Newfound board drops request to address public comments about teacher

BRISTOL — Until Aug. 14, the Newfound Area School Board had not acted on a May request by the newly appointed curriculum coordinator, Ariel Maloney, to “take action in remedying the potential damage to my public and professional reputations” as the result of comments by two school board members who questioned her suitability for the job. At its August meeting, the board decided to drop the matter.

The school board received correspondence from attorney Richard Lehmann on July 9, representing New Hampton’s school board member Francine Wendelboe. Wendelboe, along with William Jolly of Groton, had discussed Maloney’s qualifications in public before the vote to hire her. Lehmann wrote a scathing legal opinion of Maloney’s complaint, stating, “Nothing in RSA 91-A, the New Hampshire Right-To-Know law, shields Ms. Maloney from public scrutiny or discussion of her qualifications and whether she is a good fit for the district curriculum coordinator position.”

The attorney went on to characterize her attempt “to shut down public discussion critical of her” as “wildly misplaced” and her claims of defamation “utter nonsense.”

He was referring to Maloney’s threat to seek legal counsel if she should “receive any in-person communication, personal correspondence, or any other public commentary that further maligns my personal or professional reputations as a result of their public comments.”

Lehmann strayed from a legal analysis of Maloney’s complaint to comment about her fears of a tainted reputation.

“Any ‘taint’ that may have arisen was due solely to longstanding public concern about — and broad disapproval of — nepotism in government hiring,” he wrote. “This issue becomes particularly acute when the position being filled is a high-paying leadership position such as curriculum director. The simple and unavoidable fact is that Ms. Maloney was hired into a senior position in the administrative offices at a high salary by the school board that her husband is a member of. Whether her husband participated (directly, indirectly, or not at all) in the hiring process and whether the hiring was a technical violation of the district’s anti-nepotism policy (or not), it was these circumstances surrounding her hiring, rather than anything Ms. Wendelboe said, that caused any ‘taint.’”

Maloney’s suggestion the board censure Wendelboe and Jolly drew further derision from Lehmann.

“Of all the misguided issues raised in her email to the board, this is among the most egregious,” he wrote. “What Ms. Maloney proposes is to have the board her husband sits on sanction its own members, for performing the job they were elected to do.”

He continued, “Worse still, Mr. Maloney has apparently suggested that these records be scrubbed from the public record. This is problematic for two reasons. First, it is unclear to me what authority a school board has to bury its prior conversations because they made a public employee feel bad. Second, the notion that Mr. Maloney would seek to suppress discussions about his wife when he previously declared that he was too conflicted to participate in earlier discussions on the same subject boggles the mind.”

Lehmann added, “There is simply no rationale for Mr. Maloney to recuse himself from participating in discussions about placing his wife in the curriculum and then to initiate the idea of censuring other board members who did participate in those same discussions.”

The attorney concluded his letter with gratuitous advice: “The Board should reject both of these foolish ideas and get back to work serving the students, families, and taxpayers of SAU #4.”

RSA 91-A recognizes that some discussions should be exempt from public disclosure, including the dismissal, promotion, compensation, investigation, or disciplining of any public employee unless the employee asks for the meeting to be open; the hiring of a public employee; matters that adversely affect the reputation of anyone other than a member of the public body itself, unless the person asks for an open meeting; consideration of the acquisition, sale, or lease of real or personal property; consideration or negotiation of pending claims or litigation; or security-related matters.

The law also allows limited confidentiality in the consideration of applications by the Business Finance Authority; preparations for emergencies; consideration of commercial or financial information; tuition contracts; legal advice; and consideration of whether to disclose the minutes of a nonpublic session.

The school district’s attorney, Barbara Loughman, had been present during the public discussion of Maloney’s suitability for the promotion, and did not object to the comments during that meeting.

During the public comment period at the beginning of the Aug. 14 meeting, Colleen Abbey, speaking on behalf of the Newfound Teachers Association, expressed “great concern about the recent behavior of certain school board members ... when the promotion of Ariel Maloney was under consideration.”

“Members of this board violated numerous sections of RSA 91-A” and “conducted themselves is such an unprofessional and unacceptable manner” that it must be addressed, she said. “Your own school board policy, GBCC, requires that the school board shall respect all employees’ rights established by law, the school board policy, and collective bargaining agreements, if applicable. We ask you to take pause and consider how you think this makes your current employees feel about ever applying for promotion within the school district.”

Wendelboe defended her statements as being based on public documents Maloney had written, and she shared an article written for “Children and Education” in which Maloney challenged Thanksgiving myths. In it, she said, “The Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts and liked this land. They liked it so much, they stole it from the indigenous people who were living here. ... [T]hey thought they were better. They thought their clothes were better, and their religion was better, and because of that they thought they deserved to take the land.”

“I’m just curious [whether] the curriculum for the kindergarten this year is going to include that the Pilgrims were nothing but thieves and murderers, which is what a 5-year-old was told, and the opinion of Mrs. Maloney, and that is why I thought that she was inappropriate to serve in that position,” Wendelboe said.

“My only comment is I think we shouldn’t spend any more time on this,” she concluded. “We have so many important issues facing the district, and I think we need to move forward and be adults and stop the foolishness and nonsense and be grown-up about it.”

With no other board members commenting on the controversy, Chair Melissa Suckling of Danbury moved on to other matters.

Electioneering and the Right-to-Know law

The public’s right to know and school district ethics came up in other ways during the meeting, as residents asked for better oversight of district employees using school district resources for personal matters. The Attorney General’s recent cease-and-desist order against computer education teacher Erin Edwards, who used the school district’s email account to influence an election in 2023, raised concerns that it was not an isolated case.

Bristol Rep. John Sellers said he and Rep. Carroll Brown had received comments on legislative matters from people using the sau4.org email account. While it may not have been illegal in the same way as the electioneering complaint, Sellers said the district should look into it.

“This is happening more than once, all right? So it really needs to be looked at,” he said.

Aubrey Freedman of Bridgewater complained administrators downplayed the electioneering complaint, saying, “‘Well, these are non-partisan elections, so what’s the big deal?’ That is absolutely shameful. We all know, whether you have a 'D' or an 'R' or a 'I' behind your name, it’s taxpayers’ dollars. This stuff is all partisan, and to just say, 'That it’s not partisan, so what’s the big deal?' is delusional, in my opinion.”

Linda Phillips of Bristol asked the use of district email be placed on a future agenda.

“I would like it to be a public conversation about how the district handles making sure that their employees know they don’t use public efforts or property or time to do their electioneering efforts, and that needs to be a public discussion, because we have an issue with a lot of business that goes on in nonpublic session,” she said.

Phillips continued, “Clearly, the electioneering is a revelation that there’s something deeper going on. There are Right-To-Know law investigations at the state [level], the electioneering issue at the state, and other things that are going on, and this district is not investigating anything, whether it’s the conflict of interest of a school board member making a suggestion to modify the minutes. There needs to be some clearing out and self-examination, because all those other good things that everybody does, if we can’t run our business legally and statutorily correct and follow regulations — it doesn’t matter what you say, I will never be convinced that there isn’t lots of areas for improvement.”

Phillips went as far as to suggest eliminating the confidentiality protections of the Right-To-Know law, calling the minutes of nonpublic sessions “incomplete” because they only list the subjects discussed without including the actual discussion. She urged the school board to have the clerk sit in on the nonpublic deliberations in order to provide detailed accounts of the discussion.