Rhinotimes.com: Mo Knows What Goes on Behind Closed Doors

School board member Garth Hebert said that, although Guilford County Schools is facing some critical issues, including state funding cuts that may force layoffs of hundreds of employees, the school board has circumvented the state open meeting law, dealing with administrators behind closed doors, in small groups of school board members.

“Every two weeks, we’re having one of these secret meetings,” Hebert said. “There is no credibility left. I have yet to see a single thing that belongs behind closed doors.”

School board members have dealt with four major issues in private briefings with the school system’s administrators since Green started work: the current budget crisis, Green’s four-year strategic plan for the school system, his plan to split the school system into five regions, and the debate over opt-out schools for students now attending failing schools.

This week, school board members trooped to the Guilford County Schools administration building on North Eugene Street in Fisher Park to get individual briefings on the budget situation. Each meeting included from one to three school board members as well as administrators.

The budget meetings followed a March 25 school board meeting at which Guilford County Schools Chief Financial Officer Sharon Ozment made a presentation to the board on $22 million in cuts to the school system’s budget to match the expected state funding cuts. Ozment’s presentation, even by the nebulous standards of North Carolina school systems early in their budget cycles, was less than informative. The proposed cuts didn’t add up to anything like $22 million; positions to be eliminated as part of the regionalization plan, which Green has already said would be applied to offset the cost of new positions the plan will add, were also claimed as offsets to state funding cuts; and $13.1 million in cuts to the central office administration were unspecified. You have to assume that the school board members got more specific information in private.

The practice of school board members holding small meetings with administrators isn’t entirely new; former Superintendent Terry Grier sometimes briefed school board members in small groups. But it has become more frequent and systematic under Green.

Some school board members have said the private meetings are necessary to discuss personnel, something that’s allowed under the open meeting law. But school board members say the meetings, although they do touch on personnel, include wide-ranging discussions of budgetary priorities.

Green made a full budget presentation to the school board on Tuesday, April 7. By that time, most of the school board members had held private talks with administrators, discussing where to make layoffs, what programs to cut and what impact the cuts will have on students and employees.

So far, the tactic has worked. Green has maintained a solid level of support from the school board, which approved his regionalization and strategic and opt-out plans with little public discussion, despite the stated misgivings of some school board members about the practice and about the paucity of information coming out of Green’s administration. But Green has alienated Hebert, one of the few to question the budget and reorganization plans. And even school board member Jeff Belton, who rarely criticizes the school system administration in public, has begun questioning the budget numbers.

Hebert this week attacked the closed-door meetings, calling them “a good way to have a non-public meeting” and criticizing Green’s administration for what he said was an effort to hide the student enrollment projections being made by the administration, even from the school board. Hebert said he spent three weeks trying to get enrollment projections, on which the budget will be based, from administrators. He said that, when he finally got a spreadsheet of the projections, the formulas by which the enrollment figures had been calculated had been deleted from the spreadsheet – something he called a deliberate effort to hide them from a school board member.

Hebert said he was considering skipping the private briefing, since he hadn’t gotten what he considered honest information from the administration, and he thinks the meetings are a tactic to hide a budgetary discussion from the public. He also said the meetings aren’t useful, because school board members have to attend them without having been presented with hard numbers.

“It’s the third series of meetings they have had, so the board doesn’t have to hear this stuff in public,” Hebert said. “This is insane. We have reached a point where I no longer trust the staff on what they tell me. I won’t vote for another budget amendment, and I won’t vote for another budget. There’s no trust there.”

School board Chairman Alan Duncan, an attorney, said the briefings don’t trigger the open meeting law.

“To do board business, you need to have a majority of the board, and you have to make decisions,” Duncan said. “There are no decisions made at any of these. The board just needs background information to start to get an understanding of the issues that we have.”

Duncan said that the open meeting law can be triggered by committee meetings that draw less than a majority of board members, but that the briefings to which Hebert objects aren’t committee meetings.

“These are informational meetings,” he said. “There’s not an agenda or anything to decide or to vote on.”

School board member Amos Quick supported the meetings, saying he didn’t think Green intended to circumvent the law. Quick said Duncan and school board attorney Jill Wilson are quick to stop discussions that veer into matters that should be debated in a public meeting.

Quick attended one of the private sessions on Wednesday, April 1, and said that meeting included discussions of personnel matters that clearly qualified for a closed session under the law. He said he finds the small meetings helpful, because they get school board members up to speed on issues, so they aren’t at sea when they come up at the regular school board meeting.

“There are a lot of discussions you can have with three or four people that you can’t have with 11 people,” Quick said. “Especially opinionated people like the Board of Education.”

Hebert, however, said the small numbers of school board members at the meetings are part of the problem. He said that dealing with the school board in small groups is a divide-and-conquer strategy that prevents the school board from presenting a united front on important issues. He said that, if individual school board members feel stroked by the private briefings, they are less likely to hold the administration accountable at the televised school board meetings, where their oversight would have more impact.

School board member Kris Cooke said the school board has done small private meetings with staff members for years. She said they don’t violate the open meeting law because all the material discussed are later presented in open school board meetings, and because the briefings aren’t attended by a majority of the school board.

“I don’t see that it’s a violation,” she said. “I’ve been to one, and there were only two of us there. I can assure you we would not be doing anything that’s illegal.”

School board member Paul Daniels, also an attorney, said the meetings don’t violate the letter of the open meetings law. “My recollection is that if you don’t have a majority of the board there that can make policy, it’s not a violation,” he said. “I don’t think anyone’s willfully violating the law.”

Daniels said, however, that he’s not sure the meetings don’t violate the spirit of the law.

“I’ve been wondering about that,” he said. “My thinking is, even if it’s not a violation of the open meetings law, we should be having these discussions in front of everybody.”

Daniels said he can’t justify skipping the briefings. He said, “If I disagree with these meetings, my only option at this point is not to show up, which I don’t think serves me or anybody else well. We don’t have staff. We don’t have people who can bring us up to speed on issues. I’m just wondering about the efficiency of waiting until board meetings to do this.”

On at least one major issue, the strategic plan, Green trumped the school board entirely, presenting the plan in a high-production-value public event at Guilford Technical Community College (GTCC) in Jamestown on Jan. 27.

The televised GTCC presentation, complete with dancing children, poetry and waiters bearing canapés, dazzled the school board members to such an extent that, when Green presented the plan to the school board two days later, the school board approved the plan without seriously enquiring into its cost.

by Paul C. Clark, Rhinotimes.com Staff Writer