A Town Asset
The complete record, in one place.
This is an account of the Andover First Selectman's conduct toward the elementary school, drawn entirely from the town's own public record: the minutes, the packets, and the recordings of its own meetings. It was written as thirteen short pieces and began going out one at a time.
I've been persuaded by people I trust that a slow release is no longer the best way to present this much material. So here it is, all of it, in one place and permanent: every piece, the card that introduced it, and its sources. Read it in any order. Check anything you doubt — every claim carries its source.
Thirteen pieces
1 of 13
The school's own money
On July 13 the selectmen's agenda included an item: "Discussion and Action on AES Operating Budget Funding Procedure." At the meeting, the item was deleted. No discussion, no action.
I wanted to know what it would have covered, so I filed a records request. The town's answer arrived on July 16, and it deserves your attention.
For three years the elementary school has received its budget in ten equal monthly payments, on a schedule the Board of Finance adopts the way boards adopt things: on an agenda, in public, by a recorded vote. Last July that vote was 7 to 0.
On July 1, that schedule was replaced by an email.
There was no vote of the Board of Selectmen. There was no vote of the Board of Finance. One official decided, on his own, the terms on which the school receives the money the voters approved in June.
That is worth paying attention to. Because it did not come out of nowhere.
2 of 13
The line, drawn and erased
February 15, 2022. A resident asks the Board of Selectmen about the school's mask mandate. The First Selectman stops the question, politely: this board does not have anything to do with the school. That is the Board of Education. He lists what the selectmen do control: the town hall, the library, the museum.
The school is not on the list. He was right. He knew where the line was.
June 14, 2023, at the Board of Education's table: the town owns all the land, the town owns all the buildings, there are no deeded properties to a board of education. The school is a town asset.
"It's all town money. I don't split hairs."
He has not split hairs since. Both meetings are on tape, with timecodes.
3 of 13
The first move onto the grounds
Andover needed a senior center. It had wanted one since 1969. And the fairest fact in this story belongs at the top: the town first asked to use empty rooms inside the school, and the school board and the PTA said no. The town's frustration was real.
Here is what happened next. The town surveyed the school parcel, moved a zone change, and filed its referral months before the school board was at the table. When the board asked for a written agreement about sharing a campus with a town facility, the answer was that it was not necessary. The town owns it all anyway.
The agreement was never signed. The center got built, and it is a good building, and no land was taken from anyone; the town has held title since the 1960s.
The question is not whether the town had a grievance. It is whether a grievance is a licence to treat the school as a department.
4 of 13
A permit for its own lot, on its own money
In 2023 the school board called its upper parking lot a safety problem, voted 5 to 0 to spend up to $120,000 of its own money, and planned to pave it over the summer, while the children were away.
The permit was denied on July 27. The stated grounds involved planning and zoning and wetlands, and both bodies later made clear the work did not need their approval. Then new conditions arrived: town-hired labs, compaction testing, thickness monitoring, curbing. The school's paver, forty years in the trade, said he had not seen that on a job this size.
Be fair to the conditions: drainage is real, testing is not frivolous. That is not the argument.
The argument is what it took. Four months. The lot closed to buses, parents and drop-off for the school year. And in the end the school unencumbered its own money and handed it to the town, to be spent as the town's, to get its own lot paved.
5 of 13
The machinery made permanent
Start with the town's point, because it is real: the elementary school had no way to save for a roof. No capital reserve at all. The town said so in its own budget presentation and proposed a fund. A fund was a good idea.
Here is the fund the school got. It is held by the town. It was seeded from the school's own unspent surplus. It is governed by a policy the finance board wrote. Money comes out when the finance board votes. And projects route through a committee that recommends to the selectmen, who decide.
Then, in November 2024, the school board went looking for its own capital fund and could not find it. The promised $100,000 had not been transferred. The account was not where the town had said it was.
It was built for the school. It was not built with the school.
6 of 13
The town joins a contract it was not part of
In January 2023 the school board approved a solar agreement for the elementary school, 7 to 0. The town was not a party to it. The next month, so the school could file before a deadline, the First Selectman notarized the paperwork himself.
Hold onto that, because it is the fairest thing anyone can say about him here. He did not object in 2023. He helped.
Two years later he told the selectmen the school should never have signed alone. When a colleague argued the solar was the school's own business, he asked her who she worked for. And in March 2025 a special town meeting voted 53 to 24 to write the Town of Andover into the school's existing contract. His signature is on the amendment.
Nothing about the panels changed in those two years. What changed was who believed he had a say.
7 of 13
The fair point
There is a criticism the First Selectman has been making of the elementary school, and he is right about it.
The 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. For a small repair that arrangement is ordinary. For a project this size, it was worth asking about, and somebody should have asked.
He asked, at the Board of Education in October and the Board of Finance in December. He was not the only one, and the question was a good one, asked in public by an official entitled to ask it.
I am writing that 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.
