable, to act on the option. If it doesn't appear viable, then they will just be torn down as per the specifications.

The board voted 4-1 (Peter Bragdon in opposition) to authorize the building committee to not hire a Clerk of the Works if the Committee decided not to. This vote allows the building committee to make the decision without having to come back to the School Board for further approval. The vote does not obligate the Committee to not hire a Clerk, but the votes gives it the option to do so.

The board did not act on the award of the track surface bid to Maine Tennis and Track as had been approved by the building committee. The documentation of the bid was not presented at the meeting, and it was felt that it would be better to have the paperwork in front of everyone prior to a vote. This was not a time-critical item like the site-work bid since the track work will not be done until next May or so in any case. The bid information will be summarized and brought to a future meeting for approval.

The cost increase was discussed at length, with the basic consensus being that while it was a problem, it seemed to be of a manageable level given the context of the overall project. We will need to be careful moving forward that we make the proper decisions to keep the project within the overall budget and still have a quality result.

Superintendent Suprenant Contract

The board went into non-public session once the track and field discussion was complete. At the end of the non-public session, it was announced that Superintendent Suprenant and the board had reached agreement on a new three-year contract that is a follow-on to his initial three-year contract that recently ended.

I'd like to publicly thank Superintendent Suprenant for his performance during his first three years with Milford. We have made great progress in that time period, and the Milford School District is in great shape and getting better all the time.

While we don't use these terms to describe it, we have instituted processes that are essentially continuous improvement programs. Continuous improvement as a management philosophy is a prime foundation of quality systems, and we do it well in Milford. An example is our curriculum improvement process that is well entrenched in the district now. Every year we look at portions of the curriculum to plan future changes, we test the options for the changes, and we implement the changes. Each subject area flows thought this process on a regular schedule. This allows us to keep our spending relatively uniform from year to year while at the same time insuring that all aspects of the curriculum are refreshed on a regular planned basis.

We set goals each year, and we measure our progress towards meeting the goals. This closed-loop process helps to insure that we are working on the proper items, that we are coordinating our efforts towards meeting common goals, and that we are communicating our efforts to all interested parties.

Bales Mystery Solved

2007-08-25T15:51:00.000-05:00

The mystery of what was behind the Bales Elementary School sign has been solved. The District took down the sign early this week, and this is what they found:

The sign says:

* MILFORD HIGH SCHOOL *
** 1894 **

The newly-visible old granite sign is very nice, but I don't think that it will work for us going forward. The building is currently used as a combination middle/high alternative school, and there is a good chance that it will be a multipurpose building at some point in the future.

The school has some nice "bones" to it, and I think that it deserves to have a long future.

We are going to put on a new roof and replace the soffits as a side project of the current High School renovation project that was approved last year. The building needs a lot more to get it usable for a potential long term function. There will be a study committee starting up this fall that will investigate the potential uses for the building, and to guide us in figuring out what should be done with the building.

High School Renovation Project

2007-08-24T20:40:00.000-05:00

We held another meeting last night of the High School Renovation Committee. The purpose of the meeting was to review the bids that came in for "Phase 1" of the track portion of the project. Phase 1 is primarily for the site work and field aspects of the project.

In summary, the budget for the track and field portion of the overall project is $945k, not including any contingency funds or other soft costs. Our current best estimate for this portion of the project (including items that were bid and place holders for items that were not bid) is $1,274k, or $328k higher than budgeted.

This was based on awarding the site work contract to Leighton White, who bid roughly $619k for the site work, while the next lowest bid of the five received was roughly $697k for the same work.

It was disappointing to get such bad news right at the start of the project, but I don't think that it is a killer to the overall project. There are some things that we can do to ease the pain.

While we don't really have a good explanation as to why the bids were so much higher than our planning budget that was used for the budget, our best guess is that the drainage portion of the project ended up being much more complicated than originally envisioned. The final design included a new separate retention area for the water overflow whereas the original thought was that we could just use the retention pond just below the Middle School. The elevations were such that the existing area was too high to make it work, so a new retention area closer to West street was needed.

We made a couple of changes to the project during the meeting to help solve this cost problem. We decided to eliminate the Clerk of the Works position to save $54k. (We did not actually vote to do this at the meeting, but it is highly likely that we will do so at a future meeting.) The position is not really required since we decided to go with a Construction Manager arrangement instead of strictly using a general contractor. The Construction Manager and our own on-site personnel will keep tabs on the project instead. Having a Clerk of the Works might be marginally better than not having one, but it doesn't seem like it is worth the $54k that it would cost.

We spent a lot of time talking about track surfaces. The original plan was for a urethane based surface, and that is what was included in the estimate. We decided to change to a red-colored latex surface instead of going with the urethane surface. The information that we had was that the latex surface would probably need more frequent maintenance actions than the urethane, but the maintenance would be less expensive each time. The urethane might last longer than the latex, but no one could give us any hard numbers as to how long either surface would last. Both surfaces come with a five-year warranty, so from that perspective, they are about equal. Changing to red-colored latex saves $52k in installation cost as compared to the urethane. Latex seems to be the surface of choice for high schools in this area, with Bedford and Pinkerton both planning on installing latex for their recent projects.

We talked about using a blue surface instead of red just to get it to match our school colors, but supposedly the blue color fades fairly quickly while the red seems to be relatively color-fast. We were given a list of 11 schools that had a latex track, and 9 were red and 2 were blue. We decided that color-fastness was more important than matching the school colors.

Eliminating the Clerk of the Works, and changing the track to latex saved a total of $106k, bringing our cost problem down to $223k. The contingency on the project is budgeted at 15% of the construction costs. The 15% contingency associated with the $945k is $141k. If we apply all of that contingency to this portion of the project, then that decreases the cost problem down to $82k. One hates to tap into contingency so early in the process, but that is what it is for so we might as well go for it now since it is needed.

There are still a number of items that are in the cost build-up with a place-holder number that is an estimate and not an actual bid. One of the bigger items is the bleachers, with a place-holder number of $150k for a 680 seat bleacher on the home side and a 320 seat bleacher on the visitor side. This compares to the roughly 400 home/200 visitor set-up we have today. This $150k figure may be more or less once the bids come in. If we really needed the savings, then would could downsize the bleachers a bit to save cost. For example, it was estimated that changing to a 560 home/200 visitor set-up would save about $35k.

The committee voted to award the bid to Leighton White and to therefore move ahead with the project using the current designs. We will have to deal with the remaining $82k cost problem in some manner on the project, but we left that task to a later date once we get better figures for the other items.

The School Board will review this on Monday, and make a final decision on whether to award the contract to Leighton White. Assuming they do, then it is likely that Leighton will start work soon after Labor Day, We are going to have one final home football game at home on August 31st, so he can't start before then. There may be other issues that delay him a bit, but the work should begin soon.

Milford one of 10 Coolest Small Towns

2007-08-24T19:48:00.000-05:00

Budget Travel Magazine named Milford one of the 10 Coolest Small Towns in America! Go Milford!

Too bad it was Milford, PA.

Milford, PA is a small resort town that seems nice from the write up in their story, but I'll take Milford, NH any day.

I ran across the story because I saw an article that mentioned that Peterborough was also named one of the ten coolest small towns in America. The Budget Travel article talks about how the town is cool because it is kind of artsy. Although I hardly ever go there, I am impressed with Peterborough, and I agree that it is a cool little town.

My grandmother grew up in Peterborough, and I remember some of the stories she told me 40 years ago about her life in Peterborough during the first decades of the 20th century. She was there when cars were rare, roads weren't paved, and you were well off if you were able to go to school up to the eighth grade. People routinely worked long hours for low pay, and struggled to make ends meet. Life is so much easier today, in so many ways, and we don't appreciate how well off we really are now.

Milford School Board 8/20/07

2007-08-21T18:46:00.000-05:00

Superintendent's Report

Superintendent Suprenant reviewed some of the activities that occurred during the summer including:

* 339 students attending some sort of summer school program,
* Lots of training was held for various staff members,
* The schools were all cleaned and prepped for the new year,
* Some asbestos at the high school was abated in preparation for the upcoming renovations.

He announced that the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) scores would be released by the State Dept of Education on Tuesday August 28th.

He issued some press releases to highlight various items. One item in particular that he is trying to promote are the new Evening Community Education programs that will be offered this fall. In summary, there are several courses that will be offered on a tuition basis this fall in the evening at the High School. The courses are:

* Conversational Spanish
* We the People...the Citizen and the Constitution
* Digital Scrap Booking with Photoshop
* Microsoft Word 2003
* Microsoft Excel

More information on these offerings can be found on the school web site.There is a link on that page to a description of the courses, and another link to the registration forms. Most of the courses start on Tuesday October 2nd.

Superintendent Suprenant invited the School Board members to attend the opening session for the staff on Tuesday the 28th. I was able to attend the session last year, and I thought that it was very helpful to hear the messages that were given to everyone. The session is used to try to get everyone on the same page for the year, working towards common goals.

PEG Access

David Kirsch is the new PEG Access Director. PEG is Public, Educational, and Government Cable TV Access. Milford has improved the channel 21 access over the past couple of years, and we are making more progress all the time. Dave has some good ideas on how to improve things, and he will be working to add to the program over time.

Some of the things that we discussed were:

* He is hoping to add sports coverage, but there are a bunch of details that need to be worked out. There is just one true home football game this year, and he is hoping to tape the game and broadcast it on channel 21. One issue is that while it is usually fairly easy to get someone to operate the camera, it is usually very difficult to get a commentator/announcer for the game. Dave is hoping to get someone from the Radio club to act as a commentator during the game.

* Dave talked about some of his previous experiences with other schools, such as in Concord. He said that one of the keys to gaining content is to provide a camera/computer/editing software setup to each school to enable them to create presentations on a regular basis.

* He thought that it might be good to create an overview film for each of the ATC programs. These videos could be shown on CATV, and they could also be shown to prospective students from other districts.

* We discussed how we can try to improve the audio quality of the School Board tapings. There are a few choices: do nothing, get a new microphone/mixer setup (about $5K), move to the Selectmen's Meeting Room where they have set up a decent system, or fix up a place in the school that has an improved setup. I am in favor of fixing up Room 4 in the High School as the designated meeting room, instead of just using the Selectman's Room. The main advantage is that Room 4 seats about 100 people, and the Selectmen's Room only seats about 20. Having seating for 20 people is fine for most meetings, but there are usually several meetings a year where 20 is just not enough.

* Dave mentioned that there are satellite feeds of educational programs that are popular in other Districts. He mentioned Annenberg and NASA as being two that were very good. He is going to look to see if we can add them to Milford.

* The Selectmen's meetings are going to be broadcast live in a month or two. We may be able to do the School Board meetings live also, but that would be for a later date and would require some sort of infrastructure to make it happen.

Policy Review

The Staff Protection policy was postponed pending further review of the implications of paying additional compensation on top of Workers' Compensation payments.

The Daily Physical Activity policy was approved. This policy was required by the state standards that were updated last fall. The basic premise of the policy is that the District will encourage all members of the District community to engage in some sort of daily exercise.

I brought up an issue that had come to light during our discussions last meeting on the Daily Physical Activity Policy. The State mandates minimum expectations for this policy, and we used the State guidelines for our policy. The New Hampshire School Boards Association has a sample policy that is more emphatic on a couple of points. For example, in one spot they use the phrase "Commit adequate resources..." and our policy uses the phrase "Support adequate resources..." for the same section. The policy review committee had mentioned this discrepancy at the last meeting when they were discussing the proposed policy.

I thought that it was a good practice for the policy review committee to bring to light any discrepancies like that, and I thank them for doing so on this policy. I asked that in the future, they continue to bring up any discrepancies that are identified between the proposed policy and the NHSBA sample policy. Also, I asked them to identify any NHSBA sample policies that were reviewed, but the committee decided to not implement. My concern on this is that there are some sample policies that have a political philosophy associated with them that might have varying support by the board as a whole. I would prefer that anything that is controversial be dealt with at the board level, and not be decided by a sub-committee without having an open discussion.

The policy committee is systematically going through our existing policies and updating them as required. I would encourage them to change their process to instead of starting with our policy book, that they use the sample policies from the NHSBA as the starting point to try to find the areas where we are deficient.

The policy review committee has been doing a good job, and they have updated quite a few policies. Sometimes just changing the wording in a very slight manner can have a big effect on on the outcome, so they have had to be very careful as they go through the policies.

Bales School

We decided to remove the "Bales Elementary School" sign from the front of the building. This will eliminate the word Elementary from a sign on a school that is no longer an elementary school. It will also allow us to see what is under the sign, since we don't know for sure what the exact wording is that is there. The best guess is that there is a sign under there that says "Centennial School", but there is a chance that it says "Centennial High School".

We did not rename the building at this time, but we may do that at a future meeting.

