A Town Asset

In February 2022 Andover’s First Selectman told a resident, from the chair, that the Board of Selectmen has nothing to do with the school. He listed the buildings his board controls, and the school was not among them.

In June 2023 he sat at the Board of Education’s table and told them the school is a town asset, that there are no deeded properties to a board of education, that the agreement they had asked for was not necessary, and that it is all town money and he does not split hairs.

This is an account of what has followed from the second sentence. It is drawn entirely from Andover’s own public record: the minutes, the packets, and the recordings of its own meetings. Every claim is sourced, and where the record cuts against the argument, that is here too.

The school’s own money

The most recent Andover Board of Selectmen meeting had on its agenda the item

Discussion and Action on AES Operating Budget Funding Procedure ^[1]

There were rumors swirling about what this would contain. An FOIA request ^[2] was submitted to the Town Hall for related records. At the meeting, the First Selectman moved to delete the item ^[3].

When the FOIA response was received, it turned out that the rumors were true, and that the First Selectman said he was initiating a new mechanism for the transfer of funds into the school operating account: in brief, that the town had put $100,000 into the account and would release more only as the school submitted its spending records, week by week, for approval.

Here is how the elementary school is supposed to get its money, because that part is not complicated. The voters approve the school’s budget at referendum; this year that took until June 16, on the third asking ^[4]. The Board of Finance then sets the schedule on which the money actually reaches the school. For three years running that schedule has been ten equal monthly payments, July through April ^[5], and the board adopts it the way a board adopts anything: on an agenda, in public, by a recorded vote. Last July it passed seven to nothing ^[6].

On July 1, the First Selectman replaced it via email ^[7].

The email did not ask. It announced. The town had deposited $100,000 into the school’s operating account, it said, and from now on money would follow only as the school submitted its check registers and payroll registers, week by week, for review and approval ^[7].

There was no vote of the Board of Selectmen. There was no vote of the Board of Finance ^[8]. A schedule an elected board had adopted in public, by a recorded vote, was replaced by one official writing that it had been.

Set aside, for a moment, whether the school’s budget is a dollar too high or too low. The voters settled that in June. This is a different thing. This is one official deciding, on his own, the terms on which a school he does not run may receive the money the voters approved.

That is worth paying attention to. Because it did not come out of nowhere.

The money is the newest instance. It is not the first, and it is not the strangest. To understand how a First Selectman came to believe he could reschedule a school’s budget by directive, you have to go back to the night he told everyone he could not.

The line, drawn and erased

On the night of February 15, 2022, a resident stood up at the Board of Selectmen and asked about the mask mandate at the elementary school. The presiding First Selectman cut the question off before it got going. He was not unkind about it. He was clear.

This board, he said, does not have anything to do with the school mandate or how it is addressed. That is the Board of Education. And then, so that everyone understood where the boundary ran, he listed what the selectmen do control: the town hall, the library, the museum, and facilities of that kind ^[9].

The school was not on the list.

He was right, and he was saying something ordinary. Connecticut towns run this way. A board of education is not a department of the town. It is a separately elected board with its own statutory duties, and one of them is the care and operation of the school buildings and grounds. The First Selectman knew that, and said so, from the chair, to a room full of residents.

Sixteen months later he was sitting at the Board of Education’s table saying the opposite.

On June 14, 2023 he came to the school board to talk about the community center. He answered their written questions. Then he took up the memorandum of understanding the board had asked its attorney to draft, and he set out the town’s position. The town of Andover, he said, is the school district. The town owns all the land. The town owns all the buildings. The town is the owner of everything. There are no deeded properties to a school or to a board of education ^[10].

The board’s memorandum, he said, was not necessary.

Asked whether the school should simply budget to pave its own upper parking lot, he said it should go to CIP, the town’s capital improvement committee, because it is a town asset. This building, he said, is a town asset. And a few minutes earlier, on how the money should be thought about: it is all town money, and he does not split hairs ^[10a]^[10b].

He said other things at that meeting too, and they belong here. He said he does not come over and tell the board of education how to spend its money. He said he was not going to kill their budget. He took responsibility for not having put a board member on the building committee. He is not a man who came to that table to declare war, and this article is not going to pretend he did.

But the position had moved, and it did not move back. In December 2024, at a meeting of all three boards, he told the Board of Education that the school is not a board of education building, it is a town asset, it is part of the capital, and that the school’s capital projects would have to route through the town’s committee ^[11a]^[11b]. The board pointed out, on the record, what that actually meant: the capital committee makes recommendations, and those recommendations go to the Board of Selectmen for approval ^[11]. In June 2025 the same framing came back again when he challenged what the school had done with its own unspent money ^[12a]^[12b].

It is worth being precise about what has and has not been shown here.

The town does own the land. The assessor’s record is unambiguous, and it has been true since the 1960s ^[13]. Nobody took anything from anybody. And in February 2022 he was answering a question about a mask mandate, not delivering an opinion on property law.

But that is the point, not a problem with it. He was not making a legal argument in 2022. He was telling a resident where his board’s authority stopped.

He knew where the line was.

Then he moved it, and he has been governing from the other side of it ever since.

It is all town money. He does not split hairs.

