Town Councilors Jeff Plumb and Keith Hamilton look over financial data with Supt. Susan Lusi. Everybody at the Finance Committee meeting tonight seemed to want to keep the Elmhurst School open for at least another year, but the devil is in the details, some of which are beyond control of the town. T...

With all the action currently happening at the finance subcommittee these days, the School Committee meeting tonight was sparsely attended — just 8 in the audience — which was a shame, because people missed some rare good news in these tight financial times. The Portsmouth Middle School ...

In what has become a yearly ritual, the Portsmouth school committee last night held its "pre-deprivation hearing" and voted to send 45 notices of non-renewal, displacement, and termination to teachers and administrators in advance of the March 1 deadline. Both school Committee Chair Dick Carpender a...

At last night's meeting of the Portsmouth school finance subcommittee, the perennial question of what to do with the one-room Prudence Island (PI) schoolhouse was met with a new proposal: send the 3 students to the Bristol-Warren school system in a move that could save the district about $44K. The m...

The Portsmouth school finance subcommittee met this evening for their first session in the 2009-10 budget process, and even without the added confusion of whether last night's Council action on a 5% budget cut should apply to them, the outlook is grim. The members of the committee — Michael Bu...

There were about 40 people at the Portsmouth School Committee meeting last night, and many of them were from Elmhurst, there to discuss the possible closing of that school. There were two items of interest on the agenda, one related to the Facilities Committee which has been doing the long-range pla...

Portmsouth Schoool Committee and Town Council joint session. Nobody looked very happy at the joint meeting of the Portsmouth School Committee and Town Council last night, and while there were a lot of caveats about projections based on preliminary numbers, the bottom line appeared to be shortfalls f...

The Supreme Court yesterday ended Congress's most recent attempt to protect children from sexually explicit and other objectionable material on the Internet....

The Portsmouth School Committee got its first look at the report on school buildings from consulting firm RGB, and all the options for dealing with the identified issues have pricetags in excess of $20 million. Facilities committee chair Mike Buddemeyer and consultant Steven Hughes of RGB delivered ...

New members King and Volpicelli (foreground) hear from School Committee attorney Rick Updegrove (center). The Portsmouth School Committee held their annual retreat this weekend, and at today's session, newly elected members Marilyn King and Angela Volpicelli heard sobering presentations from the sch...