Amherst Central School District Board of Education·September 1, 2026
The Auditor Finally Has a Name · Thirty-Two Actions, One Motion · Teacher Contract Talks Go Behind the Door · A Transcript That Quits at 9:18
The year-end audit the Amherst school board told the public it would hear on September 1 was docketed on September 1 — and the firm delivering it is named, in an official district document, for the first time: Drescher & Malecki, which resolves a name this publication flagged as unverified two weeks ago and could not confirm. What the auditors actually told the board is another matter. The district's own recording of the meeting runs 62 minutes; this publication's transcript of it collapses into a repeating machine error at 9 minutes 18 seconds and never recovers, leaving the audit presentation, a committee report on the state's new classroom phone restrictions, and every vote of the evening off the usable record. From the official agenda, the docket is clear: a single consent motion carrying 32 separate actions — two tenure appointments, 25 personnel items, final approval of a 14-student trip to Italy, a girls wrestling team combined across four districts, and a $600 donation of book bags and ear buds — followed by an executive session on contract negotiations with the Amherst Education Association, the teachers' union. Not one vote tally is audible. The $2.9 million above the state fund-balance cap and the expiring capital reserve, both left open on August 18, do not return to the docket at all.
Two weeks ago the Amherst school board's finance chief laid out a year-end picture that ended in a promise: the outside auditors were in the building, the numbers were still a draft, and the finished audit would be presented publicly at the September 1 meeting. September 1 arrived. The official agenda carries it as the first item of the superintendent's report — “Budget — External Auditor's Report” — and, next to it, the thing this publication has been unable to establish since August: the name of the firm.
It is Drescher & Malecki. That settles it. On August 18 the audio gave only a first name, “Charles,” and a phonetic smear of a firm that came out as “Dresher and Levy” — a rendering this brief declined to normalize into a guess, precisely because a plausible-sounding guess is how a fabricated fact enters the record. The district's own printed docket now supplies the real answer, and it is neither of the things the audio suggested. The individual auditor remains unnamed: the agenda credits the firm, not a person, so “Charles”[*] stays flagged.
What the audit found is not recoverable from this recording, and it is worth being exact about why. The capture worked. A 62-minute MP3 of the meeting exists and was archived. The failure is downstream, in speech-to-text: at 9 minutes 18 seconds the transcription model stopped transcribing and began repeating a single sentence — “So it has to be probably about the E-Rate program and the concern over that going away” — which it then emitted 107 consecutive times, once every 20 to 40 seconds, straight through to the 62-minute mark. Nothing spoken after 9:18 was captured in text. The audit presentation, the report on the state's distraction-free schools law, the consent vote, and the motion into executive session all fall inside that dead zone.
There is one more complication, and it cuts the other way. In the meeting's opening minute, while the presiding officer was asking whether any other committees had reports, a member answering for the audit committee says something the transcript renders as: “We had an audit committee, but we won't be hearing from the auditor tonight, so I don't think I need to read it out.” That sentence contradicts the printed docket, and it also contradicts itself — skipping the committee's own summary makes sense if the auditor is about to present, and very little sense if he is not. A dropped or inserted negation is the single most common way this kind of transcript goes wrong, and this particular transcript has already demonstrated it will invent whole sentences. So the honest position is that the record does not establish whether Drescher & Malecki presented on September 1. The agenda says it was scheduled. The audio, where the audio still works, hints it may not have been. The district's approved minutes will resolve it, and this publication will follow the item until they do.
Every New York school district must have its books examined each year by an independent certified public accounting firm it does not employ. The firm's job is not to catch the district being clever with money; it is to say whether the financial statements fairly present what happened, using a standard set of rules, and to test whether the controls around the money actually work. It produces two things. The first is the opinion on the statements — the clean, boring result districts want. The second is a management letter: a list of weaknesses the auditors saw along the way, from a missing signature requirement to a purchasing process nobody follows.