He said it first about a building. The senior center is where the new position was tested, and it is where the Board of Education first found out what it meant.

The first move onto the grounds

Andover needed a senior center. It had wanted one since 1969. It appeared in five consecutive plans of development. It was the number one item on the town’s own long-range survey.

That case was made to the Board of Selectmen in March 2021 by a man who had come to walk them through the plans: square footage, design costs, a site survey. He was arguing for the money to draw the thing. And in the middle of making the argument he said something that belongs at the top of this section rather than buried at the bottom of it.

The town’s first attempt, he told the board, had been to use the unutilized fifty percent of the school’s floor space. That was shot down by the Board of Education and the PTA ^[14].

Correction, July 29, 2026: The characterization above — that the town’s request to use the school’s empty space was “shot down by the Board of Education and the PTA” — comes from the consultant’s account to the Board of Selectmen, not from any PTA record. Lori Blake, a PTA member at the time, states that the PTA had no vote in the matter and did not formally refuse it, but that its members spoke out against siting the center in the school over security, usage, and parking concerns, and met with school administrators who shared that view. The PTA’s position was opposition voiced, not a veto exercised. The distinction matters, and the original wording blurred it. ^[15]

So before the town ever built on the school’s grounds, it had asked to use empty rooms inside the school, and the school had said no. The town had been told no once already, and the frustration in the room was real: we keep spinning our wheels, he said. We do what the town tells us to do, and no one lets us do anything ^[14].

That is the honest starting position, and anyone writing about what came next without it is not being straight with you. The town had a grievance. The question this article asks is not whether the town had a grievance. It is whether a grievance is a licence to treat the school as a department.

Here is how the town proceeded.

In December 2022 and January 2023 it surveyed the school parcel, moved a zone change, and filed the referral that lets a municipality site a project on its own land ^[16]. Every one of those steps was a public, noticed, ordinary process, and nothing about them was concealed. But they happened months before the Board of Education was at the table.

By June 2023 the Board of Education had questions, mostly about student safety on a shared campus, and it had asked its attorney to draft a memorandum of understanding: a written agreement setting out who is responsible for what when a town facility sits on school grounds. That is not an exotic request. It is what you do.

The First Selectman came to the board on June 14 and answered the safety questions. On the memorandum, his answer was that it was not necessary ^[10]. He agreed to review it. He said the town would go to planning and zoning on the twentieth and move forward, because it was in the best interest of the town ^[10]. Two days earlier he had told his own board the same thing, in the same words, and the project had gone forward over the school board’s stated concerns ^[17]. And at the same meeting he told the board why a memorandum between the town and the school did not make sense to him: the town owns all the land, the town owns all the buildings, there are no deeded properties to a board of education, and it is all town money ^[10a]^[10b].

The memorandum was never signed. The town simply did not answer it. A month later the board was still waiting ^[18]. Eventually the town administrator said out loud, at a planning and zoning meeting, with the First Selectman present and silent, that the town would not sign it ^[18a]^[18b].

The senior center got built. It is a good building and the town is better for having it, and nothing in this account should be read as an argument against it.

And no land was taken. The town has held title to the entire School Road campus since the 1960s ^[13]. The board of education never owned it. That claim gets made in Andover and it is not true, and this article is not going to make it.

What happened is smaller than a land grab and more revealing. A town wanted to build something on ground a school uses. The school asked for an agreement about how the two would share it. The town’s chief elected official told the school the agreement was not necessary, because it was all his anyway.

A building is one thing. Two months after he told the school board its memorandum was not necessary, the school tried to pave its own parking lot with its own money, and found out what the new position meant in practice.

A permit for its own lot, on its own money

The upper parking lot at Andover Elementary is the one closest to the main office. It is where certain staff and parents park. In 2023 the Board of Education considered it a safety problem, voted five to nothing to appropriate up to $120,000 to fix it, and set out to pave it over the summer, when the children would not be there ^[10].

It was the school’s own money, appropriated by the school’s own board, for work on the school’s own grounds. The plan was to have it done before the buses came back.

It was not done before the buses came back. It was not done that year at all.

On July 27, 2023 the permit was denied ^[19]. The stated grounds involved planning and zoning and wetlands, and both of those bodies subsequently made clear that the work did not require their approval. Days later, at the First Selectman’s request, the school met with the paver and public works, and a new set of conditions arrived from the town administrator: no permit unless the Board of Selectmen approved the project, town-hired laboratories to test the soil and the asphalt compaction, monitoring of the paving thickness, Cape Cod curbing ^[19a]^[19b]. The paver, who had been doing this for forty years, said he had not seen that on a job this size. The public works supervisor confirmed those things were not required of every job ^[19].

Take the conditions seriously for a moment, because they deserve it. Drainage matters. Compaction testing is not a frivolous thing to ask for. A town that is going to be blamed if a parking lot fails in three years has a real interest in how it is built. None of that is the argument here.

The argument is what it took.

On August 4 the superintendent sent the town administrator and the First Selectman the sections of Andover’s own charter that exempt the board of education from those requirements, in terms, by name ^[19a]^[19b]. There was no reply. With the administrator away, the school was told the only official who could issue a permit in his absence was the First Selectman. The board chair called him. No permit issued ^[19].