High School Renovations

Phase one of the bid items have come back in, and they will be presented to the building committee on Thursday 8/23. According to Mike Trojano, the bids on several of the items came in much higher than originally estimated. We are going to have to deal with this in some manner.

The School Board will have a quick meeting on Monday August 27th to review the Building Committee's recommendation about the bids. The objective is to award the grounds work as soon as possible so construction on the field can be started quickly. We'll have to see where the bids are before we do this, since we need to make sure that the overall renovation project stays on track.

World Language Curriculum

The new curriculum was approved.

Superintendent/District Goals

These were approved. Bob Willette asked (and we approved) that a goal to investigate lengthening the school day be added to the list.

A Day in the Life of a Milford Firefighter

2007-08-19T15:46:00.000-05:00

I came across a very nice slideshow set to music that shows a day in the life of a Milford Firefighter. It is 3:42 in length, and worth watching. There are lots of interesting pictures showing various events that the Milford Fire Department has encountered, from floods to fires.

The credits at the end of the video give photo credits to Chief (ret.) Richard Tortorelli, Ed Stella, and the Milford Fire Department. It then suggests that if you have any interest in joining the Department, then you should contact Chief Fraitzl at mfd@milford.nh.gov.

The video is on youtube, and also on the town fire department website.

Our safety personnel in town do a great job, and they don't get the recognition that they deserve. Kudos to all of them, and thanks for serving.

Bales Elementary School

2007-08-14T20:13:00.000-05:00

The Bales Elementary School has a long history. This is the brief summary of it as posted on the MilfordNH web site:

In 1894 the town of Milford celebrated its centennial and the new Centennial High School was opened. The cost of the whole project was $47,000 of which $10,000 was for the land. The new school contained the latest in equipment and building features. Because of its excellence, students from surrounding communities were attracted to it and the tuition was welcomed by the town. Eleven graduates were in the first graduating class in 1896 and the last class to graduate was in 1961 with eighty graduates. In 1961 high school students were housed in the new AREA high school on West Street and the old high school was given over entirely to Junior High students. The building was remodeled In 1969 and became the elementary school. It was renamed the Bales Elementary School In honor of Harold C. Bales who served as superintendent from 1919 to 1939.

The building is no longer used as an elementary school, and is instead used mainly to house the Sage School program and the Special Education staff. This is a brief summary of the Sage School, as shown on the Sage School web site:

The Milford Alternative School, known as the Sage School, provides educational and therapeutic programming for students in grades six through twelve identified as "high risk" or with a serious emotional disability.

The mission of the Milford Alternative School is to provide an alternative, safe, and supportive environment in which students can achieve their academic potential and develop the skills and competencies necessary for employment, further education, and daily life.

I'd like to rename the building, with the primary motivation to get rid of the word "Elementary" since it is no longer appropriate. I think that calling it the "Bales Building" would be fine, but other names would be OK also. There is a good chance that the building will end up being a mixed use building, with a combination of school uses and town uses. Calling it a building instead of a school matches up better for a mixed use structure.

The District will be setting up a Bales Use Study Committee this fall, with the objective being the development of long term plans for the building. Everything will be on the table for review by the committee, from selling the building (giving it away), to doing nothing, to full renovations for various uses. Contact the SAU office if you have any interest in serving on the committee.

As part of the bond that passed last year, we will be putting a new roof on the building and fixing the soffits. We will hold off on doing other major work until there is a long-term plan in place for the building that seems to make sense. The next larger bond probably won't be proposed until sometime after the existing Middle School bond expires in the 2012 time frame, so there is plenty of time to figure out what we want to do with the building.

JerriAnne Boggis Wins Award

2007-08-13T17:56:00.000-05:00

The Milford Observer had a front page article this week that announced that JerriAnne Boggis was named the 2007 winner of the Women's Recognition Award by the New Hampshire Commission on the Status of Women.

Ms. Boggis won the award for her tenacious efforts to raise awareness of Milford resident Harriet Wilson (1825-1900). Wilson was the first black woman to publish a novel in the United States. Her semi-autobiographical novel "Our Nig; or Sketches From the Life of A Free Black" was published in 1859.

Ms. Boggis was the driving force behind the Harriet Wilson Project which was initially set up to simply promote the study of Harriet Wilson, but morphed into much more. The group decided to commission an ambitious statue of Harriet Wilson for display in Milford. They did extensive fund-raising and promotion for the project, and they held a very moving dedication ceremony on November 6, 2006.

This award couldn't go to nicer person. I don't know her myself, but I did attend a talk that she gave to the Milford Historical Society, and I attended the dedication ceremony. I was very impressed by her at both events, and it is obvious that she is committed to making a positive difference in New Hampshire.

She is scheduled to receive the award from the Governor and the Executive Council on September 19th.

Thank you JerriAnne for being such a dedicated and noble soul. You have helped to improve the heritage of Milford. It is people like you that make this such a wonderful community.

History of Humphrey Moore, Part 2

2007-08-08T22:27:00.001-05:00

This is a continuation of the previous post about Reverend Humphrey Moore. This posting is from Ramsdell's 1901 History of Milford, N.H. on pages 370-375, Chapter XXIII. Biographical Sketches., Rev. Humphrey Moore, D. D.

Humphrey Moore, the youngest child of Humphrey, and Mary Sweetser Moore, who for more than a generation was the minister of the town and who lived among its people for nearly seventy years, was born in Princeton, Mass., Oct. 19, 1778.

His grandfather was Paul Moore; his great-grandfather was John Moore; his great-great-grandfather was Jacob Moore, natives of Sudbury, Mass.; his great-great-great-grandfather was John Moore who emigrated from England and settled in Cambridge but removed to Sudbury in 1643.

His parents, according to the testimony of the son, “were industrious, economical, exemplary in their lives, and respected by all their acquaintances.” From them he obtained all the instruction he received previous to his ninth year, when he became for the first time a pupil in the district school. Robert B. Thomas, his first teacher in school, taught him to write, and under his instruction the pupil became a good penman, and at the age of ninety-two years his manuscripts were not only legible but good specimens of handwriting for any age. He was also thoroughly grounded in elementary mathematics by his first public instructor. His father died when he was twelve years old. From this time he depended upon his own exertions for a livelihood. The four years preceding his admission to Harvard College in 1795, were spent in alternate study and manual labor. He was obliged to practice the strictest economy in order to meet the expenses of his preparatory course and to put himself in respectable condition to appear before the faculty of Harvard college for examination. The coat which he wore on important occasions for the first two years of college life was made from one which was given to his father at the age of twenty-one years as a freedom coat and by him worn as a best garment until his death or for a period of thirty-one years. He maintained a good position in college and graduated with the class of 1799. There was a vacation of four weeks preceding commencement and not wishing to lose this time he engaged a school in Bath, Maine, to continue six months. Not being present at commencement in 1799, he did not receive the degree of A. B. until the following year.

After closing his school in Bath in December, 1799, he became a student in theology with Dr. Backus, of Somers, Connecticut, who was accustomed to train young men for the ministry, there being at that time no theological school in the country. After the usual course in divinity he was licensed to preach by the association of which Dr. Backus was a member. He was settled as pastor of the church in Milford, Oct. 13, 1802, and sustained that relation one third of a century. April 5, 1803, he was united in marriage with Hannah Peabody, third daughter of the late William Peabody. Of this marriage there were three daughters and one son. Two daughters survived him. He remained in Mr. Peabody’s family one year, looking for a good farm upon which to settle, it having been his purpose from boyhood to till the soil with his own hands.

In April, 1801, he was successful in negotiating for the farm upon which he moved that year and which he occupied the remainder of his life. His choice was wisely made. It had an ample acreage, was made up of a variety of soil, with wood lots and pasturage and an interval area of twenty acres. It was situated in the immediate vicinity of the village and a considerable portion of it is now covered with dwelling houses, having been sold from time to time for house lots to meet the demands of the increasing business of his adopted town. The elms in front of the mansion, which he lived to occupy so long, and above and below it, were planted by him, as well as the central tree upon the public square.

In the winter of 1803 and 1804, he taught the school in his own district in addition to his other duties, and until the close of his life maintained the deepest interest in the schools of the town. He fitted many young men for college during the earlier years of his ministry. Most of his students gave some portion of their time to the cultivation of the soil, some of them to recompense him for board and tuition and some for the health and pleasure it brought.

At the distance of ninety years it is difficult to understand how the young clergyman could perform so much labor in so many departments. He gave his personal attention to all his farming operations, working in the field nearly as constantly as any man he hired, occasionally taking a day for a parochial visit, generally at some season of the year other than the busiest. The larger part of his sermons were thought out while he was engaged with some tool of agriculture in his hand and written out, with rare exceptions, at night after the companions of his day’s labor were asleep. As a consequence, his discourses were practical and easily understood by the masses who listened to him. His illustrations were never brought from far but came out of the ordinary experience of an average human life. He was a good writer; could say in a few words what he desired to express; was logical in argument and pointed in application; was ready at repartee and a formidable opponent in skimish or protracted controversy. During his pastorate of a third of a century he was held in the highest estimation by his professional brethren and by general consent was counted a very strong preacher. He had a slight lisp in his speech but it was so slight that it did not impair his force as a public speaker as he uniformly spoke with deliberation. He possessed a commanding presence, his height was something more than six feet and his body seemed to have been framed for the performance of the best possible work. His physical and mental equipment was fortunately dominated by a gentle and devout spirit. It is the testimony of those nearest to him that in his protracted life he was never betrayed into the utterance of a hasty or unkind word. He was generously endowed with wit, but used this gift in such manner as to leave no sting behind.

In 1808 he purchased a second farm adjoining the first. Subsequently he made other purchases until he had, at one time, more than three hundred acres of improved land under his control. In the year 1820, he built the brick house which he lived to occupy fifty-one years. The house cost, exclusive of what was done by himself and his team, four thousand dollars, and was at that time one of the best residences in the county. The same year the legislature constituted a State Board of Agriculture, for the purpose of making an annual publication in the interest of agriculture. He was one of the committee of publication. In the report of 1822, which was the first report made, he was the author of one hundred and fourteen out of one hundred and twenty-eight pages. Fifty years later, James O. Adams, secretary of our State Board of Agriculture, reproduced a large part of Dr. Moore’s work, saying: “The author from whom I quote discusses with so much good sense the very questions which interest the farmer of today, that I copy freely.” But farming was not, in his own language, his primary object, and in 1824, he published a volume of four hundred pages, entitled, “A Treatise on the Divine Nature, Exhibiting the Distinction of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” Previous to this time he had published a pamphlet of eighty-four pages in fine type entitled, “A Reply to a series of letters on the Mode and subject of Baptism addressed to the public by Stephen Chapin.” The same year he espoused the cause of total abstinence from all intoxicating drinks, and never after used any spirituous liquor. He entered into this reform, as into everything he undertook, with his whole heart, writing and speaking much upon the subject. He had ten temperance lectures, one of which he delivered in twelve towns in the state. A barn which he raised in 1827, was the first building raised in Milford without the aid of some kind of intoxicating liquor. In the year 1829, he was appointed by the governor to preach the election sermon before the legislature, and performed the duty at the meeting of the body in June. In 1830 he buried his wife, with whom he had lived nearly twenty-seven years. Of her he wrote: “She was a faithful and affectionate wife. She was a kind and watchful mother. She brought up her children to diligence in business and to correct habits. She taught them morality and religion, and accompanied her instructions with a corresponding example. She was remarkable for industry and frugality, and was successful in whatever she undertook.”

He subsequently married Mary J. French, the daughter of the late Stephen French, of Bedford. She died Nov. 23, 1898, at the advanced age of 90 years. (A biographical sketch of this noble woman appears elsewhere.)

He closed his labors as pastor of the church January 10, 1836, but continued to preach as occasion offered, until he reached the age of nearly fourscore years. He was a good pastor; large additions were made to the membership of the church during his pastorate and he left the office he had so long filled at a time when the church was united and strong. After the close of his pastorate his active mind found employment in scientific experiments upon his farm. He never fed his ground highly, but all the material he put upon it was perfectly prepared to assist nature in the perfection of a crop. He received one or more first premiums for the most profitably cultivated farm. He interspersed these labors with the mental exercise of lecture-writing, preparing and delivering in Milford and adjoining towns between thirty and forty addresses upon popular subjects. He lectured twenty-eight times before the Milford lyceum. Thirteen of his occasional sermons were published, and eight addresses.

Although in no sense a politician, never having attended a caucus or convention in his life, the anti-slavery party insisted that he should allow his name to be used as a candidate for the House of Representatives in 1840, and again as a candidate for the State Senate in 1841. To his surprise he was elected to both positions by the joint action of the Whigs and the anti-slavery men of all parties.