That second document is where a board has work to do. Findings do not resolve themselves; the district must adopt a written corrective action plan saying what it will fix, how, and by when, and file it with the State Education Department. Amherst's board adopted its plan for the 2025 audit inside the August 18 consent bundle, without discussion. The 2026 cycle now under way — the one docketed for September 1, focused on capital project spending — will produce its own findings and, if there are any, its own plan. Because the audit is the outside check on numbers the district generates itself, the presentation of it is the one night a year when a resident can hear an independent party say whether the district's own account of its finances holds up. That is why its absence from the usable record matters more than a missing routine item would.
The August 18 meeting left three financial threads open. Each gets an accounting here, because a pending item that quietly stops being mentioned is indistinguishable from an item that was dropped.
The $2.9 million above the cap: settled outside the meeting, and not on this docket. Closing 2025–26, the district finished about $672,000 to the good on a projected total fund balance near $16.1 million, leaving $2.9 million standing above the state's 4 percent ceiling on unappropriated fund balance. Assistant Superintendent for Finance & Operations Laura Bosinski recommended moving it into the reserve for insurance claims, and the board had already passed the enabling resolution in June; the accounting entries had to be booked before the end of August to land in the fiscal year that closed June 30. Nothing about fund balance or reserves appears anywhere on the September 1 agenda — no resolution, no report, no discussion item. That absence is expected rather than alarming: the authorization existed, the deadline fell between meetings, and the place those entries surface for public confirmation is the audited financial statements, which is to say the auditor's report docketed for this meeting. Which this publication cannot report on. The chain of confirmation is intact on paper and broken on the record.
The capital reserve and its clock: no action, no mention, still parked in long-range planning. On August 18 trustees turned over whether to ask voters for a new capital reserve, given that the 2021 authorization — $10 million approved, roughly $1.8 million ever deposited and now spent down to zero — expires around 2031 with some $8 million of voter authorization never used, while the current capital project's third phase runs construction into 2029. The discussion ended folded into long-range facilities planning, with no proposition proposed and the administration explicit that nothing had to happen by this May. It does not appear on the September 1 agenda in any form. It has neither advanced nor died; it remains where the board left it, and the next natural venue for it is budget season.
The 2025 audit corrective action plan: adopted August 18, no further action. It passed inside that meeting's consent bundle on a 7–0 vote and required nothing more here.
On board policy, the disposition is simple and complete. No numbered board policy was introduced, read, amended, tabled or adopted on August 18, and none appears anywhere on the September 1 docket — not in new business, not in personnel, not in the superintendent's report. There is consequently nothing pending on first reading, nothing awaiting a second, and nothing this meeting could have advanced or allowed to lapse. The shelf of Amherst policy explainers remains empty, correctly, for a second consecutive meeting.
A reader following the August 18 brief might reasonably expect the $2.9 million to reappear September 1 for a confirming vote. It does not, and the reason is a piece of school-finance sequencing worth knowing. New York caps a district's unrestricted, unappropriated fund balance at 4 percent of the coming year's budget; anything above the line must be assigned to a legally recognized reserve, applied against next year's tax levy, or spent. The board authorizes that assignment by resolution — Amherst's came in June — and the business office then books the entries, which is bookkeeping, not governance, and requires no second vote. The entries must be dated into the fiscal year that closed June 30, which is why the end-of-August deadline existed and why the work happened between meetings.
The public confirmation comes later and from outside: the assignment shows up in the audited financial statements as a line in the reserve schedule, verified by the auditors rather than asserted by the district. So the correct place to look for proof that the $2.9 million went where the board said it would is the external auditor's report — the very item docketed for this meeting. Absence from the September agenda is the system working as designed. It is only the loss of the recording that turns a routine sequence into an open question.
The board's substantive business for the evening was, as on August 18, a single consent motion: Item D, “Approve items E and F: New Business and Personnel Items.” Eleven words on the docket; 32 separate actions underneath it — seven under new business, 25 under personnel. On August 18 that motion took about fifteen seconds and was announced 7–0. This time there is no audio of it at all, and therefore no tally. This brief reports the bundle's contents as docketed rather than as adopted, because the agenda establishes what was put before the board and the record does not establish what the board did with it. That distinction is unusual for a routine item and it is the honest one.