On August 14 the Board of Selectmen took it up, and the First Selectman moved to authorize the administrator to issue a conditioned permit ^[20]. That is real, and it should be said plainly: he moved to let it happen. But it came after the denial, after the conditions, and after the window to pave before school had closed. And the condition attached was the one that mattered: the school’s money would have to pass through a town-held fund, and the Board of Finance would have to vote to release it ^[20].

Three days later the town administrator explained the arrangement to the finance board without any decoration at all. The town controls that money, he said. It is not at the complete discretion of the school ^[21a]^[21b].

By September the school was being told the town would not accept a check made out to the contractor. It would accept only a check made out to the Town of Andover. The school would have to unencumber the money it had already set aside, hand it back to the town’s general fund, and let the town book the work and pay the bill. It becomes their money first ^[22a]^[22b]. A divided board voted four to three to do it ^[22].

In November the finance board stated the consequence in one sentence, as a matter of course, in its own meeting: moving the school’s money into the town fund moves the authority to spend it ^[23].

The upper lot stayed closed to buses, parents, staff and student drop-off for the school year ^[19]. In October, at a meeting of all three boards, a moderator asked the Board of Education point blank whether the town had ever interfered with its function. The board answered with this ^[24].

Two things need saying before anyone quotes this.

The First Selectman did not personally deny the permit, and this account does not say he did. What the record shows about him specifically is the position he had already stated, at the school’s own table, two months earlier: that the parking lot should go to CIP, because the building is a town asset ^[10]. His own account of the episode, given the following year, is that the school tried to pave a driveway without going to planning and zoning and without going to public works, and was trying to bypass everybody ^[11]. That is his framing. The record of that summer does not support it, and two town bodies said their approval was not needed at all.

And by 2024 the picture had changed, which the town said so at the time and which is fair. The money for the lot was set aside and the work could have been scheduled, and by then the school had put the failed bathrooms ahead of it ^[25]. The school itself pulled back a check it had written for the paving ^[26]. Those things are true about 2024.

They are not true about the summer of 2023, which is when a school with a documented safety hazard, its own appropriation, and its own contractor spent four months trying to get a permit to pave its own parking lot, and closed it instead.

The parking lot was an incident. What came out of it was a mechanism, and the mechanism is still running.

The machinery made permanent

Start with the part that is genuinely the town’s point, because it is a real one.

Andover Elementary had no way to save for a roof. Unlike the regional district, it had no capital line and no capital reserve of its own. When something large broke, there was no mechanism to have planned for it. The town said exactly this in its own budget presentation in April 2024, named the parking lot among the problems that had made the gap obvious, and proposed a solution: an AES Capital Improvement Fund ^[27].

That is not a scheme. That is a town looking at a real hole and moving to fill it, and a reader who wants to be fair should hold onto it while reading what follows.

Here is what the fund turned out to be.

It is held by the town ^[28]. It was seeded with $100,000, and the money in it comes from the school’s own unspent surplus ^[28]. In December 2024 the Board of Finance adopted a usage policy governing it ^[29]. And at the tri-board meeting that month, the First Selectman told the Board of Education what he wanted next: a five-year capital plan, routed through CIP, just like every other group in town. The school, he said, primarily has to understand what is capital and who is responsible for it ^[11].

The Board of Education did the arithmetic out loud, at the table, and nobody disputed it. CIP makes recommendations. Those recommendations go to the Board of Selectmen for approval ^[11]. So a school proposing to spend its own money on its own building would be proposing it to a committee that advises the selectmen, who would decide.

That is the whole mechanism, and it was assembled in under two years:

The school’s surplus goes into a fund the town holds. The fund is governed by a policy the finance board wrote. The money comes out when the finance board votes to release it. And the projects it pays for come through a committee that recommends to the selectmen.

The finance board had already stated the principle in the plainest possible terms, back in November 2023, while the parking-lot money was moving: putting the school’s money into the town’s fund moves the authority to spend it. The town administrator had said the same thing about the school’s checking account in August: the town controls that money.

Then, in November 2024, something happened that is hard to characterize as anything but what it is. The Board of Education went looking for its own capital fund and could not find it. The town’s $100,000 appropriation had not been transferred. The account was not where the town had said it was ^[30a]^[30b].

The following summer, the town administrator suggested keeping the school’s balance in the town’s interest-bearing account so the town could maximize its earnings, and observed that the school’s unspent money should go back to the town anyway ^[31]. And in June 2025 the First Selectman challenged the school’s transfer of its own unexpended funds, returning to the same sentence he had been using since 2023: the school building is a town asset ^[12].

On that last one the record cuts against him, and it should be said: the town’s own auditor reviewed the transfer and found no impropriety ^[12].

A fund was a good idea. The school needed one. What it got was a fund it does not hold, cannot draw on without a vote of another board, and cannot spend without a recommendation to a third. It was built for the school. It was not built with the school. And when the school went to look at it, it was not there.

Money and buildings are one kind of control. A contract is another, and the next one the school tried to sign on its own was a solar agreement it had already signed once.