During his service in the House there were referred to that body by our governor copies of resolutions passed by the legislature of the state of South Carolina. These resolutions mere sent to the judiciary committee and a report was made to the House in the form of resolutions setting forth the duty of the several states to return fugitive slaves. Upon this report the struggle in the legislature of New Hampshire between the friends and opponents of human slavery began, and in the protracted debate Dr. Moore was a leader, crossing swords with the ablest lawyers in the state.

The same subject came up in the Senate the following year, and he again stood four square for human freedom. Of him it can be truthfully said that “he never concealed his opinions or took counsel of his fears.”

Dr. Moore left an auto-biographical sketch of one hundred and thirty closely written pages of manuscript. The following is the record of his experience in the House of Representatives in 1840, at the time the slavery resolutions were under discussion:

“I was requested by several to speak. It required but a few words to persuade me to comply. No sooner had I begun than there was great excitement and confusion in the House. A majority of the members had no sympathy with the remarks I made. They used every imaginable effort to put me down. They shuffled and stamped with their feet. Some kicked the spit boxes which were near them. There was a roar of confusion. But I was neither intimidated nor embarrassed. I raised my voice to its highest pitch and to its greatest strength, but it was overwhelmed by a flood of mixed noises. When I could not be heard on account of the tumultuous confusion in different parts of the house, I appealed to the speaker by expressive looks. He commanded order. But no sooner was it restored, and I began to speak than the same farce was acted over again. At length an enraged opponent, to sweep me from the floor, called me to order. The speaker decided that I was in order, and that I might go on. I went on till I had finished my speech amidst the clamor of the opposition.”

The resolutions passed the House by a decided majority, and went to the Senate where they were referred to the next session. In 1841 while Mr. Moore was a member of the Senate, resolutions of the same character passed the House but were indefinitely postponed by the Senate.

In 1845, contrary to his inclination, but yielding to a stern sense of duty and to the repeated suggestion that in a cause so unpopular the names of the candidates upon the ticket must be men well known throughout the state as the tried friends of the cause of human freedom, he allowed his name to be used by the Free-soil party as a candidate for Congress. The state was then entitled to four members, and they were elected upon a general ticket. His associates were Reuben Porter, Joseph Cilley, and Jared Perkins. This ticket received a little less than five thousand votes.

John P. Hale at the time ran as an independent Democrat, his nomination by the regular Democratic party having been revoked. Mr. Hale received more votes than anyone on the regular Free-soil ticket, defeating one of the Democratic nominees without being elected himself, a majority of votes at that time being required to secure an election.

In the year 1845, he received the honorary degree of D. D. For the last twenty years of his life, which ended April 8, 1871, he gradually withdrew from active public work. He continued, however, to write sermons, lectures, and essays, and to attend the meetings of his ministerial and agricultural associations until the infirmities of age prevented. Few men have found their latter years so pleasant, or reaped so much satisfaction in a field usually so barren. Few have found their last their best days, but it was so with him. He never found fault with anything. To him, the divine order of events was satisfactory. His purpose from the beginning was to fill a man’s place in the world. This gave character to all his actions. When the late rebellion came upon the country, he hired a substitute to represent him for three years in the war saying, “I desire to have a part in this conflict.”

Dr. Moore was orthodox in sentiment and preached the doctrines usually held by the churches of his denomination at the time he was a settled pastor, but he held these doctrines in a most catholic spirit.

The creed of the church in Milford, written by him soon after his settlement, has never been altered.

His sermon preached at the ordination of Rev. Abel Conant at Leominster, Mass., some twenty years after his own ordination, and which was printed, reads well today notwithstanding the theological changes of the last three-quarters of a century.

At the Centennial celebration in June, 1894, the speakers, without exception, assigned to the beloved pastor a large share in placing Milford, where the town has stood, upon all the great questions which have agitated the public mind for the past seventy-five years.

History of Humphrey Moore, Part 1

2007-08-08T19:29:00.000-05:00

One of the historical plaques on the Colonel John Shepard Bridge commemorates the life of Humphrey Moore, 1778-1871, Clergyman.

Reverend Moore was perhaps the most significant resident of Milford during the first part of the nineteenth century. He was the first minister in town, at a time when a minister played a central roll in the governance of a town.

He served for years, and presided over the construction and expansion of the Congregational Church.

This is his brief biography as found in Ramsdell's 1901 History of Milford, N.H.. This is found on page 856, Family Registers.

Rev. Humphrey Moore, son of Humphrey and Mary (Sweetser) Moore, born in Princeton, Mass., Oct. 19, 1778. Came to Milford in 1802, and was the first settled clergyman in the town. Resided on his farm, a short distance from the village on the road to Wilton, where he died Apr. 8, 1871. Married (1) Apr. 5, 1803, Hannah, daughter of William and Abigail (Wilkins) Peabody, born in Milford, March 11, 1779, and died March 2, 1830. Married (2) March 28, 1831, Mary J., daughter of Stephen and Hannah (Swett) French, born in Bedford, July 12, 1808, and died in Milford, Nov. 23, 1898.

CHILDREN, BORN IN MILFORD.

1. Maria Antoinette, b. Feb. 24, 1804; m. Nov. 6, 1826, William, Jr., son of William and Mary (Southward) Ramsdell; res. in Milford, and d. Feb. 4, 1878.
2. Josephine, b. Feb. 4, 1808; m. Rev. John M. Ellis of Jaffrey, and d. in Milford, July 28, 1872.
3. Taseah Theresa, b. Jan. 7, 1810; m. Dec. 29, 1829, John, son of William and Mary (Southward) Ramsdell; res. in Milford until 1853, when they rem. to Iowa; she d. in Richland, Apr. 14, 1864.
4. Euclid, b. Apr. 2, 1812.

George Ramsdell was the son of Maria (Moore) Ramsdell and the grandson of Humphrey Moore. Ramsdell obviously knew the Reverend quite well, and he was able to cover Moore's life in detail in his history of Milford.

One section that discusses Moore is on page 540, Chapter XXIV, Centennial Celebration. These are part of the comments that Ramsdell himself made during the 1894 celebration.

"...The year 1802 saw the settlement of Humphrey Moore, and the year 1809, brought to town the young lawyer, Solomon K. Livermore.

They were men of large minds and warm hearts, graduates of Harvard College and lifelong friends. I doubt not that these men, during the earlier days of their active manhood, had many good and true helpers, but to us who knew them well, they stand out with commanding prominence, when we think of the first half of the century. The town had the best they had to give. They were servants of the public, and every man their neighbor. None was too poor or ignorant to cross the threshold of their dwellings. The impress of their lives appears in many another life, and your streets and public places continue to tell of them. While in the early history of many towns social distinctions, founded on the unequal distribution of wealth, have existed, and some houses have been counted too good for common people to enter, there was not and never has been any of it here. The only aristocracy I have ever heard of in Milford has been and is the aristocracy to which we all aspire to belong--the aristocracy of noble souls."

I like that phrase a lot - "the aristocracy of noble souls." You don't hear language like that anymore.

Another section that discusses Moore is found on page 520, Chapter XXIV Centennial Celebration, comments of Charles Burns at the same 1894 event:

"...The town was more than fortunate in the selection of its first permanent pastor, the Rev. Humphrey Moore. He was a splendid man, --frugal, industrious, a farmer and minister, a patriot, a gentleman and a devout Christian. His master spirit was a vital force in this community for more than fifty years. The early New England pastors were, for the most part, strong and grand characters. They were leaders among men. Their sturdy advice and rugged examples were safe guides. They did a great work. Mr. Moore was at the head of other strong religious teachers in Milford. Abner Warner, a very noble and eloquent man, left a lasting mark on this community. He valiantly espoused the cause of freedom, while he held aloft the banner of the cross. Many other good ministers have wrought here manfully, doing a work which has had large influence in moulding the character of the people."

Ramsdell's history has a chapter of biographical sketches of the key town residents, and there is a long section devoted to Moore. I'll post that in part 2 of his life.

History of Carrie Cutter

2007-08-06T16:52:00.000-05:00

One of the historical plaques on the Colonel John Shepard Bridge commemorates the life of Carrie Cutter, 1842-1863, Nurse & Heroine.

This is her story, as briefly noted in Ramsdell’s 1901 History of Milford N.H. on page 227, Chapter XV, The Year 1862:

"March 24, died, Miss Carrie E. Cutter, daughter of Calvin Cutter, M. D. She was born in Milford July 28, 1842. Her mother was the daughter of Nathan Hall. She was educated at Professor Russell’s school at Lancaster, Mass., at Mt. Holyoke seminary, and at a private German school in Pennsylvania. Dr. Cutter was surgeon of the Twenty-first Massachusetts Volunteers. In October, 1861, at her earnest, repeated request, she was permitted to join her father at Annapolis, and when the Burnside expedition sailed she was allowed to continue on the steamship Northerner, on board which vessel she was during the action at Roanoke Island, caring for the wounded. After the action she went ashore and labored untiringly in the care of the sick and wounded. Being able to speak German, she took charge of three young German soldiers, who in their delirium had forgotten the English language."

"The severity of this experience brought on fever of which she died in the cabin of the Northerner, before she had reached her twentieth birthday. By order of General Burnside she was buried with military honors, usually observed at the burial of a colonel. When the National cemetery was established at New Berne, by order of the secretary of war, her remains were removed to that place. Her name is inscribed in enduring bronze on the soldiers’ monument in Warren, Mass., the residence of her father. The United States has furnished her with a soldier’s headstone."

I did some additional google searching on her history, and found that she was part of the abolitionist movement that had a very strong element in Milford in the mid part of the nineteenth century. Her father was a noted doctor, medical author, and abolitionist. Her boyfriend Charles Plummer Tidd was an active abolitionist who was a Lieutenant in John Brown's ill-fated army. He was with John Brown during the attack on Harpers Ferry, but he was about a mile away and was able to escape capture.

This is an excerpt from a posting about him on Genealogy.com.

1. CHARLES PLUMMER TIDD was born 1834 in Palermo, Waldo Co, ME, and died February 8, 1862 in "Northerner" near Roanoke Island, NC.

Notes for CHARLES PLUMMER TIDD:
Ancestry: Am CW Soldiers:
State served: Mass Enlisted: under Plummer 19 July 1861 Rank: Pvt Age: 27

There are copies of his siblings' letters to him in, "Calendar of VA Papers," vol. 11, p. 293 and others.

1856 moved to MA. From "Origin of the town of Clinton [MA] 1653-1865," p. 538 "Although other members of his family settled in Clinton, he could not have stopped here long as he joined Dr. Cutler's party of emigrants for Kansas. In 1857, we find his name in the letters of John Brown, by whom he was sent as a trusted agent for securing funds."...."October 16, 1859, when Brown led his eighteen followers to Harper's Ferry, Tidd and Cook were at the head of the line. After the place was taken, Tidd, as his most trusted officer, was put on duty at the school-house about a mile from Harper's Ferry to receive recruits and supplies. Thus, he was not present when his leader was captured, and he escaped."

Dropped last name in order to enlist in Civil War. Died in Civil War in MA unit
This MA unit apparently from Warren as there is a Civil War monument there with the name Charles P. Tidd and also Surg. Calvin Cutter who was the father of Carrie Cutter.

"Calendar of State Papers for VA," vol 11, p. 293, 294, 90-101, 289-349, 347, 294, 344 and "VA Magazine of History and Biography," vol 10, p. 24, 274, 276, 277:
His brothers Alanson and William P. and his sisters Elizabeth, Julia, and Susan all wrote to him, worried about his involvement with John Brown and his cause.

Carrie Cutter/Cutler was his romance and served as a nurse on the same ship, dying of typhoid 24 March and was buried next to him. Her father was a leader in the abolitionist movement.

More About CHARLES PLUMMER TIDD:
Occupation: Maine woodsman;
Personality/Intrst: good singer and loved family; Loyalist ancestry
Endnotes
1. histories of John Brown of Harper's Ferry
2. Buried grave #40 in the New Berne, NC National Cemetery

Here is another bit of information about Tidd as found on The University of Virgina web site.
Charles Plummer Tidd, known as Charles Plummer, was a captain in Brown's army. He was born in Palermo, Maine, in 1834, and changed his name after the raid in order to avoid possible arrest and trial as a Harper's Ferry raider--a precaution of greater importance when he entered the army in 1861. He emigrated to Kansas with the party of Dr. Calvin Cutter, of Worcester, in 1856. He joined John Brown's party at Tabor, in 1857, and thereafter, in Canada and elsewhere, was one of Brown's closest associates, returning to Kansas in 1858 as a follower of "Shubel Morgan." He took part in the raid into Missouri. He and Cook were particularly warm friends. Tidd opposed the attack on Harper's Ferry. After his escape from Virginia, he visited Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Canada, and was freely consulted in the plans for rescue of Stevens and Hazlett. "Tidd," wrote Mrs. Annie Brown Adams, "had not much education, but good common sense. After the raid he began to study, and tried to repair his deficiencies. He was by no means handsome. He had a quick temper, but was kind-hearted. His rages soon passed and then he tried all he could to repair damages. He was a fine singer and of strong family affections." He died of fever, on the transport Northerner, as a first sergeant of the Twenty-first Massachusetts Volunteers, on February 8, 1862, with the roar of the battle of Roanoke Island in his ears. This he had particularly wished to take part in, for ex-Governor Henry A. Wise was in com- mand of the Confederates, his son, O. Jennings Wise, being killed in the engagement. Tidd had enlisted July 19, 1861, as a private. His grave is No. 40 in the New Berne, N. C., National Cemetery.