Under new business: the minutes of the August 18 meeting; the recommendations of the Committee on Special Education and its subcommittee; the recommendations of the Committee on Preschool Special Education; approval to combine girls wrestling with the City of Tonawanda, Cheektowaga and Sweet Home Central school districts for 2026–27; final approval of the overnight field trip to Rome, Florence and Bolzano, Italy for 14 students in the Italian Exchange Program; a donation from MIDLOC LLC of 100 book bags, 200 ear buds, 100 book bag charms and a teacher box of markers, pencils and erasers, valued at $600; and the disposal of two NSS Pacer vacuums from Smallwood Drive School.
Under personnel, 25 items, and the ones that matter to a family are the two at the top of the pile: tenure for Erin Fasolino at Smallwood Drive School and Courtney Paulsen at Windermere Boulevard School — the decisions that convert a probationary teacher into a permanently appointed one, and the single most consequential personnel action a school board takes. Neither name was said aloud on any part of the usable recording. Alongside them: 14 hires, three resignations, one permanent appointment, one amendment, and the fall coaches, extracurricular and substitute lists.
One line in the bundle repays a second look. Andrew Schultz appears twice at Amherst Central High School — item F.1, a resignation, and item F.2, a hire — in the same bundle, on the same night. The agenda offers no explanation, and this brief will not invent one; a resignation-and-rehire pair in a single personnel action is the ordinary mechanism for moving an employee from one appointment to another, but ordinary is not the same as confirmed, and the underlying documents are attachments the public agenda does not publish.
The Italy trip is a continuity note worth recording. It was preapproved on August 18 and returns here for final approval — the same two-step the district ran for its March 2027 Costa Rica trip, preapproved earlier and finalized August 4. The district's printed docket again gives the trip's end date as “March 1, 3027,” a typographical error carried forward unchanged from the August 18 agenda. Two meetings, same typo. It is a small thing, and it is also the second-most-durable fact about the trip.
A consent agenda bundles items a board expects to be uncontroversial — minutes, routine personnel moves, committee recommendations, donations — into one motion and one vote. The legal effect is identical to voting on each item separately: everything in the bundle is adopted, with the same force, by the same margin. Any member may ask that an item be pulled and voted on alone before the vote is taken.
The device works because the agenda is published in advance and the vote is recorded. On September 1 the first half held and the second did not. The agenda is complete and public, and this brief itemizes all 32 actions from it. But no part of the motion, the seconding, the ayes or the announcement of the result survives in the usable transcript — so for this meeting, a resident's only account of two teachers receiving tenure, of fourteen students being cleared to fly to Italy, and of a wrestling team being merged across four districts is a document, unaccompanied by any recorded moment of the board agreeing to it. That gap closes when the district approves the minutes of this meeting, which will state the vote. Until then, the correct verb for everything below is docketed.
Girls wrestling is one of the fastest-growing high school sports in New York and one of the hardest to field, because a full team needs athletes across a range of weight classes and most individual districts do not yet have enough girls to cover them. The state's athletic association allows districts to solve this by forming a combined team: two or more districts merge their athletes into one squad competing under a single banner, with an approved host district, shared coaching and a shared roster. Each participating district's board of education has to approve the arrangement, which is why the item is on Amherst's docket at all. Here the partners are the City of Tonawanda, Cheektowaga and Sweet Home — making an Amherst wrestler's teammates, for 2026–27, students from three other districts.
The evening ended where the docket said it would: in executive session, and this time for a different reason than last time. On August 18 the board closed the doors to discuss pending litigation. On September 1 the stated purpose is contract negotiations with the Amherst Education Association — the district's teachers' union. That is a meaningful change in what the board is dealing with privately, and it is the kind of fact that is only visible because the agenda states purposes the room does not.
New York's Open Meetings Law lets a public body go into executive session for a short, closed list of reasons, and collective bargaining is on it: a board may deliberate privately about negotiations with a certified employee union, on the theory that a district cannot bargain with its own position published in advance. The motion to convene must be made in public and state the general subject, which is what the agenda records. Nothing decided in executive session may be a final vote on district business; any action has to be taken back in public session, which the agenda schedules, followed by adjournment. None of those three motions is audible on the record.