The town joins a contract it was not part of

In January 2023 the Board of Education approved a power purchase agreement to put solar panels on the elementary school. The vote was seven to nothing. The town was not a party to it. There was no town meeting ^[32].

The following month the school needed a notary so it could file its application before the deadline, and the First Selectman notarized the town’s page for it ^[32].

Hold that in mind, because it is the fairest thing anybody can say about him here, and it is the reason the rest of this means what it means. He did not object in 2023. He helped.

Two years later the school came back to the same agreement, and the First Selectman had a different view.

At the Board of Selectmen on January 13, 2025, the board split on the record over whether the town should involve itself at all. One selectman argued that it was simply not the town’s business: the solar is the school’s, the school is the one who will be working on it, it is the school’s authority, and the Board of Education has control of the school building, and the selectmen should not be usurping what the Board of Education should be working on ^[33].

The First Selectman, presiding, rejected that. He said the town had to vote on it. He challenged her for having voted against the solar referral at planning and zoning. And then he asked her who she worked for: the town of Andover, or the faction on the board of education that does not want to work with us ^[33].

Another selectman broke in to steady the room. He was for the solar, he said. His worry was a different one, about whether the savings the vendor was promising were real ^[33].

In February the selectmen voted four to nothing, at the Board of Education’s own request, to route the project through a separate town meeting ^[34a]^[34b]. In March, at the Board of Selectmen, the First Selectman said the Board of Education should not have signed the agreement alone, and moved to have the town attorney draft an amendment adding the town as a party ^[35].

On March 13, 2025 a special town meeting voted 53 to 24 to add the Town of Andover as a party to the elementary school’s solar agreement ^[36].

The solar company’s own representative told that meeting he had never seen a town be a party to a school project ^[36].

In June the selectmen approved the second amendment to the agreement, and the First Selectman’s signature is on it ^[37].

Be careful about what this does and does not show, because there is a version of this story that overreaches.

The town’s involvement did not obviously slow anything down or cost the project anything. The legal work was coordinated with the school’s own solar attorney, and the record reads like ordinary review, not obstruction. If somebody tells you the town’s insertion wrecked the deal, they are going beyond the record.

What the record shows is simpler and, in the pattern, more telling. A school signed a contract it had every right to sign, and the town’s chief elected official helped it do so. Two years later the same official said it should never have signed alone, moved to have the town written into it, and put his name on the result.

Nothing about the panels changed in those two years. What changed was who believed he had a say.

Everything so far is the town reaching into the school’s business. The next one is the school’s business reaching back, and on this one he was right.

The fair point

There is a criticism the First Selectman has been making of the elementary school, and he is right about it. It is worth saying so plainly.

The elementary school’s bathroom renovation went out as a request for proposals and came back as a design-build job, with the school’s own engineering firm both pricing the work and acting as general contractor ^[38].

For a small repair, that arrangement is ordinary and sensible. The firm knows the building, the job is too small to be worth a procurement exercise, and nobody should want a school running a competitive bid every time a pipe fails. For a project of this size, it is a reasonable thing to ask about, and somebody should have asked about it.

At the Board of Education in October 2025 the First Selectman asked about it ^[39]. At the Board of Finance that December he came back to it, saying there was a problem with how things had been done ^[40].

He was right.

He was also not the only one raising it, and there is no sense pretending the question was invented by him, or that it was unfair, or that it was part of anything. It was a good question about a real thing, asked in public by an official entitled to ask it.

I am writing it down because it is true, and because anything I write about this man that could not bring itself to say so would not be worth your time.

Up to here this has been about money, buildings and contracts. From late 2025 it becomes about presence: he began turning up.

The seat he did not take, until he did

Andover’s charter lets the First Selectman sit as an ex officio member of the town’s boards ^[41]. The provision is old. It long predates the man currently holding the office, and there is nothing improper about using it.

Here is how he used it.

We went through the attendance block of every set of Board of Finance minutes in the town’s archive, back to 2015. It is a mechanical thing to check, because Andover’s clerks write down who was in the room: the members, and then the town administrator, the treasurer, the board clerk, representatives from the Board of Education, and, when nobody from the public showed up, the words “Public Present: none.”

The First Selectman is not listed at a single Board of Finance meeting from 2015 through 2024 ^[42].

Not one. Fifty-two readable meetings in the 2020 through 2024 stretch alone, and he is at none of them.

He has been First Selectman that whole time. The selectmen’s minutes of June 8, 2020 open with his name calling the meeting to order. So these are not somebody else’s years. They are his, and for four and a half of them he did not attend the finance board at all.

He first appears on May 7, 2025. From October 2025 forward he is at most Board of Finance meetings, in consecutive months, without a gap: October 22, November 19, December 17, and then January 28, February 25, March 24, April 1, May 6 and May 27 of this year ^[42].

The Board of Education is the same story, and we do not have to infer it, because he said so himself. In February 2026 the superintendent said on the record that for six years he had been publicly questioning her, the board, the teachers and the principal every single time. He replied that he had just started attending board of education meetings in October ^[43].

That is his own account and this article takes him at his word on it. He is not a long-standing fixture at the Board of Education. He became one nine months ago.

Both boards, at once, in the autumn of 2025.

There is a version of this section that reaches for more, and it is worth saying what we looked for and did not find.