Here is a brief bio of her father, Calvin Cutter, as found on the Famous Americans web site.

CUTTER, Calvin, physician, born in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, in 1807; died in Greene, Maine, 25 March 1872. He was a pupil at the New Ipswich academy, and afterward taught in Wilton, New Hampshire, and Ashby, Massachusetts. In 1829 he studied medicine, and practiced his profession in Rochester, New Hampshire, from 1831 till 1833. in Nashua from 1834 till 1837, and in Dover from 1838 till 1841. Between 1842 and 1856 Dr. Cutter visited twenty-nine states of the Union, delivering medical lectures. In 1847 he began the compilation of "Cutter's Physiology," a Textbook for schools and Colleges, of which, prior to 1871, about 500,000 copies had been sold. It has been translated into several oriental languages. In 1856 Dr. Cutter was chosen to convey a supply of Sharpe's rifles to Kansas, a hazardous task, which was successfully performed. Later in the same year he led into Kansas the Worcester armed company of sixty men and also the force known as "Jim Lane's army," which he commanded for nearly a year. He was president of the military council in Kansas, and instrumental in the capture of Colonel Titus. In 1861 Dr. Cutter became surgeon of the 21st Massachusetts infantry, and served in the national army nearly three years. He was twice wounded, and made prisoner at Bull Run. During most of his term of service he had charge of the medical depot of the 9th army corps as surgeon-in-chief.

Shown to the left is an image from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina Civil War Image Portfolio. This image shows Dare County, Roanoke Island, N.C. "Landing of troops on Roanoke Island. Burnside Expedition, 1862." William Momberger Del., George E. Perine, Engraver. Hurlbut, Williams, & Co. Neg. 83-654. P1-28-R62-C582w. You can see paddlewheel steamboats in the picture - perhaps one of them is the Northerner that carried Charles Tidd and Carrie Cutter.

Finally, here is a link to Wikipedia's article on the battle of Roanoke Island on February 7th and 8th, 1862.

History of Colonel John Shepard

2007-08-03T20:57:00.000-05:00

The “Stone Bridge” in Milford is officially named the Colonel John Shepard Bridge because according to page 23 of Ramsdell’s 1901 History of Milford N.H.:

“The highways in town were without exception laid out over paths already trod, and no land damages seem to have been paid. John Shepard had built a bridge across the Souhegan at the point where the stone bridge now stands, for the accommodation of the patrons of his mill, and in 1758 the town of Monson repaid Mr. Shepard some portion of the expense, and became the owner of the south half. Ten years later the selectmen laid out two highways, or streets, from the middle of the bridge to the then existing highway through the town, one passing east of Union square and the other to the west. The bridge was an inexpensive structure, and the amount paid Shepard small, but it was the largest item of expense to which the town was subjected during its existence.”

Colonel John Shepard was one of the first settlers in Milford. Here are a few excerpts from Ramsdell about him. (Ramsdell lists him as Shepherd in several places in error, and I have corrected all the errors for consistency).

Chapter IV, page 29, Early Settlers

John Shepard, a prominent citizen of Concord, Mass., in 1741, induced by an offer on the part of the proprietors of Souhegan West, settled on the north side of the river, erecting mills upon the present location of Gilson’s saw-mill, near the present granite bridge. He built a cabin a little north of the Methodist church, and afterwards a house upon the spot where now stands the residence of Fred J. Kendall, and still later erected a more pretentious dwelling upon the site now occupied by the residence of Henry H. Barber.

The following is a copy of the vote of the proprietors of Souhegan West, passed April 30, 1741:

Voted, That the proprietors will give to Mr. John Shepard one hundred and twenty acres of land to begin at William Peabody line and run down the river to the bottom of the falls and so wide as to make the one hundred and twenty acres . . . he building a good Grist Mill and a good saw mill on said Souhegan river against the aforesaid land, and to finish them by the last of November next, and keep them in good repair for the use of said proprietors, he giving a bond to our treasurer to comply with the same forthwith, he having the liberty to cut such white oak timber for the mill as he wants and has not of his own.

Mr. Shepard was an honored citizen of the town and did much to establish business at the falls, as Milford village was called in those early days. He was succeeded by his son, John Jr., who was also prominent in public affairs, serving as colonel of the state militia and as one of the judges of the inferior court of common pleas for the county of Hillsborough. His granddaughter Sarah married William Crosby, many of whose descendants are at present occupying positions of responsibility in town. Andrew N. Shepard, or East Milford, is a great-great-grandson of the original settler.

Chapter II, page 19, Origin of the name of Milford

Before the coming of the white man there were several ford-ways by which the Indians crossed the Souhegan on foot; one much used was located at the foot of the falls below the factory of Morse, Kaley & Co. Parties using this ford as they were traveling in a northeasterly direction entered the shallow water near what is now the western terminus of the foot bridge, and came out upon the river bank near the shop of the late S. D. Knowlton. The building of the stone dam of the Souhegan Manufacturing company has caused the water to flow back and cover the old shallow ford-way to such a degree that it is not now easy to conceive of this place as a passageway through which the red man for generations, and the white man afterwards, crossed the river whenever the water was not unusually high. After the building of Shepard’s mills upon these falls in 1741, this ford was known as the Mill ford by way of distinction. At the date of the incorporation of the town the settlement in the vicinity had been for half a century known as the Mill-Ford village. Hence the name of the town.

Chapter VI, page 51, The War for Independence

During the winter and spring of 1775, a company of minute men had been formed and drilled, in anticipation of the coming conflict. The collision at Lexington, April 19, aroused the country, and the Amherst company in command of Captain Josiah Crosby, at once started for Cambridge. His first lieutenant was Daniel Wilkins, Jr., son of Pastor Wilkins. His second lieutenant was Thompson Maxwell, already alluded to.

Colonel John Shepard, who was in his seventieth year, and too old to take the field, went to Cambridge with the men, and received from Captain Crosby the following, at a later day:

“This certifies that Esq. Shepard, in April 1775, went with a detachment of Militia of about one hundred men from Amherst to Cambridge, aided, assisted, and comforted them and at Cambridge left with them two Spanish milled dollars.
“Josiah Crosby.”

On the back of this certificate is a list of other articles left, as follows:

“Pork 57 ½ lbs., ½ bushel beans, 1 ½ bushel to Sargent, some bread and 1 ½ bushel meal.”

Chapter XV, page 167, Important Events, Year 1801

During this year a highway was laid out and constructed from Shepard’s bridge through the mill-yard towards Amherst. When Shepard built his mill nearly sixty years before, he laid out with bounds more or less definite, a mill-yard for the accommodation of the logs which were from time to time drawn in to be manufactured into boards and other lumber. During these years the travel from the bridge to Amherst was obliged to pass north of the mill-yard, except as it crossed it at some seasons of the year by sufferance. The new road was laid out two rods wide, and many are now living who remember the appearance of the logs as they were piled very high upon the north side of the road through the mill-yard; in fact, it was a matter of some danger to pass through this narrow road in the spring when the snow and ice were melting. The selectmen licensed this year eight individuals to retail spirituous liquors, all good and prominent men; this was the number usually licensed by the town during its first half century.

Chapter XXIV, page 529, Centennial Celebration (Remarks by Ramsdell at 1894 meeting)

In imagination let me roll back the wheels of time one hundred and fifty years, and what do we here behold? Peabody established on his farm--John Shepard with his grist and sawmill erected on the Gilson privilege, given to him by the town of Amherst, on condition that he build a mill, the machinery of which was to be dragged part of the way by hand through the forests; Benjamin Hopkins, with his friend and hired man, Caleb Jones, laying the foundations of his bullet-proof dwelling a little north of the residence of the late Luke Smith, on his magnificent farm of over eleven hundred acres; John Burns hoeing his corn on the George W. Duncklee farm, about a mile and a half from where we stand. These five men, with their families (excepting, of course, the Nevins settlement), made up the entire population of our territory one hundred and fifty years ago. It is not certain that Hopkins and Burns had completed their dwellings so as to be counted actual settlers in 1744, but they were here a part of the year, at least, at work upon the land.

This is his listing on page 921 in the Family Registers section of Ramsdell:

Col. John Shepard, born in Concord, Mass., in 1706, and died in Amherst, Nov. 29, 1785. Married (1) a Miss Hartwell; (2) Sarah French, born in 1722, and died in Milford, Oct. 31, 1802. He was a farmer, residing on place on road to Amherst, his house standing on the lot now occupied by the dwelling-house of Fred J. Kendall, settling there in 1741. He also built and operated a grist-mill on the site now occupied by the saw- and grist-mill of Smith Berry.

CHILDREN, THREE BORN IN CONCORD, MASS., SEVEN IN AMHERST.

1. John, Jr., b. 1732.
2. Lydia, b. 1735; m. a Mr. Howe, and d. June 14, 1791.
3. Abigail, b. Apr. 6, 1738; m. a Mr. Stevenson, and d. in Lyndeborough, Aug. 23, 1822.
4. Benjamin, b. March 18, 1744; m. Lucy Lund, and d. March 26, 1810.
5. Samuel, b. 1746; d. Jan. 12, 1835.
6. Mary, b. Sept. 21, 1749; m. Jacob Hildreth of Amherst; res. there, and d. Jan. 22, 1823.
7. Sarah, b. Oct. 17, 1757; m. Stephen, Son of Benjamin and Sarah (Harris) Kendrick of Amherst; res. there, and d. Sept. 5, 1840.
8. Jotham, b. June 22, 1761; d. young.
9. Rachel, b. Apr. 5, 1762; m. July 4, 1781, Samuel Dodge, Jr.; d. July 23, 1785.
10. Daniel, b. Sept. 25, 1764; m. May 25, 1793, Fanny Wentworth; d. Sept. 22, 1794.

Col. John Shepard, Jr., son of Col. John and (-----) (Hartwell) Shepard, born in Concord, Mass., in 1732. Came to Milford with his father in 1741. Was a farmer, residing in the house on the Mont Vernon road next north of the Methodist church, on east side of the highway, where he died Dec. 1, 1802. Married, Oct. 21, 1757, Mercy Wilkins, born in Middleton, Mass., in 1732, and died in Mason, Aug. 11, 1825.

CHILDREN, BORN IN MILFORD.

1. Elizabeth, b. Apr. 16, 1759.
2. Mary, b. Oct. 5, 1760; m. James Gilman; d. in Milford, Oct. 8, 1841.
3. Jonathan, b. Oct. 31, 1762.
4. Sarah, b. Nov. 28, 1767; m. Nov. 16, 1790, William, son of Josiah and Sarah (Fitch) Crosby of Milford; res. there, and d. Dec. 15, 1845.
5. Lydia, b. June 12, 1770; m. May 24, 1795, Daniel Staniford, and d. in Boston, Mass., June 1, 1796.

Colonel John Shepard Bridge

2007-07-29T12:37:00.001-05:00

The Colonel John Shepard Bridge (commonly known as the Stone Bridge) is one of the more notable landmarks in town. There have been a number of bridges in that spot since the very beginning of Milford history, with this one being very quaint. I like the architecture of the bridge as it seems to fit the town well.

Some historical plaques were added to the bridge a few years ago. These plaques list some of the more notable citizens from Milford, with names representing various eras from the beginning to more modern times.

I have been passing by these plaques for the past few years and I have been curious about the background for each one. I am familiar with many of the names since I am one of the few people to have read the Ramsdell - History of Milford, N.H. 1738-1901 from cover to cover. However, I do not know the background of some of the newer names and I'd like to find out about them.

I presume that most people in town are not familiar with the story behind the names on the plaques, so I thought that it would be helpful to give a brief overview of each one. I will create a separate posting for each person as I have time, and as I learn their story. Some of the biographies are well documented in Ramsdell, but the others may be more difficult to find.

I do not know the background of the plaques. I suspect that they were installed by DO-IT or other similar group, but I just don't know. If anyone knows who installed the plaques and how they chose the particular names to be memorialized, then please let me know.

This is the information on the plaques that are posted on the bridge. Although there is no plaque for him, I have also included Colonel John Shepard since the bridge is named for him.

