Keene Sentinel 12/05/2007 (Posted with Permission)
SWANZEY CENTER - The contention that plagues the Monadnock Regional School District is now being eyed at the state level - by the Criminal Justice Bureau of the N.H. Attorney General’s office.
In a letter dated Nov. 28, Chief Investigator Paul E. Brodeur informed the school district’s attorney, Paul L. Apple, that accusations from Sullivan selectmen had been forwarded to his bureau.
Under scrutiny are two possible spending “irregularities,” according to Brodeur - specifically concerning the amount out-of-district students pay to attend school in the Monadnock district and the school board’s spending of hundreds of thousands of dollars in health insurance savings.
The letter from Brodeur follows letters Keene attorney Beth R. Fernald sent to the N.H. Department of Revenue Administration and the N.H. Department of Education on behalf of the town of Sullivan.
In those letters, dated Oct. 22 and Nov. 5, respectively, Fernald charges that out-of-district students attending the Monadnock Community Connections School, an alternative program of Monadnock High School, aren’t being charged the full cost of their education.
She also accuses the Monadnock board of spending a health insurance savings of $400,000 on raises and bonuses.
And in a letter dated Nov. 19, Fernald filed a petition for “declaratory judgment” in Cheshire County Superior Court, arguing that the much-debated issue of early retirement was never properly approved by district voters.
“The court could do any number of things but the probabilities are that it will hear it (in a trial),” Apple said.
Apple said he will be responding to both the Superior Court and Attorney General’s criminal bureau promptly.
The move by Sullivan follows a vote by a majority of residents at the 2007 town meeting to authorize $25,000 to investigate the feasibility of withdrawing from the district.
“This has been ongoing,” said Sullivan Selectman Richard Hotchkiss, who said selectmen are attempting to investigate whether any problems in the district can be fixed before deciding whether withdrawal is a good option. As a result, he said, legal fees for the matter are being paid from the voter-approved $25,000. The early retirement benefit, which gives veteran teachers the option to retire early by paying them a percentage of their salaries for seven years, was originally included in the 2000-01 teachers’ contract.
Opponents call the benefit - which was originally intended to represent a savings in the district by enabling it to hire newer, less-costly teachers - prohibitively expensive. And in the latest contract recently negotiated between the teachers union and the school board, the benefit will be phased out in three years.
But, information posted on Sullivan’s Web site challenges whether early retirement was ever legal in the first place.
“The voters were not informed of the yearly cost of the Early Retirement Program over time,” Fernald wrote in her filing with the Superior Court. “Under New Hampshire law, voters must know the financial implications of a cost item or the item cannot be validly approved.”
At most, she wrote, the voters may have been warned of the cost of the benefit in its first year - 2000-01.
But when the 2000-01 contract expired, she wrote, early retirement did too, since the contract “specifically stated the Early Retirement Program would be continued only if it were negotiated as part of a successor agreement.”
By contrast, Apple said the benefit carried forward. In numerous responses to Fernald’s letters, he declined to discuss the topic of early retirement with her since, at that time, it was still part of negotiations with the teachers’ union. In her letters to the state Department of Revenue Administration and the Department of Education, Fernald tackled two other issues - among them, the cost of students attending the Monadnock Community Connections School from out-of-district.
Monadnock Community Connections is supported by federal funds set to dry up at the end of this year. In September, the board voted that in the future, students wishing to attend the school from other districts would be charged the same tuition rate as the rest of the high school.
But critics, such as Sullivan school board member Timothy Aho, said it costs much more for students to attend Monadnock Community Connections, so they should be charged more.
The fact that they won’t be, Fernald wrote in her letters, is “particularly puzzling” since Monadnock voters rejected a warrant article in March that would have made Monadnock High School an open-enrollment school, which means it would accept students from other districts.
Fernald has also accused the Monadnock board of authorizing $400,000 in spending from health insurance savings for raises and bonuses.
Although she stated the savings came from a change in health care providers, the district didn’t change providers. Instead, the savings - which totaled over $500,000 - were the result of a competitive bidding process.
In addition to funding a number of bonuses and wage increases, more than $200,000 of the savings was approved for hiring new staff members.
“I think there’s some misrepresentation in the statements,” Superintendent Kenneth R. Dassau said after the meeting. “The district will now be forced to expend significant amounts of money to defend itself.”
Apple echoed him.
“I think there’s some representations in those letters that with some investigation would not have been made,” he said. “It’s just a plain misstatement of fact that we changed insurance carriers.”
Fernald was unreachable for comment.
Aho, Sullivan’s school board representative, said health savings should have gone back to the taxpayers. And he questioned the legitimacy of adding staff positions under a default budget.
On Tuesday, the school board also approved $50,000 from the health insurance savings to hire a new director of buildings and grounds. This money will cover the director’s salary for the remainder of the school year, whereas roughly $94,000 will have to be raised for that salary next year.
That $94,000 will not appear as a separate warrant article, but will be part of the operating budget for 2008-2009.