We looked for a history of some other, gentler practice, a liaison who used to attend and report back, so that his presence could be set against a tradition. It is not there in any usable form. Selectmen were liaisons to town commissions ^[44], and a finance board member served as liaison to the regional school board ^[45]. But the Board of Finance’s own chair said plainly, in 2021, that the board’s only liaison committees were the community center and CIP ^[46]. There was no liaison to the Andover Board of Education. The tidy story is not true, so it is not here.

We also looked, across six years of records, for any instance of him pressing to sit inside the closed portions of those boards’ meetings. There is none. The only cross-board executive-session arrangement anywhere in the record runs the other way: in October 2021 the selectmen asked the Board of Finance to send someone to theirs ^[46].

None of that is needed, because the census does not need it.

For four and a half years he held the seat and did not take it. Then, last autumn, he took it at both boards in the same season, and he has not missed many since.

Ask yourself what changed.

Presence is not pressure by itself. It matters for what it is used for. One of the things it has been used for is her contract.

The contract, and the law firm

The First Selectman has never called for cutting the superintendent’s salary, and this account is not going to say he has.

What he has done, repeatedly, is imply that she is overpaid, and that the raise in her contract was somehow slipped past the public. In February 2026, asked as the ex officio member where he would cut the school’s budget, he restated his standing demand for line-item detail and named salaries as the main increase ^[43]. In March 2026 he sent the Board of Education a letter from a law firm questioning her contract ^[47].

The specific charge is that the raise is not in the minutes. That charge is true, and it is worth being straight about rather than defensive.

On October 9, 2025 the Board of Education took the superintendent’s contract into executive session, came back out, and approved it. The approval does not appear in the written record ^[48].

That is a real lapse, and the board should not have let it happen. It is a lapse against the board’s own ordinary practice, which is the thing that most needs saying: eighteen months earlier, in April 2023, the same board approved the previous renewal of the same contract seven to nothing, in open session, and wrote the vote into its minutes, exactly as you would expect ^[49]. They know how to do it. In October they did not do it.

But a hole in the paperwork is not a secret in the contract, and the difference matters.

In March 2026, after the letter arrived, the Board of Education took the matter up in public and held a recorded roll-call vote affirming the contract ^[50]. It passed. Whatever was or was not written down in October, the contract has now been affirmed by a recorded public vote of the elected board that employs her. There is nothing left to find.

Which leaves the substance. Is she overpaid?

In 2025-26, Andover paid its superintendent $100,000 a year: $90,000 in salary and a $10,000 retirement contribution ^[51].

It paid that for six tenths of a superintendent. Her Andover contract engages her at 0.6 full-time-equivalent. The other four tenths belong to Scotland, which employs her under its own separate contract ^[51].

So the useful question is not what Andover pays. It is what Andover pays per unit of the person. Normalized to a full-time position, Andover’s rate works out to $166,667 ^[51].

Set that against every other Connecticut school district that runs only elementary grades, which is the only fair comparison there is. Contracts were collected for thirty-nine of them, from town clerks, district websites and records requests, and every one was normalized the same way. Among the peers with current contracts, Andover ranks twenty-third out of twenty-four. The median peer pays $193,157, about sixteen percent more than Andover. The only district in the state paying less is Eastford, whose superintendent works one hundred and four days a year ^[51].

The obvious objection is that Andover is small, and small districts should pay less. The data says otherwise. Across this cohort, pay is essentially uncorrelated with enrollment. Small Connecticut elementary districts pay a market rate for the job, whether they have a hundred students or a thousand ^[51].

And the study says plainly what it does not yet have: current contracts for five more peer districts are still being sought, and one of them could conceivably come in at or below Andover ^[51]. That is worth knowing, and it is in the report, and it does not move the picture much. Twenty-three out of twenty-four is not a close call.

You can keep implying she is overpaid, or that something was hidden. The board has now voted on the contract in public, on the record, by name. The number is what it is, and anyone can check it.

The implication just keeps coming.

The contract was one demand for records. It was not the largest, and it was not the one that ran into a federal statute.

A question answered, and asked again

In November 2025 the First Selectman came to the Board of Education with a request for preschool data: four spreadsheets, broken out ^[52].

The superintendent refused, on the record, and explained why. Some of what was being asked for was student information protected by federal privacy law: the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act ^[53], which reaches not only names but any information that would let a reasonable person in the school community identify a particular child ^[54], and the confidentiality provisions of the special-education law ^[55]. Some of it was employee information protected under the school’s collective bargaining agreements ^[56] ^[57] and Connecticut’s own freedom of information statute, which lets an employee object to disclosure ^[58]. Some of it, being health information, is not the town’s business under any reading ^[59] ^[60]. And in a preschool of this size, she pointed out, a line-item breakdown of costs is not an abstraction. There are a handful of children. A one-on-one aide’s salary, itemized, identifies the child that aide is assigned to ^[61].

That is not a school hiding something. That is a school following a statute.