Colonel John Shepard	1706-1785	Miller

William Crosby	1758-1831	Benefactor & Citizen
Humphrey Moore	1778-1871	Clergyman
Hutchinson Singers	Mid 1800's	Advocates & Musicians
Mary A. Lull	1832-1910	Doctor & Benefactor
George A. Ramsdell	1834-1900	Governor & Historian
Carrie Cutter	1842-1862	Nurse & Heroine
Albert E. Pillsbury	1849-1930	Author & Benefactor
George A. Worcester	1852-1941	Involved Citizen
Lucy "Gertrude" Howison	1873-1958	Community Servant
Alberta Hagar	1889-1985	Teacher & Historian
Harland Holt	1908-1995	Dedicated Citizen

Milford School Board Non-Public Sessions

2007-07-23T12:16:00.000-05:00

The Sunday July 22nd editorial in the Nashua Telegraph was titled "A Disturbing Trend in Sealing Minutes." This is a link to the editorial, but you may need to be a subscriber to view it.

The editorial was part of a several months long review by the Nashua Telegraph regarding the Nashua Board of Education's (NBOE) practices for non-public sessions, and the minutes that they keep from the meetings.

The main points that the Nashua Telegraph has been making is that it appears that the NBOE has not been following the spirit nor the letter of the law regarding non-public sessions. You can read the Telegraph to learn all the specific complaints that they have regarding NBOE, and I'm not going to reiterate them all here.

What I do want to say - in my probably biased opinion - is that the Milford School Board (MSB) does a good job of following both the spirit and the letter of the law regarding non-public sessions and the minute taking of those sessions.

New Hampshire Statutes RSA Chapter 91-A details the law regarding meetings and minutes for groups such as the MSB. 91-A lists at length all the specifically-allowed events and the specifically dis-allowed activities. The expectation is that maximum openness of activities is presumed unless there is a specifically-allowed activity that overrides the general guidelines.

These are some of the key non-public session points of 91-A, and the corresponding Milford practices:

* Non-Public sessions must be posted in advance with a description of the reason for the non-public session. All MSB meeting are posted as per the detailed requirements. The specific section of 91-A that allows a non-public session to occur is referenced in the posting.

* Only topics specifically allowed to be discussed in non-public session can be discussed in non-public session. The MSB does a good job of staying on topic during non-public sessions. We are careful to stay on topic and not drift to discussions of items that are not allowed to be discussed in non-public. There have been several instances where we have cut-off discussions when we were moving to a topic that is not allowed to be discussed in non-public.

RSA 91-A lists the topics that are allowed to be discussed in non-public. An example is 91-A:3 II. (a) The dismissal, promotion or compensation of any public employee... As per this particular section, we routinely discussion compensation levels of district employees in non-public session rather than in public session. I view this as a good practice, since it allows us to be more open with our questioning and discussions about an employee, and it allows us to come to a better understanding of the situation. We want to know all the good points and all the bad points about an employee when setting salaries. If we had to be in public session, then the bad points might not be addressed since we would not want to accidentally disclose something that might not be accurate.

* Non-public minutes need to be kept and publicly disclosed. The MSB provides minutes of all non-public sessions. Any decisions that are reached are recorded, and any votes that are taken are listed along with the names of the members and their votes.

* Minutes can be withheld (commonly known as sealed) if certain specific guidelines are met. The MSB will occasionally seal the minutes of a non-public session if the guidelines of RSA 91-A:3 III. are met. The minutes are unsealed if the reasons for the sealing are no longer valid. A hypothetical example would be if we were discussing the purchase of real estate and we voted for the district representative to make an offer on the property along with specific approvals for counter-offers. We would seal the minutes that outlined our negotiating plans until the negotiations were complete. We would then unseal the minutes.

Once a year at the final meeting before the election of new board members, the MSB reviews the status of the minutes that are still sealed to see if there has been a change in conditions that would allow the minutes to be unsealed. There are usually none that have had a change of status, and they just remain sealed. An example of a non-public minutes that will probably remain sealed forever would be one that was a disciplinary hearing for a student. There would be no point in opening-up this type of thing to public scrutiny, and discussing things that would affect adversely the reputation of any person is one of the items that is specifically allowed to be withheld from public inspection.

Milford's Host Home Program

2007-07-19T18:14:00.000-05:00

Milford has a number of social service programs that are designed to help out people with problems of various types. One great program that I have been involved with on a few occasions is the host homes program.

The purpose of the program is to provide short-term crisis intervention for adolescents and their families when they are experiencing stress of some type. The method of intervention is to have the adolescent stay with a non-involved local family for a short period of time to try to ease the stress levels. There are many different situations that lead to a crisis, but the program allows the adolescent to stay in a safe environment while the problems are being addressed.

There are three points to keep in mind about this program

1. Learn about the program and what it offers. More details on the program can be found here. You never know when you will have an occasion where the program might help out a situation. If you know of an adolescent with problems, then recommend the program to them or to their parents or guardians.

2. Consider volunteering to be a host homes family. They are always looking to have more families set up to accept placements. They try to match the adolescent with a family that is compatible, and having more families in the program helps to provide various situations that offer different environments from which to choose.

Also, there are some families that have hosted a larger portion of the placements in the program. Having more families in the program helps to spread the load around. There are no hard and fast rules as to how many placements you will handle if you sign up to be a host home. It is entirely up to you. If you can do one placement every year or two, then that is great. If you can do more, then that is good too.

There is a qualification process that you need to go through if you want to be a host home. This is to insure the adolescent is being placed in a safe and suitable environment.

Mary Pat Jackson is the program coordinator, and she does a great job. Contact her if you have any questions of any type.

3. Consider making a donation if you can, as they always need more money to help out with situations.

Milford - One home football game this year!

2007-07-18T20:14:00.000-05:00

We had our first meeting of the High School Project Management Advisory Committee today. The meeting was a good get-to-know-you type of meeting, and it gave everyone a solid understanding of the scope of the project.

One very interesting bit of news that came out during the meeting is that as of now, the plan is to have one home football game held in Milford. All the other "Home" games will be held at a neutral site such as Souhegan.

It now looks like the August 31st game against Souhegan will be held in Milford! This is usually our biggest rivalry, and will be great to have it on our own home turf. We need all the psychological advantages that we can get since they are usually such a tough opponent.

The plan until just recently was that there would be no home games this year. This was needed to allow the track and field renovation plan to move forward at a pace that would enable the project to be complete in time for the fall of 2008 season. There were a bunch of assumptions that led to the project plan being structured this way.

There have been some changes in some of the assumptions, and one is that the Architect (David Laurin) is submitting the site plan review for a "fast-track" approval that, if granted, will allow us to change the sequence of site construction activities and get more things done this year.

I had not heard of the fast-track approval process before now, but supposedly, this process has been used successfully by a few school districts in the past. This process has the potential for turning a permitting process from a couple of months cycle time to less than two weeks.

This is great news if this does occur as is currently planned. It will be nice for the seniors to get to play at least one home game on the home turf, and not miss out on the home field experience in total.

Milford School Board Meeting 7/16/07

2007-07-17T23:19:00.000-05:00

Superintendent’s Report

There are about 339 students taking part in some sort of activity in the District this summer. Some of the activities are reading programs at Jacques, special education/Title 1 programs at Heron Pond and the Middle School, and remedial programs at the High School.

There are many training programs in place for the Teaching staff for the summer. Most of these are in-district programs, but there are a few out-of-district programs. There were 22 programs listed, with titles such as DIBELS Essentials Workshop, Earobics Workshop, ePortfolio work, Writing across the curriculum, and Introduction to Harcourt Reading.

Renaming the Bales Elementary School

The Bales Elementary School is really no longer an elementary school, and we are looking at changing the name to better reflect the current and future uses of the building.

Sarah Clark, who will be a senior next year at Milford High, gave a very nice report on the history of the naming of the Bales Elementary School. She did an excellent job of researching the history of the school from the late 1800’s until the present.

We are going to find out a bit more information before we decide what we will do, if anything. The school was named in 1969 in honor of Harold Bales who was the Superintendent of Schools from 1919 to 1939. We want to find out if the naming was done by a vote at town meeting, or if the School Board did it. If it was named at Town Meeting, then we might need another vote by the Town to change it again.

Review of District Goals

Superintendent Suprenant reviewed the progress for the past year for the District goals that we had set a year ago. We had gone over all the items at various times during the year, but I was very pleased to see the summary for the year that showed that all goals were achieved.
The items that we reviewed were:

* District report card,
* Automated messaging for parents and teachers,
* Implementation of policies in support of the new state minimum standards,
* Development of renovation proposals for the High School and Bales
* Union contract negotiations
* Literacy Professional development
* Individualized learning / Follow the Child
* DIBELS Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills
* World language curriculum development
* Wellness committee
* Improved communications with local private kindergartens
* Adult education planning
* Evening alternative student education planning

World Language Curriculum

The new world language curriculum was presented. This aligned the French, Spanish, and Latin curriculums through all the grades. There were a few significant changes, mainly at the high school level where there will now be five courses offered in French and Spanish instead of four. The top two courses in each will be studies in History and Literature related to the particular language. We will also institute a 1B course to provide a transition option from an introductory course to the second level course.

Daily Physical Activity Policy

We implemented a new daily physical education policy that is consistent with the new minimum standards from the state. We are now in compliance with this requirement.
The policy is somewhat of a motherhood and apple-pie policy statement that basically states that we should encourage daily physical activity for everyone.

Track Update

The next track and field project fundraiser is a scramble golf tournament to be held Thursday August 2nd at Amherst Country Club. I plan on entering the event, so the winning team is all locked up. There will be plenty of competition for second place, so come on and sign up.
We moved $35K from the athletics trust fund to the track fund, as planned in the overall project financing.

Heron Pond Addition Fund

I made a motion that we take $200K out of the Heron Pond Addition Construction Fund and return it to the general fund for distribution back to the taxpayers on this year’s taxes. There is about $318K left in the fund at this time, and removing $200K will leave about $118K for the projects that remain to be completed. One of the remaining projects will be done soon, and this one will add a second culvert under the access road to drain the swamp area quicker during times of high water flow.

There are two more projects that are potentials that still need to be costed. One is to add lighting of some type to Heron Pond Road in the area from Whitten Road to the corner turn. Right now there is no lighting of any type in that area, and it is a traffic hazard when there is a night event such as parent-teacher conference night. It can be pitch black in that area and it is difficult to even see the sidewalk.

The second potential project is to do some sort of a retrofit to some or all of the windows in the original section of the building to make them easier to open. The windows are extremely difficult to open, and they have been a problem since they were first installed. When they were first installed, they were designed following accepted design practices, and they were built to specification, but they are still difficult to operate by some women teachers.

I am pleased to report that the motion to return the $200K passed unanimously.

Update on Adequate Education Bill

I reviewed my thoughts on the adequate education bill that was recently signed by Governor Lynch.

Peter Bragdon basically agreed with my opinion on the bill, specifically that the bill requires us to provide kindergarten starting in the ’08-’09 school year, that only half-day kindergarten is required, and that we will not know the details on the funding until after the voting next year.

He did mention that there is a nuance to the interpretation that the bill requires half-day kindergarten. The language in the state specs states that school districts should strive to offer half-day kindergarten. The word strive is not a mandatory word, so there is a possibility that someone could interpret that it is not required.

Peter stated that he thought that there would be some sort of correction language that will be implemented this year that will correct this interpretation. I think that that even if the language is not corrected, that there is other language in the bill that supersedes the strive wording and that kindergarten is required.

Next Meeting

We decided to cancel the first August meeting since it appears that there is not really a need to have a second meeting at this time.

HB 927-FN and Milford Kindergarten

2007-07-10T19:42:00.000-05:00

I reviewed the HB 927-FN adequate education law that was signed by the governor on June 29th. These are my interpretations as to how this new law will relate to Milford. The full text of the law can be found at HB 927-FN

1. All 5 year olds will be entitled to attend public Kindergarten starting with the 2008-2009 school year. Attending Kindergarten is optional, but Milford is required to offer public Kindergarten starting in ‘08-‘09.

2. My interpretation after reading all the detail is that the minimum acceptable program that meets the definition of an adequate education is half-day Kindergarten. This law does not mandate full-day Kindergarten.

I come to this conclusion because HB 927 references ““school approval standards”…as adopted by the state board of education through administrative rules.” The current rules contain this standard for public school approval: Ed 306.25 Kindergarten. Every district shall strive to offer at least a ½ day kindergarten program to every eligible student. A kindergarten program shall comply with all pertinent provisions of Ed 306.

There is also this section that defines minimum school day duration: Ed 306.18 School Year. c) Each school with a school year option based on days shall be subject to the following requirements: (3) For each elementary school: a. The regular school day shall be 6 hours in duration with at least 5.25 hours devoted to instructional time;… d. Kindergarten sessions shall be at least 2.5 hours in duration;

3. There is a good chance that the state will provide start-up funding of some significant amount to the school districts that do not currently offer Kindergarten, but we will not know what the funding will be until after the March voting is completed. My guess is that the adequate education state funding formula will be completed just before the June 30, 2008 deadline mandated by the courts.

