The pattern

Any one of these is a disagreement. Together they are a position, acted on.

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 ^[1].

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 ^[2a]^[2b].

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 ^[3]. 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.

The pattern

Sources