Newly elected ConVal School Board representative Jim Kingston of Temple said at Tuesday night’s meeting that he believed RSA 91:A, the public Right-to-Know Law, had been breached in recent email communications among the board and requested the board address the issue. 

“I was troubled by emails that went out to the whole board. I feel trust has been breached by these emails that have gone out,” Kingston said. 

Kingston said that a School Board member had communicated with the group without using a “bcc” for board communication, which he said is “best practice for public boards.” Kingston said that because the emails in question, which also included a “reply all” response, constituted a two-way conversation, the exchange is legally considered to be a conversation instead of a one-way communication. 

“It’s one of those things, that because it’s a law, if you allow even little transgressions, you damage your reputation and you can lose the trust of the community. I felt this issue needed to be brought up publicly so that we get trained as a board properly to keep the trust of the public,” Kingston said Wednesday morning. “No one was acting with ill intent, and there was nothing untoward in the communications. But because we are a public board, we cannot discuss School Board issues outside of a public meeting. There are just procedures that need to be followed.” 

Kingston suggested at Tuesday’s meeting that the board “needs to be presented with remedial training on electronic communications at a bare minimum.” 

Kingston, who ran as a write-in candidate from Temple, served on the New Ipswich School Board for 25 years before moving to Temple. After expressing his concerns, Kingston submitted a printout of emails in question to Superintendent Kimberly Rizzo Saunders, who said she had not been copied on the emails and had not seen them. 

“Absolutely, I will forward these our counsel,” Rizzo Saunders said, and thanked Kingston for bringing the matter to the board’s attention.

Board sets April 25 for feasibility meeting

The board set a date of April 25  for the first meeting of the feasibility study committee in response to requests for possible withdrawal from the ConVal School District by both Francestown and Dublin. Rizzo-Saunders noted that one School Board member and one Select Board member from each ConVal town needs to take part in the feasibility study committee meetings, which will take place at the SAU. 

School Board member Alan Edelkind of Dublin, chair of the district’s Strategic Organization Committee, which led the recent ConVal reconfiguration proposal, made a statement about the failure of the article at the polls. Had the article passed, the ConVal School Board would have been given the authority to consolidate the district’s elementary schools from eight schools to four, with possible elementary school closures in Dublin, Francestown, Temple, and Bennington. However, it only received 45.47% of the vote, when two-thirds was required. 

“As we all know, the vote was not successful. We did not get two-thirds majority we needed to proceed with reconfiguration. For the immediate future, the Strategic Organization Committee will take a backseat to the feasibility study process; we can’t do both at the same time. The work we did was fantastic. It was a lot of hard work by our board members, and it was an interesting time. Were some mistakes made? Yes. But we did what we needed to do,” Edlekind said. “We had a lot of community input and we really heard from our community.”