From the Wilmington Star-News (10/1/09): A flurry of e-mails leading up to the decision to postpone showing President Barack Obama's Sept. 8 speech to schoolchildren has raised questions about whether the Brunswick County school board uses e-mails to circumvent the state open meetings law.
“It seems to me they acted inappropriately,” said Ashley Perkinson, an attorney with the N.C. Press Association. According to state statute 143-318.10, any communications involving the majority of board members and deliberations and decisions on public business are considered a meeting and should be done in public.
School board member Catherine Cooke, who e-mailed her fellow board members to oppose airing the speech, said she doesn’t feel she violated the law because she was simply expressing her opinion. The board doesn’t usually discuss public business online, she said.
The StarNews made a formal request Tuesday that the schools set up a system enabling ongoing public review of school officials’ e-mails. The county government recently established such a system following a StarNews request.
Leonard Jenkins, the schools’ head of information technology, said he is consulting with the county on how its terminal is set up but did not have an answer on when the school system would have its own ready.
School board attorney Kathleen Tanner Kennedy wrote that she imagines the terminal “is time-consuming to put in place, if that is what the school system decides to do.”
School board member Bud Thorsen said he supports the StarNews’ request and thinks it would save the school system money in providing e-mail records, which are currently reviewed by Kennedy to ensure they don’t contain information that can’t be released and then are printed out.
On Sept. 25, the district handed reporters hundreds of copies of board members’ e-mails, first requested by the State Port Pilot on Sept. 10. Many of the e-mails relate to the Obama broadcast, which the mostly Republican school board decided to postpone in the schools without having a public meeting about it.
In e-mails sent to fellow school board members and Superintendent Katie McGee on Sept. 2 through 4, Cooke and Scott Milligan both asked that the speech not to be shown at all in the schools. School board Chairwoman Shirley Babson has said that she and others had been concerned the speech would be too political and that she wishes its transcript had been available earlier.
“I vote to opt out across the board,” Cooke wrote on Sept. 3. “Let the parents decide if they want their children to participate on their own time, not instructional time. My children will not be in school if this is allowed. And that is just the beginning.”
On Sept. 4, the school board attorney sent board members a message reminding them “that if all board members are emailing each other at once about board business (resulting in various email strings), that is considered a ‘meeting’ and would violate open meetings law.”
Then on Sept. 7, McGee e-mailed board members, telling them not to respond to the information she was forwarding to them to avoid any violation of the open meetings law and to keep a log of calls and e-mails for a public records request received on the matter.
Babson said she called every board member individually on Sept. 4 asking for opinions, and all of them agreed to postpone airing the presidential address and to require parents to sign a form allowing students to watch it. She said she’d just found out about the speech, and with pressure from parents and the Labor Day weekend coming up, a decision needed to be made quickly. Kennedy told her there was no time to call an emergency meeting, Babson said.
Attorney Perkinson said time constraints should not be seen as a reason not to violate the open meetings law, which happened when “they discussed it and were able to make a decision over phone calls rather than at a public meeting.” She said people are entitled to file a lawsuit if they feel the open meetings law has been disobeyed, as provided by state statute 143-318.16.
“I never discuss any public business over e-mails, but I do call board members and ask for their opinions,” Babson said. She said, however, that this is the first time she recalls the board making a decision over the phone, and that she was not aware of a possible law violation in the action.
Babson and fellow board member Thorsen said they feel they did not break the open meetings law because they did not participate in the e-mail discussions.
“I guess if we’re in violation, that would be it,” Thorsen said of the e-mails.
The two board members also said e-mails from Cooke and her husband, Brunswick County Commissioner Marty Cooke, did not influence their decision on the Obama speech. Catherine Cooke denied her husband was trying to use his clout as a county commissioner in the matter.
“My husband and I did not coerce anybody,” she said. “The board took a vote as a board.”
Unlike his wife, the commissioner did not ask for the speech to be banned from the schools but did write an e-mail urging school board members to allow children to opt out of watching the address.
“Frankly, personally, this smacks of indoctrination whereby it seems the message can’t be expressed adequately to the voting public to gain their support so now the message has to be forced down the throats of our impressionable children,” he wrote on Sept. 3.
He defended his actions on Wednesday.
“I think I have freedom of expression,” he said. “I wrote those e-mails as the parent of children in the school system, as a private citizen and also as a former teacher.”
In an earlier personal e-mail to his wife, he had written, “Obama is serving koolaid to our children locally! This is indoctrination!” The e-mail came on Sept. 2, after a man named Joseph Kronski e-mailed him suggesting Obama was trying to use the schools to promote his political agenda through the speech and its accompanying classrooms activities.
The term “drinking the Kool-Aid” means to accept a philosophy blindly and originated in the 1978 Jonestown Massacre, where members of a cult were ordered to commit suicide by having a flavored drink with poison.
by Ana Ribeiro, Star-News Staff Reporter