What the working part of the recording contains is a board doing the unglamorous half of its job: reporting on itself. Board President Jessica McLaughlin opened with a thank-you letter from a visitor who had attended the August meeting, Dave Lowery[*], who complimented the board on running an efficient meeting — a compliment earned, given that the August 18 session ran under sixteen minutes gavel to executive session. He singled out the reserve fund presentation, which is to say Bosinski's, and had good things to say about the district newsletter. “It was really great to receive that feedback from someone outside of Amherst,” McLaughlin said.
The same correspondent surfaced again in a second capacity: he has returned to a board presidency in another district after five years away and is canvassing presidents across the Erie County Association of School Boards about an informal dinner to trade practices. McLaughlin said she had told him she would attend. She had already been to the association's Back to School Dinner on August 20 — the one item under board and committee reports that the agenda actually names — where board member Gordon Crock[*] received an emerging-leaders award, and where Vice President Maryjane Metzen and Daniel Weinstein also attended.
Crock's own report from that dinner was the meeting's most human passage, and its subject was a laminated rectangle. Talking with a Kenmore board member — “that was one of the dangers of going to those things, to get to talk to people” — he learned that their trustees carry identification badges for building visits. Crock, a retired teacher, made the case from the other side of the classroom door: he visits the middle school library, students are everywhere, and “you see somebody, an adult, walking through, and it's like, who are you?” A badge, he said, would mean “people knew I belonged.” The district's answer was that badges exist, that not every member has one, and that whoever wants one should be camera-ready. The Kenmore board member's second idea got a warmer reception and no decision: pairing each building's report to the board with an actual visit to that building, during the school day, students present.
The last item before the transcript failed was the one the failure then parroted for fifty-two minutes. The board has a meeting scheduled Thursday, September 10 at 10 a.m. with the office of Congressman Kennedy[*], arranged through a state school-boards council; McLaughlin was reading the invitation aloud when the audio record gives out. The board's own guess at the agenda was E-Rate — the federal program that subsidizes internet and telecommunications service for schools and libraries, and a line item most districts of Amherst's size depend on. “There's been a lot of speculation about the E-Rate program from the federal government potentially going away,” a member said, noting that the U.S. Department of Education has been broken up and its responsibilities scattered to other agencies. That sentence is the last substantive thing in the transcript. The machine then repeated a corrupted version of it 107 times.
The second item on the superintendent's report — a Distraction Free Schools Committee report from Michael Belle-Isle, Assistant Superintendent for Student & Staff Services — carries a name that sounds like a slogan and is in fact a statute. New York now restricts student use of internet-enabled personal devices, phones chiefly, for the full school day rather than class-by-class: the so-called bell-to-bell rule. Districts were required to write their own implementation policy, decide how devices are stored during the day, and provide a way for a parent to reach a child in an emergency. A standing district committee is the ordinary machinery for that: it collects how the rule is landing in each building, what enforcement actually looks like, and what needs adjusting.
None of Amherst's report is recoverable. It falls entirely after the 9:18 transcript failure, and the agenda gives its title and its presenter and nothing else — no attachment, no summary. For a policy that touches every student in the district every day, that is the most consequential silence in this brief after the audit itself. It is noted here so it is not lost, and it is the first item this publication will look for in the district's approved minutes.
Every action the board was scheduled to take is listed below, itemized from the district's official BoardDocs agenda for September 1. No vote tally is available for any of them. All six scheduled actions fall after the transcript failure at 9:18, so there is no audio evidence of a motion, a second, a voice vote or an announced result — and no evidence of attendance, recusal, or abstention either. The seven-member board would ordinarily be announced as voting 7–0 on a consent docket, as it was on August 18, but that is an expectation and this brief does not report expectations as outcomes. Rows therefore read docketed, not passed. Two members are placed in the room by the surviving audio — Board President Jessica McLaughlin, who presided, and Gordon Crock, who reported — and no other attendance can be established. The vote record for this meeting is the district's approved minutes.
The agenda records the motion as “Approve items E and F: New Business and Personnel Items,” making this the single adopting action for all 32 numbered items in those two sections — seven under New Business, 25 under Personnel. Unlike August 18, there is no Financial section on this docket. No part of the motion or its result appears in the usable transcript.