Since we don’t know what we will get under the new law, it would be prudent for any warrant article that is put on the ballot to assume that we will receive aid according to regular state aid formulas, such as the current 30% building aid formula. The articles should be written in a manner that allows for increased aid to be accepted and applied to the project.

4. This is not in the law, but is a practical outcome. It is likely that we will be able to set up a half-day Kindergarten program by renovating the Bales annex. Although it will be tight, it is likely that this could be done between the time a construction program is approved in March ‘08 and the start of school in September ‘08.

A full day program is much more complicated, and much more expensive. It would require the construction of a new building, which could not be completed by September of ’08. If we were to offer a full-day program, we would have to set up some sort of interim facility or program for the ’08-’09 school year. This might take the form of roughly ten portable classrooms somewhere.

Another possibility would be to fund students to attend local private Kindergartens. I suspect that this is not a viable option since the private Kindergartens would have to meet the No Child Left Behind requirements and most (if not all) of them do not. Private Kindergartens generally do not have “highly qualified” teachers on staff as mandated by NCLB.

5. Netting everything out, it is my opinion that we should offer a half-day Kindergarten program. This will meet the letter (and the spirit) of the law, and will be much more affordable than a Full-day program.

Renovating the Bales Annex is a relatively low cost solution that would be money well spent. Even if the District enrollment increases to the point where Kindergarten and First grade no longer fit into the Jacques/Bales Annex complex, we could build a new facility at that time for Kindergarten, freeing up room for First Grade.

The only exception to this thought process is that the State may provide special Kindergarten Adequate Education construction money only on an interim basis, and then rescind it later. This may be a one-time only opportunity to get a new school built at a lowered cost to the School District. The problem with this is that we won’t know until after the voting is over as to what the State has decided to do. Since we need to have a Kindergarten program in place for the ’08-’09 school year, we can’t wait to find out all the funding details.

Selectmen Crush School Board!

2007-07-05T22:34:00.000-05:00

Selectman Noreen O'Connell, School Board Member Paul Dargie, and Selectman Tim Finan held a sack-race death-match for world domination during the Fourth of July festivities at Keyes Field.

Tim was the ringer in the race as he showed off his superior sack race hopping skills. He pulled ahead steadily during the race and completely crushed the outclassed Dargie.

Noreen came in first place out of all female Selectmen entered in the race.

School Board Meeting Monday 6/18/07

2007-06-24T18:05:00.000-05:00

Superintendent's Report

The graduation on 6/9/07 went well despite the bad weather. The event was moved indoors to the gym, and went well even though we were in cramped quarters. There was a video feed into the cafeteria for the overflow crowd. The administration did their usual fine job with the event, and it went off without any major problems. All the student speakers gave excellent speeches, and Dr. Craven gave a nice speech of his own.
The annual scholarships awards night was held, and $126,810 was distributed during the evening. [I'm proud to say that my daughter Jenna won several of the awards. I had never been to one of these events before this year, and I was very impressed with the generosity of the Milford community. I'd like to give a heartfelt thank-you to all that donated in any way to the scholarship programs.]
The High School Destination Imagination team placed 4th out of 13 in their category at the Global finals in Knoxville, Tennessee. The Middle School team placed 35th out of 65 in their category. Attending the Global Finals was a rewarding but tiring experience for all that attended.
There was an evening for parents of incoming first grade students that were identified by DIBELS testing as perhaps in need of special services. Parents for 58 students attended the event, and they received home packs for use over the summer.
The Superintendent issued a press release on several topics including a summer reading program being put on in conjunction with the Wadleigh Library, an announcement that we will be restarting an adult education program this fall with classes in Conversational Spanish, We the People…the Citizen and the Constitution, Digital Scrap Booking with Photoshop, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Excel, and an announcement that we will be offering night school for high school students that have failed or are struggling with Math and English.
All schools are now approved by the state without any qualifications. The Jacques Memorial had a qualified approval last year since we did not have an approved homework policy in place. We instituted this policy during the past year, so the qualification was lifted.

ATC Annual Report

The ATC group presented their annual report. Presenting at the meeting were Rosie Deloge, Director of Technical Studies; John Leslie, Committee Chair; and Steve Martin, Computer Technology Chair.

They distributed a nice booklet that described the programs. While nothing is perfect, it seemed as if the program is doing well and is headed in a good direction. They reviewed the various pages in the booklet highlighting areas of interest, including listings of student achievement, awards, State Expo results, Business partnerships, Technical Honor Society inductees, and a review of each program. We had some discussion concerning the possibility of building houses on the two potential lots that may be split off from the Heron Pond School site.

John Leslie is stepping down as Committee Chair after six years in the position. He has done a great job in moving the ATC program forward. Steve Martin will be the Committee Chair this coming year.

Professional Development Master Plan

Chantal Alcox and Laurie Johnson presented the new Professional Development Master Plan that will be submitted to the state by the end of the month. This is the five-year update to the plan, and it contained some significant changes. Most of the changes that were incorporated were dictated by the recent changes in the State requirements. The Professional Development Committee has worked hard over the past year in developing the new plan.

The old method worked well, but the expectation is that the new methods will work even better. The old method was based on obtaining designated clock hours (CEU's, credit equivalency units) for professional development work during the year. This has the benefit of being easy to administer, but does not focus on outcomes and instead just focuses on the process.

There are several methods that can now be used, including the old clock hours (CEU's) approach. The primary method that will be used involves the development of three year goals for professional development, and the creation of portfolios that provide evidence of development. Since District professionals often have multiple certifications, they may decide to use a different approach for their various certifications depending on the suitability for each one.

High School Renovations Committee

We decided to appoint all ten applicants to the Committee rather than try to cull it down to a smaller list. The thought process was that each person provides a point of view and a strength that will add to the group, so having more people will add to the group. Some will be more interested in the track, and others will be more interested in the facility renovations. We also expect that not everyone will attend every meeting, so the meetings should not be too unwieldy despite the large committee size.

We modified the charge to the committee to match the larger size group. We changed the spending approval limits for the committee, set up the emergency approval procedures, and set up the quorum and voting parameters. I was appointed as the School Board representative to the committee.

Policy Proposals

Most were moved on to the next reading. The only one that wasn't was the Computer Software and Hardware policy. The proposed new first paragraph is very restrictive in that it basically bans the use of non-school district equipment from being used in the schools, except for personal printers. I expressed my thoughts that this was too restrictive and asked the administration to review the requirements again to see if it could be toned down. John Leslie had expressed similar thoughts at the beginning of the meeting.

We had a long discussion on this topic at the Technology Committee meeting the next day. The net result is that Matt Ballou will go back and develop a revised version that is somewhat less restrictive. One area in particular that will probably be loosened up is the restriction on PDA's. This will probably be rescinded since many administrators and faculty use PDA's to coordinate their home and work schedules.

Bales Study Committee

This committee will be set up in the fall.

I asked that the district change the sign on the front of the Bales School during the summer, so we will have a fresh start in the fall. Right now the sign says "Bales Elementary School" since that is what the building was used for when the sign was created years ago. The school is only used for the Sage program today, and this is for Middle and High School students. I hadn't thought about it before, but it just struck me a few weeks ago that it must be demoralizing for a Middle or High School student to enter a building identified as an elementary school each day.

The sign is in bad shape and needs to be redone in any event, so it makes sense to do it now before school starts. I think that it should be changed to "Bales Building" since that would allow it to be used as a multi-purpose building, but "Bales School" would be acceptable also since that is what it is right now.

Questions? Suggestions?

2007-06-13T18:11:00.000-05:00

Is there anything that you want to know, but you don't know where to go to ask the question? Do you have an idea as to how the Milford School District can improve? If so, then please contact me and I'll try to help out.

You can contact me by email at pauldargie@aol.com, or you can post a question or comment on this blog. Blog postings can be anonymous.

In general I will try to get an answer for you, but there are some things that I won't be able to get into. The School Board is part of the dispute process for the School District, so I can't get involved in any complaints that may eventually require a review by the board. An example of this would be a complaint about a specific teacher. These types of issues need to be addressed through the chain of command to insure fairness to all parties.

School Board Meeting Monday 6/4/07

2007-06-05T16:30:00.000-05:00

Construction Manager Selection

We started the meeting at 5:30 instead of the usual 7:00 start time in order to interview candidates for the construction manager position for the High School renovation project.

We interviewed representatives from three candidate companies:

Eckman Construction
Hutter Construction Corporation
Turnstone Corporation

All three companies made solid presentations, and I thought that any of them would be able to do a good job for us on this project. We ended up choosing Turnstone Corporation for the job. The principle of the company are Stacy Clark, President; Billy Clark, Vice President; Deborah Clark, Office Manager; Phil Cote, Estimator/Project Manager; and Rick Smock, Project Superintendent.

Superintendent's Report

There will be an Orientation night on 6/5/07 for parents of Fifth graders moving up to the sixth grade next year.
The High School scholarship night is 6/5/07, with a reception at 6:30 in WOWS for board members.
Some parents of very young students were invited to a reception at Jacques on 6/7/07 to learn about summer school activities, and kindergarten and first grade issues.
Graduation is 10:00 on Saturday 6/9/07 at the High School Football field.
The eighth grade graduation is Wed 6/20/07.
The Superintendent passed out the list of graduating seniors that are continuing their education next year. 75% of the graduating class is moving on, with 52% planning on attending a 4 year program and 23% choosing a 2 year or certificate program.
A photo of Jacques School Principal John Foss dressed up as the world famous "Book Fairy" was passed around. John had promised the students that if they read 2007 books or chapters during the year, he would be a Book Fairy for a day. He lived up to his word, but he might not ever live this one down...
Bert Becker volunteered to be on the RSCC committee.

Milford Athletics Fundraising Committee

Lori Pitsas gave an update of the Family Fun Day fundrainsing event that was held at the Hampshiredome. The event was well attended, and seemed to be a great success. Although final numbers were not available, the event raised something in the neighborhood of $5K for the High School Track project. More fundraisers are planned, with the next one being the golf tournament in August. More information can be found at www.milfordtrackandfield.org.

Bales Committee Charge

The charge to the proposed Bales Study Committee was reviewed and approved for a first reading. The charge to the committee is: "To describe options available to the School Board for the future use of the Bales building, inclusive of the gymnasium and the annex. Such options will detail the educational and economical advantages and disadvantages associated with each option."

The list includes seven items that are specifically mentioned to be included in the review. We discussed item 6 at some length. This item is: "Consideration of the use of the annex to house state-mandated kindergarten." No decision was made as to whether this line item would remain as part of the charge to the committee.

Kindergarten Committee Charge

After a lot of discussion, we decided to not have a Kindergarten Implementation Study Committee. The rationale for the decision is that the main purpose of the committee was to identify the costs associated with implementing a Kindergarten program if mandated by State law, and the administration has the background and capability of obtaining this information without the overhead of a committee.

School Board Chair (and State Senator) Peter Bragdon mentioned that the State Senate had recently modified the adequacy definition that had been established by the House of Representatives. The House version included "half-day Kindergarten" as part of an adequate education. The Senate removed the half-day phrase and just included the word Kindergarten without any modifiers.

With the prospect of perhaps needing to offer full-day Kindergarten instead of the half-day program that we had been envisioning, Bob Willette moved that we add research into full-day Kindergarten to the overall project.

The Administration agreed to provide this information in time for inclusion on a warrant article if deemed necessary.

After some reflection and some research after the meeting, it is my opinion that the current wording of the adequate education definition does not require that we offer full-day Kindergarten. A half-day program should suffice. I expect that there will be some sort of a legal opinion generated when the bill is passed that will clarify this point. This is a critical point, because for Milford, a full-day program will cost a lot more than a half-day program. I expect that we will be able to fit a half-day program into the Jacques/Bales Annex buildings. A full-day program will not fit there and will require the use of a different facility. This changes the start-up costs from perhaps $1.5M for a Bales Annex renovation, to something like $7-8M for construction of a new 10-12 room school.

Policy Proposals

All the personnel policy updates were moved to a first reading.

Milford School Board to Study Kindergarten Options

2007-05-23T21:48:00.000-05:00

After years of not supporting public kindergarten, the School Board voted at the 5/21/07 meeting to study the options for implementing public kindergarten in town!!!!

One of the agenda items for the meeting was School Board Goals. We have a standard process each year to implement yearly goals, and this agenda item was a part of the normal process. A typical process flow is to set annual goals shortly after the election, set action items and schedules a month or two later, monitor the action items during the year, and then summarize the results at the end of the year. This agenda item was part of the step for setting action items and schedules.