The pressing did not begin in November and it is not only his. In February 2026 he pressed the preschool at the Board of Education, and the superintendent rebutted the cost claim on the spot ^[62]. At the joint meeting of the finance and selectmen’s boards later that month he raised the cost of out-of-town students ^[63]. Other instances, and it matters to be accurate about this, are not him at all: members of the finance and education boards have carried much of the transparency pressing in their own meetings ^[64]. The subject of this section is the First Selectman and the members aligned with him, and pretending otherwise would be the kind of error that hands the whole argument away.

Now the part that ought to end this.

The questions being asked have answers, and the answers are on the public record, and they have been for five years.

In February 2021 the school laid the whole thing out for the Board of Finance: why out-of-town children are admitted at all (the state grant that funds the program requires an income mix), what they pay, and what the special-education children pay, which is nothing, because the law says so ^[65]. In March 2022 the superintendent told the same board that the preschool pays for itself between the tuition and the grants ^[66]. In January 2024 she explained the cost structure again: the program sits outside the general fund, funded by school readiness money, Smart Start money, and tuition ^[67]. In January 2026 she explained it again ^[68]. In March 2026 she explained it again, to the finance board, with the tuition basis ^[69]. The numbers are printed in the board’s own packet ^[70].

And on the out-of-town children specifically, the logic is not complicated. A preschool room the school is running anyway has empty seats in it. An out-of-towner cannot be placed in Andover for special education at Andover’s expense, and pays full price ^[71a]^[71b]. Filling an empty seat at full tuition brings money in ^[68].

Be careful with that, because there is a version of it that is not true. Asked in 2021 whether taking in a large number of out-of-town children would make money, the school said the opposite: it would hurt, because once you have to open another classroom the revenue stops covering it ^[65]. The preschool does not profit from out-of-town students. It fills seats that would otherwise sit empty. That is the claim, and it is the only one this article makes.

A fair question deserves a real answer. The answer has been given, in public, at meeting after meeting, since 2021.

The question keeps being asked as though it never was.

The questions were asked at board tables, meeting after meeting, on the record. In the spring of 2026 they arrived in mailboxes.

Paying to defeat the budget he was there to help create

In the spring of 2026 the elementary school’s budget went to the voters three times. On May 5 it went inside the town budget, as a single question, and the question failed, 451 to 331 ^[72]. The budgets were then split, the way Andover splits them after a defeat, and on May 26 the voters passed the town’s side and rejected the school’s, 431 to 343 ^[73]. On June 16 the school’s budget came back a third time, reduced to a six percent increase, and it passed, 420 to 317 ^[4].

Before each of those votes, a letter arrived in every mailbox in Andover.

The three letters are a set: one page, addressed to “Andover Taxpayers,” mailed to every postal patron in town under a bulk-mail permit, each closing with a call to vote NO on the date of the coming referendum ^[74]^[75]^[76]. The first takes up the preschool: whether taxpayers subsidize it, how many of its students come from out of town, whether the tuition covers the cost ^[74]. The second sets the proposed budget against the last audited year and works the increase into a figure per additional student ^[75]. The third recites the two defeats and argues that annual increases of six percent or more are not sustainable ^[76].

Say the fair things first, because they are real. Any resident may argue against a budget, in public, at his own expense, and a town where budget proposals draw written argument is healthier than one where they pass in silence. These letters are not anonymous and they are not hidden money. His name is signed at the bottom of each one and printed again beneath it: “Paid For by Jeffery J Maguire” ^[76]. The numbers in them are drawn from public documents. And the third letter says plainly, in his words, that voting NO “is not a vote against education” ^[76].

Now the other thing.

The signature reads Jeffrey J Maguire. Nowhere on any of the three letters do the words “First Selectman” appear. The second letter introduces its writer at length: twenty-five years in Andover, a degree in accounting, a CPA, a wife who taught public school for twenty-four years and served on the school board, children through the local schools ^[75]. It is a full accounting of who he is, except for the one thing every reader of a town budget mailer might most want to know: that he is the town’s chief elected official, and that the budget he is asking them to defeat is one his own office spends the rest of the year administering.

He was not a bystander to this budget who happened to have a stamp. And the letters themselves say the position is settled and standing. I voted NO last year, the second one says, and intend to vote NO again this year ^[75].

Then there is the calendar. The first letter arrived in early May, days before that vote. The second arrived on May 20, six days before the May 26 vote ^[75]. The third arrived on June 12, four days before the June 16 vote ^[76]. Each one landed close to the day of the vote it argued against.

None of this was against the rules. That is worth saying twice, because it is true, and because it is the point. A private resident may send three letters before three votes and sign them with his name. These letters are signed with his name.

What they never say is what he is.

The letters could ask for a NO. They could not manufacture one forever. On June 16 the voters approved the budget, and fifteen days later the First Selectman changed how the school receives it.

Where is the vote?

Start with how the elementary school is supposed to get its money, because that part is not in dispute and it is not complicated.

The voters approve the school’s budget at referendum; this year it took three of them, and the third, on June 16, settled it ^[4]. The Board of Finance then sets a levy schedule: the mechanics of how the money the voters approved actually reaches the school. For the last several years that schedule has been ten equal monthly payments, July through April ^[5]. It is not a habit and it is not a courtesy. The finance board puts it on the agenda, discusses it, and votes. In July 2024 it passed six to nothing ^[77]. In July 2025 it passed seven to nothing ^[6], and the packet for that meeting carries the arithmetic ^[78].

