Tonight's Portsmouth School Committee meeting started on a great note: the parent volunteers and students in our Hathaway elementary "Journey Through Books" did a presentation on the program. Diane Myers, one of the volunteers, explained the process: kids get a booklet with blank pages, each led off by a different genre, that they fill up with 100 pages of books that they read or their family reads with them. Once a week, they meet with a volunteer at the school and talk about what they've read, making that reading-retelling connection. Ms. Myers's daughter, Erin, showed off the five ribbons she'd won for completing Journey every year since kindergarten. Then, a group of kids from the program went around the room, showing off their books, and explaining it to the Committee and the audience.

Congratulations to Dr. Martin, all the parent volunteers, and the wonderful staff at Hathaway (including Joan Mouradjian, the excellent librarian) for making this all happen. (Okay, so it's Jack's school. I'm very proud of the great work they do there.)

The rest of the agenda wasn't nearly so pleasant. Jack Callahan, a citizen with long-time involvement in the recently completed gym, brought the committee's attention to issues with the HVAC system, which is apparently malfunctioning, with temperature control issues that didn't come to light until recent temps plummeted.

"This could have been avoided if testing and balancing had been done at the end of construction," said Callahan.

Larry Fitzmorris tried to make this the Committee's fault. "I have considerable experience in high technology integration systems. The system has not been integrated; someone failed to do their job. You made too many payments here. You have no lever against them. I was concerned about this all along. The school committee needs to answer for this."

The committee decided to schedule a meeting with the architect, contractor, and HVAC subcontractor next week, and to suspend payment until issues are resolved.

They moved on to subcommittee reports, usually a less contentious area, but Dick Carpender had other things in mind. "Since the election," said Carpender, "I've tried not to go after every point. But silence can sometimes be perceived as agreement. Some of the ads and articles run by the PCC are misleading. They said that the school committee has made no effort to decrease their budget. Not true. B&E said there was 300K in cuts, and those cuts were made. The other thing — an article that said the lawyer for the PCC said that the filing of Caruolo was a subterfuge to increase the base before the tax caps. I have no problem with the PCC's position in the lawsuit, but those comments to me are saying that there isn't any deficit, and that the school committee and B&E are not telling the truth. And that is not serving this community well. I talked to someone from the PCC two weeks ago, and they said that the School Committee was the one dividing the town. I'm not going to say who's dividing the town, but we need to move forward without being accusatory."

Oh, man, it was tasty. And the best part, when Fitzmorris bulled his way up to the microphone and began, "Madam chair.."

"I'm not going to take public comment at this time," said Chair Sylvia Wedge.[Sorry, Larry. This was a report containing only information; see RONR (10th ed.), p.507, l. 28-30]

Fitmorris huffed and blustered at the mike for a minute. "I should have the opportunity to respond."

"We're not going to do that tonight," said Wedge. This gave Jaime Heaney an opportunity for tonight's HeaneyWatch™ quote "As a member of the Finance Subcommittee, those remarks don't represent the Finance Subcommittee."

"I know," said Wedge. "That was a report containing Mr. Carpender's opinion."

I saw Fitzmorris talking up the NDN reporter as the meeting broke up, talking about gym numbers. Guess they want to have a spare bone to gnaw in case Caruolo goes badly for them.