We started the process this year by setting the goals shortly after the election. During that step in the process, I had proposed that the District study the implementation of public kindergarten in Milford. The purpose of the study was to identify the costs of the various options to see if there was a way to implement public kindergarten at a modest cost. This proposal was defeated by a vote of 2-2-1, with Bert Becker and I in favor of the study, Len Mannino and Bob Willette against the study, and Peter Bragdon abstaining due to his wife working at a private kindergarten. This lack of a three vote majority has been the norm for years on the Board.

I submitted a new proposal during this past meeting. The new proposal was very similar to the previous one, but there was a significant difference in the timing that led to it's passage. The key point was that after the previous motion was defeated, the state House of Representatives added half-day public kindergarten to the definition of an adequate education. The bill is now winding it's way through the legislative process and is currently undergoing review by the state Senate.

As of today, it seems reasonable to forecast that the bill that defines an adequate education will include half-day public kindergarten in the final language. There are two significant unknowns about this result: 1) if this will mean that half-day public kindergarten will be required to be offered by each school district, and 2) if the state will be required to pay for this requirement since it is an "unfunded new mandate."

Because there is a now a reasonable chance that the Milford School District will be required to offer half-day kindergarten to all students that want to attend, it makes sense for us to figure out how to accomplish this requirement. Len and Bob both changed their minds because of this potential looming requirement, and they voted in favor of the study.

The final language of the motion was "I move that the board adopt as a goal for the year that we investigate the costs, feasibility, advantages and disadvantages of potential public Kindergarten options. The purpose of this goal would be for the board to be able to have a proposal ready in the event that public Kindergarten in Milford is mandated by state law. The goal shall not make any recommendation for or against public Kindergarten."

The last sentence was added to my original motion to make it clear that the purpose of the investigation was to study the options, not to advocate for public Kindergarten. Both Len and Bob are philosophically against public Kindergarten, and they wanted it made clear that they were not voting in favor of public Kindergarten. They both voted in favor of the amended motion to show their support for being ready if we are required to move forward with offering public Kindergarten.

We will set up the action items and schedules for the goal at the next meeting. It is likely that this will take the form of appointing a committee to study the task with a report due by late October or so. This will give us the information needed to place a warrant article on next year's ballot.

There are three basic kindergarten options that will be reviewed:

1. Renovate the Bales Annex for use by First grade or Readiness classrooms, and put Kindergarten classes in the west end of the Jacques school. This needs to be done in this sequence since Kindergarten classrooms need to be slightly larger than First grade classrooms to qualify for building aid. This option would be the least expensive by far. The big negative for this one is that this will be a tight fit. There are only four classrooms in the Bales Annex, and for long term needs, five or six classrooms may be needed. The space issues need to be closely reviewed to determine if this option is viable, or if there is just not enough space to make it work.

2. Build a new Kindergarten building, probably on the Brox property somewhere near Heron Pond. This option will create the nicest facility, but would be the most expensive.

3. Find a facility somewhere in town that could be purchased and renovated into a Kindergarten facility. I have no idea if there is anything that is suitable that would be available, so this one might not even be a real option. We need to do a survey to determine if something is possible or not.

All in all, I was very pleased with the vote. I have been in favor of public Kindergarten for a very long time, and it now seems like we are on a path that will eventually lead to public Kindergarten in town.

School Board Meeting May 21, 2007

2007-05-23T19:08:00.000-05:00

The big news for the School Board meeting on 5/21/07 was the discussion about public kindergarten in Milford. I am going to make a separate post about that topic. This post will cover the rest of the meeting.

Superintendent’s Report

There were two student groups that made presentations during the meeting.

FBLA – Future Business Leaders of America

Chris McBrien gave the introduction for the group. Five members of the FBLA entered the state competition, and two of them did well enough to move on the National finals.

Andrew Curtis was named Who’s Who in FBLA, Thomas Finan finished third in Accounting II, and Lauren Lambert finished second in Word Processing I.

Hilary Scott placed first in Computer Applications, and Kendall Maggelet placed second in Accounting II. Both of them are moving on to the National Leadership Conference in Chicago at the end of June.

Congratulations to all!

Peace Jam

Beth Powers introduced the Peace Jam group from the High School. This is a new group at the school that has grown to about 20 members. I didn’t get all the names of the students that attended, but some of them were Ryan Willette, Zoe Torres, Zake LaFontaine, and Haley McCormack. (I may have spelled their names incorrectly, and I apologize in advance if that is the case.)

The Peace Jam group seems to have been very active. These are some of the activities that they have done this year:

Fundraising to support various activities.
Sold fair trade coffee as a fundraiser
Donated money to kiva.org. This is a group that makes microcredit loans to people around the world. They donated at least $500 to the group, and the money was loaned to about 8 different people around the world. All 8 are paying back their loans on schedule.
Holding a meeting on Thursday night to highlight the problems in Darfur.
Attended the national conference with several Nobel Laureates. Met the Dali Lama at the conference.

Wellness Committee

The goals and objectives of the Wellness Committee were presented. There are a relatively large number of people on the committee, and they have been meeting on a regular basis. Bob Willette discussed his views that the goals and objectives are too weak and lacked specifics. He mentioned that he had voted against the document, but that most of the rest of the committee supported the document.
RSEC Committee Membership

Superintendent Suprenant asked for volunteers from the board for membership on the Regional Services Educational Center committee. Bob Willette had been a member previously. Milford belongs to the group, but we do not use their services very much since we mostly handle our special education needs in-district. No member volunteered for the committee at this time.

Capital Plan Review

Peter Bragdon reviewed our mid-range capital plans. The town does a capital plan each year, and they ask for input from the school district. We have limited near term capital expenditures planned, with most of the larger items such as Bales renovations, more high school renovations, and the middle school roof replacement, scheduled for around 2012 or so when some of our existing bonds are retired.

Asbestos Removal

We awarded the contract for asbestos removal at the high school as part of the renovations project to the low bidder – MARCOR Remediation. They have done work for us in the past, and they are a good outfit.

Policy Proposals

The policy review committee is proposing a fairly large rewrite of many of the Personnel policies. There are a lot of changes being proposed, but in total it seems straight-forward and non-controversial.

School Board Goals

The school board goals for the year that had been previously adopted were reviewed. Peter Bragdon presented a basic timeline for each for us to review and approve. Some were approved as-is, and others were modified somewhat. The five goals were:

Administrative Compensation Review – this will be done soon as we will be doing the Superintendent’s review soon, and we need this to set up his plan for the next year
Contract Negotiations – We are negotiating with the new Milford Educational Support Staff Association bargaining unit. The goal is to have an agreement in place in time for the March ballot.
Provide Oversight to Capital Projects – This is managing the high school renovation project
Study Leftover Facilities Issues from Prior Year – this goal is to have something in place to be able to have a warrant article on the March ballot, if that is what we determine we want to do. One project is to create two building lots out of excess land near the Heron Pond school, and the other project is the potential purchase of the lot just north of the high school.
Determine the future of the Bales building – We are going to have a committee work on this. The committee will be named in September or so, and be given about a year to review the options for Bales and to make a recommendation. Funding for renovations (if that is what is recommended) will probably not be available until 2012 or so.

At the conclusion of this discussion, I made a motion concerning Kindergarten, and there was a lot of discussion on the topic. I will cover this in a separate posting.

High School Renovations

The architect has met with Construction Manager candidates. He will make a presentation at the next board meeting, where we may select the CM.

School Board Meeting Monday 5/7/07

2007-05-08T23:00:00.000-05:00

Attendees

This was a fairly well attended meeting since there were several groups making appearances to ask for donations for trips to national contests.

Superintendent's Report

- The Milford Women's Club is disbanding, and they donated $150 for art supplies at Jacques.
- We received approval from the state to keep the last day of school for Seniors at 6/8, which allows the Graduation to stay on Saturday 6/9. We needed a waver since the recent no-school days due to flooding resulted in the Seniors being short by two days from the mandated amount.
- The last day of school for everyone else is Thursday 6/21.
- Rachel Arnold won the NH Letters About Women contest.
- The Southwest Music festival was held last Saturday at the Middle School, and was a big success.
- The Milford Christian Academy has had some financial difficulties in recent years, and as a result, they are changing their organizational structure to place an emphasis on home schooling. There are 21 Milford residents at the school spread out over many grades, so the impact would be low if the school closed and some students changed over to Milford Public Schools.
- Brittany Alperin won the Kaley speaking contest last year with a talk on Alzheimer research funding. After a series of events, she won a trip to Washington DC where she read her speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial to a large crowd.

Donation Requests

There are several groups that won state competitions that are moving on to national competitions. Some of them can to the board to ask for financial support for their trips.

1. There are three students that won History Club events. Judy Zaino (group advisor) gave an overview of the program.
A. Israel Piedra won first place Senior Individual Documentary for his 10 minute film "The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising." He showed the film at the meeting, and it was extremely well done.
B. Mollie Staretorp won first place Senior Individual Paper for "Alfred Nobel: Explosive Tragedy to Humanitarian Triumph."
C. Adam LaGro won second place Senior Individual Documentary for his film “Bletchley Park: The Triumph of Allied Codebreakers.”

2. There are two teams going to the Destination Imagination Global Finals in Knoxville, TN. The Middle School team are performing in the CarDIology problem area, and the High School team is performing in the Extreme DI section. There are a total of 11 students going to the event. Cathy Chevalier (Elementary School Program Coordinator) gave an introduction to the group. Josh Clemons, Jillian Dargie, and Michael Dargie talked about their experiences on the Middle School team. Most of the other members were out fund-raising at the Fisher Cats concession stand and did not make the meeting.

3. There are two students going to the Skills USA championship in Kansas City. Ed Miller (Advisor) gave an overview of the program. A.J. Solon won for Machining, and Michael Jorgenson won for Extemporaneous Speaking. A.J. had received the highest score (937 out of 1,000) ever achieved by a Milford student. A.J. showed his Sterling engine model that he has been building from raw stock.

High School Renovation Project

David Lauren (Architect) reported on the status of the High School renovation project. It was decided that we will manage the program using a Construction Manager rather than by using a General Contractor. The driving force to this decision was that there is a possibility of receiving in-kind donations for the project, and this doesn't work very well with a GC approach. The other issue is that we might have to phase the project to work around school requirements, and this also does not work well with a GC approach.

We are going to have just one CM for all projects. This has several advantages - it lowers the overhead by eliminating duplication of various items such as bonding, and it minimizes the finger pointing when there are warranty issues after the jobs are complete.

We decided to postpone the appointments to the building committee until after the CM is chosen. Several of the people that have expressed interest in the committee work for CM companies, and they might have a conflict of interest.

David Lauren is going to develop a short list of CM candidates to present to the board. The board will choose the CM from the short list.

One of the critical path items is the site disturbance approvals needed from the state. The Football field/Track is the most complicated from an approvals standpoint. We will probably start work on the multipurpose field as the approvals process is much cleaner for that area.

It now appears that we will not be able to hold home football games this fall. The team should be able to practice on some area of the field, but it will not be suitable for an actual game. The administration is looking into alternate field availability for home games. The field should be done by the fall of 2008.

Lori Pitsas and Ron Carvell gave an update on the fundraising activities.

Perkins Funding - Career Development Specialist

Rosie Deloge gave a presentation on the need for bringing the current part-time Career Development Specialist to full-time status. The increase in the costs for this position will be covered by Perkins grant funding for at least three years.

Rosie made a convincing case for the justification of this position. After considerable discussion, the board voted to adopt her recommendation.

Heron Pond Building Fund

The fifth grade wing addition is complete, and there are only a few items that remain to be completed on the project. There is more money left in the fund than is needed to complete all the projects. The intent of the board is to return any excess funding to the taxpayers as soon as practical.

Steve Bancroft (Whitten Rd resident near the school) discussed his recent flooding problems from the pond next to the school. Steve has had water issues just about every year since Heron Pond was built, where he never had problems before then. Initially the problem was the beavers that were clogging the drainage culvert, and now it is just that the culvert is too small of a diameter to drain the swamp at times of high water.

When Heron Pond was first built, the culvert was designed with two larger sized pipes. The Army Corps of Engineers reviewed the plans, and required that the two larger pipes be replaced by one smaller pipe.

We have been discussing this problem every year, with the intent of finding a solution to the flooding problems. Money was allocated for the culvert fix in the budget for the fifth grade wing addition, but had not been spent for various reasons. It was decided to continue to allocate money for the culvert project, and the board encouraged the administration to try to fix the culvert this summer. This may not be feasible due to wetlands permitting time requirements, but they will try to get it done.

Up to $5k was also allocated to a study of the potential for a geothermal heat source project.

It was decided to not increase the height of the retaining wall on the slope at the rear of the school.

The administration was asked to find out if there was some way to add lighting to the Heron Pond road that would not be too expensive, and which could be used only on those few times each year when there are large functions at the school that require parking on the dark section of the road.