That is a decision of an elected board, made in public, by a recorded vote, every single year.

On July 1, 2026, the First Selectman replaced it with an email.

The email did not ask. It announced. Effective July 1, it said, the Town would be implementing a revised funding process for the elementary school’s operating budget, to strengthen cash management, maximize the investment of town funds, and eliminate reconciliation issues identified in the annual audit ^[7].

This is what the revised process was. The town had deposited $100,000 into the school’s operating account, and that sum would stand as its balance until spending drew it down. Thereafter money would arrive only as the school showed it needed it. The school’s business manager was to submit weekly check registers and payroll registers, reviewed and approved, by email, to the town treasurer, the assistant treasurer and the town administrator. On receipt, the town would transfer an amount equal to the approved disbursements shown on those registers. The business manager would also prepare a monthly reconciliation for the treasurer. And the treasurer would be responsible for ensuring that the school’s cumulative funding did not exceed its approved budget ^[7].

He sent it to the school board’s chair, copied the chair of the Board of Finance, and blind-copied the town treasurer and the town administrator: the officials who would carry it out ^[7].

And he did not write it as a plan. He wrote it in the past tense. The email does not say the town proposes to deposit $100,000, or intends to, or would like the boards’ view on whether it should. It says the town has deposited it, effective July 2, to initiate the new process ^[7].

Nor was it only written as done. It was done. July 1 was the day the first of the ten scheduled payments was due to reach the school. What the school received was the $100,000 ^[79].

Now take his reasons seriously, because they deserve it, and because they are not invented.

A town that releases a tenth of a school’s year on the first of the month is holding less of its own cash than a town that releases the money as it is spent, and cash sitting in a town’s investment account earns interest for the people who paid it. Reconciling two sets of books is genuinely easier when the transfers match the disbursements. Auditors do raise these things, and they had. None of that is a pretext, and anyone who tells you it is has not read the email.

It is not even a new thought in Andover. In July 2024 the town administrator told the Board of Selectmen the town should try to keep as much money as it could in its investment account, the school’s balance included, to maximize the interest it earned ^[31]. That idea has been in the air for two years, and it is a respectable one.

Neither did he spring it cold. On June 22 he had sent both board chairs a written proposal: the same account, the same weekly registers ^[8]. The school board’s chair turned it aside in writing the next day; her board, she wrote, was likely not interested, and she would bring it to them ^[8]. The day after that, he forwarded it to every member of the Board of Finance, so that, he wrote, we can have a discussion ^[8]. No meeting of any board ever took it up. A week later, the money moved.

So there was a good argument to be made, and there was a board to make it to.

He did not make it to a board. He made it to a bank.

The Board of Finance had adopted the ten-payment schedule by a unanimous public vote eleven months earlier ^[6], and it did not meet to reconsider it. When its chair saw the email, he answered in writing: it is very unclear to me that this is right and proper; did the selectmen vote on this? The finance board certainly didn’t ^[8]. The Board of Education, the elected body whose budget it is, had declined the idea through its chair and was overridden. And his own Board of Selectmen took no vote either: one of his selectmen wrote him that she did not agree, that the board had neither discussed nor voted on the change, and that she thought he had overstepped his role ^[8].

There was no vote anywhere. He wrote it, and it happened. He said so himself, five days later, in writing: the Board of Selectmen has not yet voted on this procedural change, and until such time, he is responsible for implementing it ^[8].

What came next is what settles whether this was a policy or a reach.

The school board did not agree, and said so: its chair objected in writing within hours, and by the end of that first day the board had reached out to its attorney ^[8]. And by the following Monday, a revised funding process that the Town would be implementing, effective July 1, had quietly become something else in the telling. It became a proposal: a thing the selectmen would have the opportunity to discuss, modify, or affirm at their July 13 meeting ^[8].

Then the attorney’s letter arrived, demanding the rest of the July payment ^[79]. And on Sunday evening, July 12, after five o’clock, the rest of the scheduled payment was transferred ^[79]. The selectmen met the next night.

And it was on the agenda anyway. “Discussion and Action on AES Operating Budget Funding Procedure.” Board of Selectmen, July 13 ^[1].

A proposal is a thing you take to a board before you do it. This one never got there. When the meeting opened, he moved to delete the item from the agenda, and it was gone ^[3]. What remained was a twelve-day-old fact, already carried out, and, the night before, partly undone.

Nine days later the town’s auditor sat down in front of the Board of Finance.

He is a partner at the firm that audits Andover, and he had come to present the year’s audit. It reports one finding serious enough to be called a material weakness, and it is about the very thing the email named: the reconciliation of the town’s general ledger with the school district’s ^[80].

Read the finding and the first thing you notice is whose problem it is. The town’s ledger is not integrated with the school’s. Journal entries are required to reconcile them. And the town’s year-end closing entries to record the school district’s balances and activities were incomplete. The cause is given as a lack of reconciliation controls ^[81].

Then read what the auditor recommends be done about it. That the town no longer record balances and activities already accounted for by the school district. That the town limit its accounting to transactions involving direct financial activity between the two: appropriations, transfers, reimbursements, shared service costs. And that the school district continue to provide the town with monthly financial reports ^[81].

