Nine months after leaving a New Hampshire school district in the middle of a $5 million budget crisis, Mary Henry has a new job, a new state, and a new administration standing firmly behind her.
Henry says she inherited the Claremont financial crisis, not caused it — and that she became the scapegoat for a problem she was brought in to fix.
Board members learned in August 2025 that Claremont’s SAU #6 was facing a multimillion-dollar deficit. Weeks later, the district placed Henry on unpaid suspension over what the interim superintendent at the time described only as “additional concerns” about her performance. Henry left in November after she and the district negotiated a separation agreement rather than go through a termination hearing.
In July, Henry started as director of finance and operations for the Mountain Views Supervisory District, which serves Woodstock and several surrounding Vermont communities.
Henry remains “one of the finest professionals that the Mountain Views Supervisory District has ever had the pleasure to hire,” said Keri Bristow, who chairs the Mountain Views school board.
However, the Claremont portion of her resume still follows her.
“I really don’t think the hiring district did their due diligence in hiring her,” Candace Crawford, a member of the Claremont school board, said by phone Monday,
Current Claremont Superintendent Timothy Broadrick declined to weigh in on her specific performance, as he started his position after she left. But he was direct about who is responsible for the district’s finances.
“The business administrator and I are always responsible. Period,” Broadrick told the Valley News. “It’s any business administrator’s job and responsibility to know that the books are right, or if they’re not, to be the one who raises the alarms.”
Superintendent of Mountain Views, Sherry Sousa, said the hiring committee reviewed 17 applicants and chose Henry for her experience in public school finance.
“If there have been problems about Mary executing her position, the [Claremont] board would have had cause for termination,” Sousa said. “If the licensing board in New Hampshire believed that Mary had done something incorrectly or in violation of a license, it would have been rescinded. … That did not happen, and that gave us cause to pursue her as a candidate.”
“We know we have the best candidate for the position,” Sousa added.
What happened in Claremont
Claremont’s fiscal crisis didn’t start with Henry, and it didn’t end when she left. Broadrick said the district’s books had been in disarray for roughly seven years, and that Claremont hadn’t completed an annual audit since around 2020 or 2021 — spanning two or three business administrators before Henry.
“It wasn’t that some new problem emerged — it’s that they ran out of cash,” he said, and compared it to checking a bank balance without accounting for checks already written.
Henry said she was told when she was hired in July 2023 that Claremont was five years behind on audits and already in a fiscal emergency. She traces the deficit to two sources: money returned to taxpayers after a prior tax rate was miscalculated, and unbudgeted special-education placement costs. The bulk of it, she said, ties to 2020 and 2021 audits she said she flagged to the district’s auditor in May 2025.
One of her first moves in Claremont, she said, was digitizing a paper-only system, which added to the district’s confusion: “Everything was to be scanned into the system and was paid. [But] nothing was, and everything was by paper and by hand, and you were constantly trying to find things.”
Henry wasn’t the only administrator to leave Claremont. Superintendent Christopher Pratt resigned in September 2025, and several others left around the same time.
“I can’t answer for other people and why they left,” Henry said. “I don’t think there is one administrator left from when I was there.”
The leaked letter
An internal SAU “findings of fact” letter dated October 2025, a month before she left the district, outlined a dozen allegations against Henry, ranging from improper insurance paperwork to unreconciled bank statements.
Due to the separation agreement between Henry and the district, the document was never approved for public release, but it was leaked anyway — months later, Henry said, when a Claremont resident posted it to Facebook in January.
“I don’t know how they got their hands on it,” she said. Neither Henry nor Mountain Views officials could say who leaked it, though both believe it was released to damage her reputation.
Since none of the findings were adjudicated and SAU #6 had not made the letter public or confirmed its contents, Sousa declined to address the substance of the letter. Analyzing the findings “line by line,” she said, was “a rabbit hole that can be contested and has been contested, and it’s not proven for cause of termination, nor has it impacted her license.”
Henry said she was never formally notified of a license investigation. “In the state of New Hampshire, they have to tell me they’re investigating me and put me on notice,” she said.
“I was never put on notice that there was an investigation.”
Her New Hampshire license expired at the end of June 2026, and she is working toward Vermont certification, which requires a year in her current role before she can apply.
A district that’s all-in
Mountain Views officials describe a hands-on onboarding and finance plan: weekly check-ins between Henry and Sousa, continued contact with her mentor and predecessor, Jim Fenn, and a six-month evaluation planned for December or January.
Board chair Keri Bristow told the Valley News the board had held off on a statement while coverage played out, but was unambiguous.
“Why did Claremont try to destroy the person who was trying to fix the problem?” she said, adding that it’s “very infuriating to me that we have to put out fires like this when what we’re really trying to do here is build a new high school, middle school, [and] keep moving forward with our successes in literacy and mathematics.”
The board didn’t wait long. On Aug. 20, Bristow sent a message to district families that said there was a “poisonous attempt” by “a relatively small group of individuals” to ruin Henry’s career. It closed with an endorsement from Fenn: “They’ve hired one of the most accomplished and talented Directors of Finance and Operations to support our District’s schools that you’ll find anywhere — in New England or beyond.”
Henry said the scrutiny weighs less on her than on the people around her. “The worst part of all of this isn’t about how much this has come back on me,” she said. “It’s about how much it’s coming back on others — this district, my family.”
Asked why she’s staying in public education rather than returning to the private sector, Henry didn’t hesitate: “I contemplated it. I looked into it. I want to be here, and I’m not going to let someone take away what I work so hard for, and what I want to do with my life.”
Before Claremont, Henry was a business administrator at the Fall Mountain Regional (2022-23), Hillsboro-Deering (2020-22), and Winchester (2018-20) school districts. She holds a master’s degree from Plymouth State University, a bachelor’s in accounting and finance from Granite State College, and a certificate in education finance from Georgetown University. She also served for roughly a decade on the Fall Mountain Regional School Board.
“I was not terminated from Claremont. We negotiated out of my contract,” Henry told the Valley News.
Claremont, meanwhile, still hasn’t replaced her. The district’s business administrator job has been open since Henry left.
“The job has been posted since January. We are actively looking for a business administrator,” Claremont board member Crawford told the Valley News. “Things are much better than they were a year ago. Things have stabilized, and I encourage people to apply.”
Crawford said the vacancy isn’t unusual. “If you look around the state, we are not unique,” she said. “There are many schools with vacant business admin positions.”
The New Hampshire School Administrators Association currently lists at least nine open financial positions at schools across the state.