Here are the documents filed today at the New Hampshire Supreme Court to appeal Judge David Anderson’s ruling on my Right to Know case against the Timberlane Regional School District.
Donna Green Brief Case 2015-0274
I will post the district’s response to this brief, as well as the hearing date, when they are available.
In other news, the chairman of the school board appointed Sue Sherman as co-chair of the Capital Improvement Plan Committee, in keeping with the vote of the CIP committee itself asking to replace Rob Collins with Sue Sherman. This is a good thing and shows some public commitment to the goal of planning capital improvements in the district.
[CORRECTION 9/22/15: A previous version of this post said that Mrs. Steenson did not have the authority to assign a co-chair to the CIP without a vote of the school board. Dr. Metzler pointed out that Policy BDE permits the SB chair and the superintendent to appoint standing committee co-chairs without a vote of the board. I heartily regret voting in favor of changing this policy and completely overlooked this unpalatable and misguided aspect of it.]
This just in:
NOTICE OF MEETING
The Sandown Withdrawal and Feasibility Study Committee will meet
on September 22, 2015 at 7:30 PM in the Timberlane Regional High
School library, 36 Greenough Road, Plaistow, NH. The committee is
tasked with conducting a study of the feasibility and suitability of the
Town of Sandown withdrawing from the Timberlane Regional School
District.
This meeting is open to the public.
timberlaneandsandown 
Donna,
Thanks for posting this. I hope you win. I just gave it a quick skim, I don’t know when I will find the time to read it as closely as I would like.
That said, I think the verb “advances” is a tad misleading. To me it implies that your case was recognized for its merits, for example if it were selected by the Supremes for review. Do you know by when that decision will be made?
As for the chair’s alleged ability to appoint chairs, I was going to say it was “like the chair thing” meaning the assigned seats but then I realized it would be totally confusing just to say that. The RSAs almost never say anything about how to pick a chairperson or what their powers are. If the SB chairperson customarily assigns the chairs you sit in and the chairpersons of subcommittees and everybody goes along, that’s OK I think. Plus, isn’t there an actual voted policy that allows the SB chair to appoint chairpersons of subcommittees, I recall some mention of that in a quoted email.
I distinguish between the statutory withdrawal committee and any subcommittee created by the SB. The former is not a creature of the SB or subject to its supervision even if the SB has a hand in selecting its members. So I don’t think the SB chairperson has any authority to pick the chair and it is my understanding that the committee actually voted to approve her choice essentially making her action moot. For the latter especially if there is some policy I think she has a stronger case although I still think the members once appointed could pick a different chair. So they didn’t need to ask the SB chairperson to make the change but they did.
Key is this statement in the filing: “Rather than making public information available in a manner that permits maximum utility for the user, and corresponding accountability for the government, the defendants here have
plainly attempted to stymie the use of this information by the public. They have done this in a manner that requires Ms. Green to spend extended periods of time in the superintendent’s office. They seem to want her to spend extended time in the superintendent’s office despite the fact that the defendants apparently felt the need to call the local police and file a crime report against her. Thus, despite the fact that defendants feel that Ms. Green was sufficiently disruptive that they reported her to the police, they continued to choose a course of conduct that required them to have more,rather than less, face to face interaction with her.”
If the court hears this and rules in favour of Donna Green, which they should do, it means this corrupt “district” can no longer hide behind the political and procedural excuses, and that the potential of revealing evidence of their apparent gross mismanagement will finally become real.
Why else would they resist otherwise?
And the issue arising from this is that the same standards are not applied to EVERYONE. Equal treatment under the law.
Not sure what you mean by this comment, Mark.
Are you implying that the district doesn’t want to give me salary information in a usable form just because it is me? Not so…
Anyone is free to apply for it and see what happens. It is not the person; it is the information.