Monthly reports, continued. Less town bookkeeping of the school’s detail, not more.

The town agreed with all of it. On May 6, eight weeks before the email, the town administrator filed the town’s corrective action plan with the State of Connecticut. The town concurs with the finding, it says. Then it sets out what the town will do: stop recording balances already accounted for by the school district, limit its accounting to direct financial activity between the two, reconcile interfund transactions and balances monthly, and reconcile general fund expenditures to the school’s accounting system annually. Projected completion date, June 30, 2026 ^[82].

The day before the email.

There is a second finding worth knowing about, from the year before, because it cuts against the way this has been told. The fiscal 2024 audit carried a significant deficiency that was the school’s: bank and interfund reconciliations at the school district. The school filed its own corrective action plan, moved its reconciliations into its accounting system, began reconciling its interfund accounts monthly, and looked at bringing in a consultant to help its business manager ^[83]. In this year’s audit that finding is gone ^[80].

The reconciliation problem that persisted was not the school’s. It was the town’s, and the town had already told the state, in writing, twice, how it intended to fix it.

Then the board turned to the change itself and asked the auditor what he made of it.

He did not say it was a bad idea. On the substance he said close to the opposite: he had spoken with the superintendent and the first selectman, and he had no conceptual objection to a cash management policy meant to maximize interest. What he said was that neither the state statutes nor the town charter addresses the question, so it is the town’s own to settle, and that his recommendation would be a board policy, approved by the Board of Finance, laying down the parameters within which the administration then sets its procedures ^[80]. The question, he said, is who ultimately has the authority to make those decisions, and a cash management policy could certainly include how the Board of Education gets funded ^[80].

The First Selectman was sitting at that table, and he did not distance himself from any of it. Yes, he told the board, he was driving this, and it was not because of anything nefarious; he had never once raised the school’s expenses with them beyond the budget ^[80].

Take him at his word. The auditor was not talking about motive either.

One more thing, and it is the thing to sit with.

When the school board’s chair objected, he answered at length, copying all three boards and the town staff. The Board of Education, he wrote, is responsible for managing the district within the budget it is given, and determines how those appropriated funds are spent. The Board of Finance recommends the appropriations and sets the rate. The Board of Selectmen administers town government and manages the town’s cash. His process, he wrote, was not intended to control or influence how the Board of Education spends its approved budget. The Board of Education, he wrote, will continue to have full authority over its expenditures ^[84].

Read that again, because every word of it is correct, and because he wrote it down.

He knows precisely where the line runs. He can set it out, in writing, in his own words, in July of this year.

He was standing on the wrong side of it when he typed it.

Set aside whether the school’s budget is a dollar too high or too low. The voters settled that at referendum. Set aside, if you like, whether weekly registers are a smarter way to move money than a monthly transfer. They might be. That is an argument, and it is one a person could win.

The Board of Finance adopted that schedule by a vote. Seven to nothing, in public, last July.

A schedule adopted by a vote is undone by a vote.

So where is the vote?

Set the pieces side by side.

The pattern

A memorandum the school asked for, and never got. A parking lot the school could not pave with its own money on its own grounds. A capital fund the school does not hold and cannot draw on without another board’s vote. A contract the school had already signed, reopened so the town could be written into it. A superintendent’s contract questioned by a law firm. A demand for records the school is forbidden by federal law to hand over. A preschool asked, for five years, to answer questions it has answered for five years. Two ex officio board seats that sat empty for four and a half years and are now filled almost every month. Three referendums in one spring, and before each one a letter in every mailbox urging the budget down, signed with his name and none of them saying what he is.

And, now, the school’s own money.

Any one of these is a disagreement, and reasonable people in a small town have disagreements. Several of them, on their own terms, began with a fair point. The town really did need a senior center. The school really did have no way to save for a roof. The bathroom contracting really was worth a question.

But they are not several things. They are one thing, done repeatedly, and the man doing it told us what it was.

In February 2022 he stood at the front of a meeting and told a resident that the Board of Selectmen has nothing to do with the school, and listed the buildings his board controls. The school was not among them ^[9].

Sixteen months later he sat at the Board of Education’s table and told them the town owns all the land and all the buildings, that there are no deeded properties to a board of education, that the agreement they wanted was not necessary, and that the school building is a town asset.

It is all town money, he said. I don’t split hairs ^[10a]^[10b].

He has not split hairs since.

He can still state the line perfectly when someone asks him to. This July, at the Board of Finance, with the school’s funding on the table in front of him, he said he cannot tell the Board of Education what to do, that the finance board cannot either, and that the school board can do whatever it wants with its balance ^[80]. He was three weeks into deciding when it could have the money at all.

None of this is secret. It happened in public, meeting by meeting, in front of anyone who was in the room, and it is all on the recordings and in the minutes. The full record, every claim above with its source and its timecode, is gathered here: /links/1150/

You have watched a lot of this happen. What you make of it is up to you.

This account is also shared on Facebook, a card at a time. Those cards, each linking to its section and its sources, are gathered on the complete record.

A Town Asset

Sources