New Hampton Community School serves 26 kids in first year of Got Lunch! summer deliveries

BRISTOL — Ann Holloran, principal of the New Hampton Community School, told the Newfound Area School Board last week that a pilot Got Lunch! program served 26 children this summer.

Holloran reported on the pilot during the school board's Oct. 27 meeting. The Inter-Lakes School District helped launch the pilot, and the initial season served nine families over the 10 weeks.

“We raised over $11,000, so we were able to financially support the whole program, which was amazing,” Halloran said. “And again, remember, we started in late April, and so that just talks again about our community at large.”

She said it was in April New Hampton Fire Chief Scott Cathy and Pastor Scott Mitchell approached her with their concerns about food insecurity for students during the summer months. Cathy had been involved with the Got Lunch - Ashland and Holderness program, and suggested starting one in New Hampton.

The New Hampton Community Church, New Hampton School, and community members formed a group to launch the program, with Got Lunch! Inter-Lakes offering support.

“It’s a 10-week program,” Halloran said. “The cost is $280 per child. So each bag has a fresh fruit or vegetable, it’s a protein-rich sandwich fixing.

"They also had mac and cheese as a shelf-stable food item. There were other spaghetti and pasta given other weeks. And then they also had a $10 voucher for Hannaford, for milk and butter and eggs.”

To deliver the food, there were six volunteer packers at Inter-Lakes Elementary School, six volunteer drivers, and six retired Newfound district teachers and staff members helping with the program.

“Inter-Lakes has been running their program for over a dozen years now. It’s a well-oiled machine,” Halloran said. “So we’re really fortunate. They have offered to have us come back and be a part of their program" next year.

Labor Day schedule

While Labor Day fell on Sept. 1 this year, it will occur late — on Sept. 7 — next year, which complicates the setting of the school calendar. As schools aligned with the Huot Career and Technical Center in Laconia look at standardizing their academic calendars, they are considering three options.

Laconia has proposed a Sept. 9 start, which would extend classes until June 24; Sept. 1, with classes ending on June 22; or Aug. 31, ending June 17.

“I think it’s going to be up for discussion amongst all of us,” Superintendent Paul Hoiriis told the school board on Oct. 27.

In recent years, Newfound has returned to having school begin after Labor Day, but School Board Chair Melissa Suckling objected to a June 24 end of year, calling it “just silly.” She asked about switching from the 180-day school year requirement to using educational hours to meet state education requirements, ending earlier in June.

“We used to have to approve that as the board. I remember doing that,” Suckling said. “So, is there the ability to start Sept. 9, but maybe do some sort of switch to not going to the 24th, and doing something hours-based and making our calendars a little less overwhelming?”

Discussion continued about whether some of the trade certifications for Huot students require meeting certain hours requirements. While this is the case, they generally complete those requirements well before the end of classes, Suckling said.

Hoiriis noted Newfound has some flexibility in setting the academic calendar, as long as it does not deviate much from Laconia’s schedule.

“We seem to do all of our teacher in-service the week before Labor Day, anyways, on that Tuesday through Thursday, and then we always have kids start on the Tuesday after. We don’t wait to the Wednesday.” He said he will be recommending a Sept. 8 start.

Hoiriis said, in meeting with other superintendents, he would bring up the questions about hours-based scheduling, and use of “remote days” during bad weather to shorten the length of the school year.

The superintendent also noted there may be new legislation in 2026, requiring that schools not open before Labor Day.

The board also discussed the use of schools as polling locations. Laconia’s schedule does not include classes on election days, and Bristol has asked to use Newfound schools as polling places.

“That actually is very convenient, now that there’s legislation that we have to align as close as possible with Laconia,” Hoiriis said, noting his staff would schedule in-service days for teachers while voting is taking place in March, and parent-teacher conferences could take place while classes were canceled during November elections.

Dennis Fitton of Alexandria, who was Newfound’s delegate to the New Hampshire School Boards Association, said, “There was actually quite a lot of heated discussion about that very thing, the schools being polling locations, regarding the enforcement of federal law and firearms on school grounds.

"So when they use their facilities for voting days, they don’t have any children in the school. It’s kind of the workaround to the citizens being able to be there.”

Public hearing

At the start of the meeting, the school board held a public hearing on the special school district meeting scheduled for Nov. 4, to ratify actions of its annual meeting of Feb. 1 and March 11, related to required documents which could not be completed until the district had rebuilt its financial records after a November 2023 cyber attack.

In the summer of 2024, there was a complete turnover of the district administrative team, with a new superintendent, a new business administrator, a new student services coordinator, and a new administrative assistant.

“The new team led the charge to rebuild the financial system, resulting in some delays and technical defects in the budget process,” Hoiriis said. That included problems identified by the state Department of Revenue Administration: not posting the budget on the official DRAt form; failure to post the default budget on the proper form; failure to post a signed school district warrant; and failure to have all of the required documents posted by the last Monday in June.

“We did post the budget on the website,” Hoiriis said, adding it was several hundred pages long, “but it wasn’t on the DRA form, that actually is shorter.

"We had a default budget number, but we did not post the default budget on the form,” and actually were revising the numbers right up to the district meeting as Business Administrator Angela Carpenter worked through what was known about the lost data.

“We posted the warrant articles on time and ahead of time, and met all the deadlines on that, but did not post a signed copy,” Hoiriis said.

Asked why it took so long to schedule a meeting to correct the mistakes, Carpenter said she just recently got through the rebuilding of the 2024 budget, which was necessary to complete the forms. The NH Department of Education just approved those numbers, so the forms can go on to the DRA following the ratification meeting.

Carpenter said she has nearly completed the 2025 budget for DOE approval and DRA submission, and auditors will be verifying her numbers. Once the state has all the “true” numbers, the DRA will be able to work with the towns in setting their tax rates.

“So this legalization meeting is required under law, so the towns can get their work done to set taxes,” Hoiriis said.

TD Bank purchase

The school board signed a second amendment to its purchase-and-sales agreement for the TD Bank property downtown. The document was already amended to avoid having to hold a special set of school district meetings to let voters decide on the purchase; the question will now go through the standard process of a deliberative session and voting in 2026.

The new amendment gives the district extra time to complete its building survey, by extending the date from the beginning of November to Dec. 5.

Apart from the amendments, the purchase-and-sales agreement remains confidential, which citizens questioned at the school board’s last meeting. They asked that its contents be made public before a vote.

The most important information already is in the public domain, with the bank offering to sell its property — which includes the bank building and the accessory structure that houses district offices — for $665,400. The property is now assessed at $1.1 million, with TD Bank having recently spent $1.8 million in improvements to the bank building.

In other business, the school board formally approved the implementation of new education standards based on the state education code.

The package, approved on Oct. 27, was revised to accommodate questions and comments Curriculum Coordinator Ariel Maloney heard when making a presentation at the Oct. 14 meeting. It also makes clear that Newfound’s curriculum guidelines deviate slightly from the state recommendations, while still meeting state standards.