Seven items: (1) minutes of the August 18, 2026 Regular Business Meeting; (2) recommendations of the Committee on Special Education and the Subcommittee on Special Education; (3) recommendations of the Committee on Preschool Special Education; (4) combining girls wrestling with the City of Tonawanda School District, Cheektowaga and Sweet Home Central school districts for the 2026–2027 school year; (5) final approval of the overnight field trip to Rome, Florence and Bolzano, Italy for 14 students in the Italian Exchange Program, February 11, 2027 to March 1, 2027; (6) donation from MIDLOC LLC of 100 book bags, 200 ear buds, 100 book bag charms and a teacher box of markers, pencils and erasers, valued at $600.00; (7) disposal of two NSS Pacer vacuums from Smallwood Drive School. Items 4 through 7 carry attachments not published in the agenda body.
Amherst Central High School: resignation, Andrew Schultz; hire, Andrew Schultz; extracurricular list. Amherst Middle School: hires, Mercedes Busby and Jordyn Morreale; extracurricular list. Smallwood Drive School: hires, Maryam Alzghoul, Caitlin Cannan, Leah Hanna, Christopher Herrmann, Sydney McKinley, Kayla Miner and Tanya Staples; amendment, Kathleen Dittmer; tenure, Erin Fasolino. Windermere Boulevard School: hires, Humaira Afrin, Lakin Latone and Shelby Moorhouse; resignations, Nayeema Khan and Prasanthi Pulavarti; tenure, Courtney Paulsen. District Office: permanent appointment, Crystal Kadey. Districtwide: hire, Nicole Hendee; fall coaches list; substitute list (additions).
Agenda item H.1: “Convene to executive session to discuss contract negotiations with the Amherst Education Association.” The stated purpose differs from August 18, when the board convened to discuss pending litigation. Collective bargaining is an enumerated ground for executive session under New York's Open Meetings Law. No motion, second or vote is on the usable record.
Agenda items H.2 (“Convene to Public Session”) and I.1 (“Adjourn”). Both are scheduled actions requiring motions in open session. Any board action arising from the executive session would have to be taken here, in public. Neither motion appears on the usable record, and whether any action followed the closed session is not established.
Agenda section G, “Follow Up Action Items,” is present as a heading with no items listed beneath it — the same as August 18, when the presiding officer confirmed aloud there were none. Included here for completeness of the docket, not as an action taken. Note that section G on this agenda is follow-up items; on the August 18 agenda the letter G carried the Financial section, which has no counterpart on this docket.
The central caveat, stated plainly: this brief is built from a complete official agenda and 15 percent of a recording. The district's BoardDocs agenda for September 1 was retrieved on August 28 and parsed in full; it is the source for the session type, the docket lettering, every one of the 32 consent items, the executive-session purpose, the auditor's firm, and the names and titles of the officials assigned to each report. The audio capture also succeeded: a 62-minute MP3 exists and is archived. What failed is transcription. At 9 minutes 18 seconds the faster-whisper “medium” model entered a degenerate repetition loop and emitted the identical sentence 107 times across the remaining 52 minutes and 43 seconds. Of 244 transcript segments, 107 are that one hallucinated line; the file contains only 130 distinct utterances in total. A corroborating operational signal: transcribing this 62-minute file took 3 minutes 4 seconds of wall clock, against 28 minutes for the 15.7-minute August 18 file — the decoder was not doing the work. Nothing in this brief describes what was said after 9:18, because nothing is known about what was said after 9:18. A re-transcription of the archived MP3 would likely recover most of the meeting and is the obvious remedy; it has not been run, and this brief does not assume its result.
The auditor's firm is resolved. The auditor is not. The August 18 brief flagged two names it could not confirm: an outside auditor known only as “Charles,” and his firm, which the audio rendered as “Dresher and Levy.” The September 1 agenda names the firm outright as Drescher & Malecki, in a print-quality district document, next to the docketed External Auditor's Report. That closes the firm question and confirms the August judgment not to normalize the phonetic rendering into a real-sounding guess: the audio's second word was wrong, and a tidy correction would have been a fabrication. “Charles”[*] remains unresolved — BoardDocs agendas credit firms, not individuals, and the audio never reaches the presentation. He stays flagged and should not be named in any formal context until the district's minutes confirm him.