8 of 13
The seat he did not take, until he did
Andover's charter has always let the First Selectman sit with the town's boards. The provision is old, and there is nothing improper about using it. Here is how it was used.
We read the attendance block of every Board of Finance meeting in the town's archive, back to 2015. Andover's clerks write down everyone in the room, down to "Public Present: none."
From 2015 through 2024, the First Selectman is not listed at a single Board of Finance meeting. Fifty-two readable meetings in the 2020 to 2024 stretch alone. He has held the office that whole time.
He first appears in May 2025. Since October 2025 he has been at almost every meeting, month after month without a gap. The Board of Education is the same story, by his own account: he told the superintendent in February that he had just started attending in October.
Both boards, at once, in the same autumn. Ask yourself what changed.
9 of 13
The contract, and the law firm
The First Selectman has never called for cutting the superintendent's pay, and I am not going to say he has. What he has done, repeatedly, is imply that she is overpaid and that her raise was slipped past the public. In March, a law firm's letter arrived at the school board questioning her contract.
Two things are true. Last October the board approved the contract and failed to write the vote into its minutes. That was a real lapse, against the board's own usual practice. And in March the board fixed it the right way: a recorded, public, roll-call vote affirming the contract. It passed. There is nothing left to find.
Which leaves the number. Andover pays $100,000 a year for six tenths of a superintendent; she serves Scotland separately. Normalized to full time, that is $166,667. Among Connecticut's elementary-only districts with current contracts, Andover ranks 23rd of 24. The median peer pays about sixteen percent more.
The implication just keeps coming.
10 of 13
A question answered, and asked again
Since 2021 the preschool has answered the same questions, in public, at meeting after meeting. Why out-of-town children attend at all: the state grant that funds the program requires an income mix. What they pay: full tuition, filling seats that would otherwise sit empty. What the numbers are: printed in the board's own packets.
In November 2025 a new demand arrived: four spreadsheets, broken out. The superintendent refused, on the record, and explained why. In a preschool this small, a one-on-one aide's salary, itemized, identifies the child that aide is assigned to. Federal privacy law reaches not only names but anything that would let someone in the school community identify a particular student.
That is not a school hiding something. That is a school following a statute.
A fair question deserves a real answer. It got one, five years ago, and every year since. It keeps being asked as though it never was.
11 of 13
Paying to defeat the budget he was there to help create
The school budget went to referendum three times this spring. May 5: it failed inside the combined town budget, 451 to 331. May 26, after the split: the town's side passed and the school's failed, 431 to 343. June 16, reduced to a six percent increase: it passed, 420 to 317.
Before each vote, a one-page letter arrived in every mailbox in Andover, urging a NO. Say the fair things first: the letters were legal, they were signed, and the money behind them was disclosed, under his own name. Any resident may argue against a budget at his own expense.
The second letter introduces its writer at length: twenty-five years in town, a degree in accounting, a CPA, a wife who taught public school. What none of the three letters say, anywhere, is "First Selectman." The one thing a reader of a budget mailer might most want to know: that the budget he was asking them to defeat is one his own office administers the rest of the year.
The letters said what he thinks. They never said what he is.
12 of 13
Where is the vote?
How is the elementary school supposed to get its money? The voters approve the budget at referendum; this year that took three votes, and the third settled it. The Board of Finance then sets the schedule: ten equal monthly payments, adopted on an agenda, in public, by vote. Last July: 7 to 0.
On July 1 an email replaced it. Money would now follow only as the school submitted weekly spending registers for the town's approval. The town, it said, had deposited $100,000. Not a proposal; the past tense.
On July 1 the school was due its scheduled payment. What it received was the $100,000. On Sunday, July 12, after 5 PM, the night before the selectmen met, the rest went out. And at the meeting, the item was deleted from the agenda.
On July 22, the Town's own auditor said how a change like this should be made: a policy adopted by the Board of Finance. By vote.
The Board of Finance adopted that schedule by a vote, seven to nothing, in public. A schedule adopted by a vote is undone by a vote.
So where is the vote?
13 of 13
The pattern
A memorandum the school asked for, never signed. A parking lot it could not pave with its own money. A capital fund it does not hold and cannot draw on without another board's vote. A contract it had already signed, reopened so the town could be written in. A law firm's letter about a superintendent whose pay ranks 23rd of 24. A demand for records federal law forbids the school to hand over. A question answered for five years, still being asked. Two board seats empty for four and a half years, now filled almost every month. Three letters before three votes, signed without the office. And now the school's own money, rescheduled by email.
Any one of these is a disagreement. Several began with a fair point, and the account says so. But they are not several things. They are one thing, done repeatedly, and the man doing it told us what it was, at the school board's own table:
"It's all town money. I don't split hairs."
None of this is secret. It happened in public, and it is all in the minutes, the packets and the recordings, with a source and a timecode on every claim.
Read the whole record — andoverct.info/series/town-asset
What you make of it is up to you.
Everything above, gathered
Every source cited across all thirteen pieces, grouped by the section that cites it, is here: the complete record of sources.