The administration was asked to get more details about the potential fixes for the windows that are difficult to open. We want to have a more definitive costing plan in place prior to deciding whether to fix the windows, and how many to fix (one per room or all of them).

Collective Bargaining

After the formal meeting was complete, the board held a "non-meeting" to discuss collective bargaining. Per the State RSA's, discussions of collective bargaining are non-meetings, and are not subject to Open meeting requirements.

The meeting lasted about three hours.

Factoid from Milford's Past

2007-04-25T17:00:00.000-05:00

This is from page 170 of the History of Milford N.H. 1738-1901 by George Ramsdell.

1805. Caleb Jones died April 16, aged seventy-nine years. He was one of the early settlers locating upon the Mile slip soon after he became of age, and was one of the most eccentric persons ever residing in town. He planted and cultivated a cherry tree for the purpose of furnishing boards for his own coffin. After it had grown to sufficient size, he cut the tree and had it sawed into boards, from which the coffin in which he was buried, was made. He was succeeded on his farm by his son, Zadoc Jones, who in turn was succeeded by his son William, who now occupies the ancestral acres.

I first read this passage a couple of years ago, and it has stuck with me ever since. It's hard to imagine anyone doing something weird like this today.

I can just picture good ole Caleb looking out the window of his house and thinking to himself, Gee, I just had a great idea! I'm going to plant a cherry tree out there right now, and then cut it down in twenty years and make my own coffin!

I think that he took the old saw "If you want something done right, then do it yourself" to a new level.

Full-Day vs. Half-Day Kindergarten Programs

2007-04-24T19:18:00.000-05:00

There has been debate for years in Milford regarding the inclusion of public kindergarten. However, I remain convinced that Milford needs to offer public kindergarten, and the sooner the better.

I think that one issue that has held back the incorporation of public kindergarten into Milford is that some voters have wanted to see convincing evidence that public kindergarten is advantageous as compared to private kindergarten. The problem with this is that it is difficult (perhaps impossible) to find any relatively recent peer-reviewed scholarship that identifies the value of offering public kindergarten as compared to private kindergarten. The reason for this is that public kindergarten has long since been considered by mainstream educators to be an integral part of public education, and that there is no controversy regarding the value of public kindergarten that needs studying. It is unfortunate that there remains a need for this type of analysis in New Hampshire.

There have been some studies that compare the value of full-day versus half-day public kindergarten programs since this is a topic that does not have a consensus opinion among educators. One fairly comprehensive analysis of data from the 1998-99 school year was published in 2004, and can be found at this URL:

http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2004/2004078.pdf

The title of this study was “Full-day and Half-day Kindergarten in the United States, Findings from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998–99.” This 154 page document is chock full of all types of analysis about various kindergarten issues.

This is the beginning of the executive summary of the study:

“A major trend in kindergarten programs that has occurred in the past few decades is an increase in the prevalence of kindergarten classes that meet for the entire school day rather than just a part of the day. The increase has been attributed to various social, economic and educational factors. Increases in the number of single parent households and households with both parents working are commonly cited as important factors contributing to the need for full-day programs… Arranging childcare during the workday is less costly and less complicated for these families when the child is in school for the whole day rather than half of the day. Another rationale in support of full-day kindergarten is that children who have spent some of their pre-kindergarten years in nursery school classes or child care arrangements (often full-day) are ready for the cognitive, social and physical demands of a full-day kindergarten… Proponents of full-day kindergarten also emphasize the potential educational benefit—teachers have more time to get to know their children and individualize their instruction, and children have more time to acquire the early academic skills taught in kindergarten… In some cases, the move to full-day classes has been made to provide sufficient time for children to complete kindergarten curriculum that has become increasingly rigorous…”

One section that I found of particular interest was a chart that showed that from 1970 to 1998, there was a steady rise in the nationwide percentage of students attending full-day kindergarten as compared to half-day programs. The percentage going full-time rose from about 18% to about 56% during that time period.
Another finding of the study was that students attending full-day kindergarten programs had slightly better cognitive gains during the school year as compared to half-day programs.

The implication of the study is that full-day kindergarten programs provide benefits that make them worthwhile. It seems that the trend towards full-day programs will continue due to these advantages.

From my perspective, I would be happy to simply institute a half-day public kindergarten program in Milford, and leave it at that level for a long period of time. There is a large difference between no program and a half-day program, while the difference between a half-day program and a full-day program is much smaller.

Virgina Tech - Lessons for Milford Schools

2007-04-20T18:29:00.000-05:00

The tragic occurance at Virgina Tech was a horrible experience, but there are some lessons to be learned from it for Milford.

1. The key lesson to learn is that this could happen anywhere, at any time. It could just as easily have been Milford instead of Virgina Tech. There are people with mental defects everywhere, and they can snap at any time. Therefore, we need to continue to create and implement contingency plans to deal with as many situations as we can envision.

At least since Columbine, the Milford School District has worked each year to upgrade our overall security. There have been a series of initiatives to try to make things safer, and we need to continue to make safety improvements.

Some of the initiatives have been to add video cameras at each school, designing the Heron Pond School to enable effective lock-downs, requiring photo ID’s for everyone at the High School, signing up for the emergency phone system, locking the doors at all schools to limit access, and requiring all visitors to be buzzed in by office personnel.

One significant safety initiative will be implemented soon as one portion of the High School upgrade bond that was recently passed. This renovation will replace most of the doors in the building with new doors and hardware that allows the rooms to be locked from the inside each room. This is a key feature that will enable the school to safely go into an effective lock-down mode. Right now the doors can only be locked from the hallway side, which means that the person locking the door to the room would be exposed to a threat in the hallway. After the renovation, the rooms could be locked from inside the room without being exposed in the hallways. The windows on the new doors will also be limited in size, which will allow them to be covered so someone in the hallway would not be able to look into the room from the hallway.

Perhaps it makes sense to revisit some of our decisions to see if additional security upgrades are warranted. One possibility would be to add a second SRO (School Resource Officer) to the one that we have now. Officer Durham does a great job, but he can only be in one building at a time. He spends most of his time at the Middle School and that seems to work very well. Maybe we need to have another full-time SRO at the High School to be on hand to act quickly in an emergency. Another possibility is metal detectors at the High School. I have been adamantly against them in the past since they have a large operational cost and they don’t work very well, but they do work to some extent and perhaps they would make the difference. It is certainly worth discussing the pros and cons on them again to see if they would help.

2. Another lesson to learn is that it is better to over-react to a safety issue rather than try to find the best solution. There is a lot of second-guessing going on regarding the Virgina Tech response to the initial shootings. From my perspective, it seems that their response of just locking-down the building where the initial shooting occurred was reasonable based on what they knew at the time, but in retrospect, was the completely wrong answer. They would have been much better off if they had hit the panic button immediately instead of trying to be logical.

How does this relate to Milford? I think that it would be a good idea to have the administration make it known to everyone in authority that they should assume a worst case scenario whenever they are confronted with a situation that they don’t understand fully, and to act accordingly. The old saw “it is better to be safe than sorry” really applies to these types of situations. In today’s world, no one is going to second-guess a decision to go into lock-down mode when the evidence that prompted the lock-down is flimsy. Some judgment needs to be applied so that the panic button is not hit indiscriminately, but the message is that one should not try to be too logical and instead should focus on the potential downsides.

3. A third lesson is that we all need to be vigilant regarding potential warning signs that individuals may exhibit that point to future problems. In every population there are people with varying levels of mental problems, and we need to try to identify as soon as possible those that need help. Some people are a danger to others, and some are a danger to themselves. We need to worry about both scenarios and try to make a difference if possible.

I’m not sure what to do about this from a practical perspective. The district does have a solid special education department that works with students with apparent issues, but it is much more difficult to identify those students and faculty that seem to be progressing well on the surface, but have underlying issues that can surface at any time. I guess that the message is that we need to look below the surface, and probe when something seems amiss.

School Board Meeting Monday 4/16/07

2007-04-17T21:33:00.000-05:00

I've read several of the blogs in town for the past few months, and I've decided that I'd like to make some occasional postings on my own rather than just reply to the postings of others.

I expect that I will post on a variety of topics, but I plan to focus on school issues.

My first posting will be a summary of the school board meeting held on Monday 4/16/07:

Attendees

School had been canceled on Monday due to the floods in town, so the meeting was cut back somewhat. Some of the regular attendees did not make it to the meeting for various reasons and some of the scheduled topics were postponed.

The regular meeting attendees were Bob Suprenant (Superintendent), Peter Bragdon, Bob Willette, Len Mannino, and Paul Dargie. Bert Becker was sick and did not make the meeting. Tim Finan (our new Selectman) was the only member of the public in attendance.

High School Graduation Date

At the first April meeting, the board had decided that the High School graduation would be held on June 9th. It is standard practice to wait until the beginning of April to set the graduation date to ensure that the snow days were behind us. However, this year was different, with three no-school days since then. The Superintendent reported at the meeting that he is planning to petition the state to allow us to keep the graduation date on the 9th, despite the extra no-school days. He said that he was hopeful that the petition would be approved, since having no-school days at this time of year is rare. The main issue is that a graduation is a big deal, and people make plans around it. It is common for some relatives to have to travel a long distance to attend, and they have already started making arrangements. It is a major inconvenience to change the date once it has been established. So the net result is that the graduation is still scheduled for June 9th at this time.

High School Art Exhibit

The Superintendent reported that the annual High School Art Exhibit would be held on Thursday April 19th. There will be displays set up in the lobby to showcase a variety of art presentations.

Summer School Plans

An effort is being made to coordinate the district summer school plans with the Library. Meetings have been held with Michelle Sampson at the Library to try to improve the reading activities that are offered during the summer. The main focus is on helping students that are struggling with reading to try to minimize the loss that normally occurs over the summer months.

Student Management System

The current computerized student management system that is used by the district is having support problems, and the District is looking to switch to a different system. We are looking to switch to Powerschool, which has 32 users in New Hampshire and seems to be on more solid footing. It looks like most of the cost for switching over will be supported by entitlement grants.

One interesting feature that the new system would offer is the ability for parents to log into a password-protected area and view what their children are eating for lunch.

Full Time Career Development Specialist Request, Perkins Fund

Rosie Deloge, Director of Technical Studies, was scheduled to make a presentation on her request to fund a Career Development Specialist position using Perkins grant money. This presentation was postponed due to the bad weather.

Several members of the board made the comment that even though the position would be grant funded and would be at no charge to the taxpayers, that the position would need to be justified as if it were a new permanent position. The reason for this is that the Perkins funding will only last a few years, and it is likely that once a position is integrated into the system, it is hard to eliminate the position when the funding runs out.

Hearing to Receive and Expend Unanticipated Revenue

This is a standard procedure that is done at this time each year. When the budget for a school year is put together during the fall of the preceding year, an estimate is made of the revenues and expenses that will occur in areas that do not relate to property taxes. The two main areas are Food Service and Grant spending. There are always variations to the budget in these areas, and if money in excess of the budget is received, then we are not legally allowed to spend it without a hearing.

This year we received about $126,171 more than we had budgeted, so we needed to hold a hearing to allow us to spend the extra money. This money is grant money and can only be used for the specific purpose defined by the grant. If we do not spend the money as detailed in the grants, then we would just have to return it. Getting more grant money than expected is a very good thing for us, as it allows us to accomplish a variety of things that we would not normally be able to do.

Meeting Location

The Selectmen are upgrading the Selectman’s meeting room in town hall, and they informally offered to allow the School Board to hold their meetings there instead of the High School Library.

We discussed the pros and cons of this, and no decision was made. The biggest pro is that the room will soon have a very nice PEG access setup. The biggest negative is that the room is small and does not handle a large crowd.

Heron Pond Building Fund

No action was taken on this since Mike Trojano was not able to make it to the meeting. The basic idea is that 5th grade addition is mostly complete, and we want to wind up this fund.

Policy Proposals

Dispute procedure # 2409 was approved to a second reading with some minor modifications from the first reading. There was a lot of discussion surrounding the language describing the rights of individuals to contact the New Hampshire Commission for Human Rights, with the net result being that the language was left in as drafted.

High school graduation requirements # 3531 was approved to a second reading with some minor modifications from the first reading.

High School Renovations - Architectural Services

Purchasing policy 2330 requires that there be three bids for purchases over $10,000, if feasible, unless waived by the School Board. Based on a number of factors, the board decided to waive this requirement for the hiring of the Architect for the High School renovation project. The main issue is that David Lauren has been working on the high school for years, and he has intimate knowledge of the issues surrounding the school. Since this is primarily a renovation project and not new construction, this specialized knowledge is very important in being able to cost effectively design the renovations that need to be done. The board authorized the Superintendent to negotiate with David Laurin to create a contract that is advantageous to the District.

The meeting only lasted for 1-½ hours due to some of the items on the agenda being postponed.

There was no need for a non-public meeting.