Whether the audit was actually presented is genuinely unresolved, and this brief does not pretend otherwise. The agenda docketed it. The surviving audio contains a committee aside transcribed as “we won't be hearing from the auditor tonight,” which contradicts both the docket and its own following clause. Given that this transcript demonstrably fabricates whole sentences, a dropped or added negation is well within its error range, and the sentence is not reliable evidence either way. The point is flagged rather than decided.
A second unresolved line, and a change from last month. Asked at the top of the meeting whether there were visitors wishing to speak, an official the audio calls “Mr. Stoney”[*] answers “We do” — after which the presiding officer moves directly to committee reports and no public comment follows on the usable record. This may be a mistranscribed negative, or public comment may have been deferred; the transcript cannot distinguish them. On August 18, by contrast, no visitors asked to speak and the record was clear. The name “Mr. Stoney” appears on no agenda and is flagged.
Proper-noun corrections applied. The verified roster and corrections file for this district (created 2026-08-21, sourced from the district's official Board of Education page) were applied in full, and two new Whisper mappings surfaced and are recorded for the file. The audio renders board member Gordon Crock as both “Mr. Krakus” and “Mr. Kroc” in the same passage; the roster confirms the correct spelling and the narrative sequence — he is introduced, then speaks — confirms both renderings are the same person. The audio also credits last month's reserve fund presentation to “Ms. Kaczynski,” which is Laura Bosinski, Assistant Superintendent for Finance & Operations, who gave that presentation on August 18; the referent is unambiguous and the correction is applied. One new administrator is added to the district record from this agenda: Michael Belle-Isle, Assistant Superintendent for Student & Staff Services, agenda-confirmed and stated here without qualification.
Names left flagged. Four proper nouns appear in the surviving audio, in no official document, and are marked: the visiting correspondent Dave Lowery[*]; the district clerk or official addressed as Mr. Stoney[*]; the auditor Charles[*]; and Congressman Kennedy[*], whose office the board meets on September 10 — named only on the recording, though the reference is consistent with the district's congressional representation. Several further audio-only items are too garbled to render at all and are therefore reported by description rather than by name: the district where Lowery has resumed a board presidency (the audio gives an unrecoverable phrase); the keynote speaker at the August 20 dinner and her organization; the acronym of the state council that arranged the September 10 meeting, which the audio gives as “NISVA”; the exact title of Crock's award, rendered as the “Raymond Carter Emerging Leaders Award”; and a district staff member credited with the newsletter, rendered “Ms. Kisodi.” None of these is normalized into a plausible-sounding guess. ECASB is expanded to the Erie County Association of School Boards; the acronym is the agenda's, the expansion is standard.
Attribution discipline. The recording identifies no speaker by voice. Two attributions are made and both rest on documents rather than inference: Board President Jessica McLaughlin is credited with the ECASB dinner report because the agenda assigns that item to her by name, and Gordon Crock is credited with the badge discussion because he is introduced by name immediately before speaking. Every other remark is attributed by role — “a member,” “the presiding officer” — because matching a voice to a roster is a guess. Metzen and Weinstein are named only as having attended the August 20 dinner, per McLaughlin's report; that is not evidence they attended this meeting, and this brief does not treat it as such. The board's non-voting ex-officio student member is not counted in any figure here and does not appear on the usable record.
Other caveats. Street-name validation was not run — no street inventory exists for this district in the pipeline — and no street or property address was mentioned in the surviving audio or appears anywhere on the September 1 agenda, so there was nothing to validate. The one address-like item, the Italy itinerary, is a list of cities and was cross-checked against the agenda. All dollar figures, personnel names, school assignments and item counts in this brief come from the official agenda, not from audio. Figures carried forward from the August 18 meeting — the $2.9 million, the $16.1 million fund balance, the $8 million of unused capital-reserve authorization — were described in that room as draft and subject to change until the audit closes, and this brief has no basis to update them.