State School Board’s 5-hour ‘public’ meeting, closed for all but 45 minutes, shatters public trust
State School Board’s 5-hour ‘public’ meeting, closed for all but 45 minutes, shatters public trust
Note: This post was first published by the Oklahoma Observer and is shared here with permission from the publisher and the author.
Our state has long bragged that, “It is the public policy of the State of Oklahoma that the people are vested with the inherent right to know and be fully informed about their government.”
But as all eyes were on March Madness, the final score during one team’s appearance was State Secrecy 300, People’s Right to Know, 45.
It would have been the only true blowout of a very competitive, very visible tournament. But it will take a while before Joe Sixpack realizes the damage across the board to the public’s role in governance.
While the NCAA managed to ensure game transparency despite the pandemic, the State Board of Education made a mockery of Oklahoma’s longstanding promise of transparency with citizens during a five-hour special meeting March 25.
All but 45 minutes were behind closed doors.
The open sessions produced vaguely worded motions which will need translation into coherent English before writing the minutes.
At least there’s a complete video [still publicly available on the SBE Facebook page of the relatively few actual words spoken in making motions.
More than 100 citizens attended the virtual ZOOM meeting [all board members were at different locations], which was simulcast live via Facebook. About half stuck out the entire four-hour-plus executive session.
Since that’s where all the real discussion occurred, none of the citizens can help unravel the facts.
Don’t blame those who wrote a properly done agenda.
Regular meetings are scheduled a year in advance, so interested citizens can mark their calendars ahead with date, time and location and to check agendas for those entities whose work they follow.
But the pandemic changed the 2021 list filed by the State Board of Education, making what had been Regular Meetings into Special Meetings because they moved from its Oklahoma City office to being held virtually.
Special Meetings can deal only with items on its posted agenda, and can only consider each item as it is listed.
The March 25 agenda did not call for a single executive session – it called for five distinctly separate executive sessions. Each session required the board to get specific advice from its attorney[s] on why secret discussion was required and legal for the subject involved.
The board was required to emerge from each session with an individual “Vote to acknowledge return to Open Session,” followed by a public discussion and possible action by publicly cast and recorded vote on any action covering Executive Session deliberations.
The process was to be repeated five times for the five topics involved:
Summarily suspending teacher certificates for two individuals pending proceedings for revocation or other action. Specific reasons given were three sections of the OMA and three others from state laws involving employee rights;
Closed discussion with legal counsel “concerning a pending investigation, claim or action concerning Oologah-Talala Public Schools, when advised by legal counsel that disclosure of any additional information could seriously impair the ability to process or conduct the pending” situations. Again, a vote in Open Meeting was required to enter Executive Session; when closed discussions were complete, the board was to vote in public to reconvene in public session, discuss in public and take any action needed, both by recorded public vote;
Closed discussion with counsel on the same general topic for Epic Charter Schools, with the same procedures required to enter or leave Executive Session, take any action in public, and vote again in public on entering a fourth Executive Session following the same procedure;
Closed discussion on the same general topic for Western Heights Public Schools, with the same requirements to enter and exit closed session, vote to reconvene in open session, have any discussion and vote on action in public, and follow the same procedure for the fifth and last Executive session, and;
Closed discussion on pending litigation, Oklahoma Public Charter School Association v. Oklahoma State Board of Education [Oklahoma County District Court Case No. CV-2017-1330], with all the earlier procedures followed.
But as the time dragged on, hour-after hour, it was obvious that the agenda was not being followed. Several of those attending the open meeting on line wrote comments complaining that the by-then obvious combining of five meetings into one left them clueless about how long each issue was discussed or who might have been asked to appear during part of any topic’s session.
The way the Executive sessions began, 40 minutes into the meeting, should have been a clue. Following a positive discussion with no action on Oologah-Talala’s quarterly report on steps it was taking to get off probation, one board member asked what was next.
State Superintendent Joy Hofmeister, as board chair, replied, “I’ll ask Mr. [Brad] Clark [general counsel],” who replied that the next item was a “series of executive sessions.”
The motion was unanimously approved, without any discussion of whether the sessions needed to be or could legally be held in closed meeting on advice of counsel, and Hofmeister instructed, “We will move into executive session. I believe there are instructions for that [how to communicate between board members and the attorneys without the public seeing the online meeting] for moving into that session. I’ll see you there.”
That was it from roughly 1:45 p.m. until roughly 5:45 p.m., when the newest board member Trent Smith’s picture appeared in a star of the Executive Session slide tapping his pencil on a table and obviously waiting for the other members to join him in returning to live action.
Once assembled, the board quickly voted to move forward with summary suspension proceedings for the two teachers.
Smith then asked to make a motion, before which Hofmeister warned that both she and legal counsel concurred that it would, if approved, violate “Oklahoma statute, the Oklahoma Constitution and the oath I swore to uphold when I took office.”
Although Smith’s motion dealt solely with the agenda item involving the Charter School lawsuit, he moved to approve a resolution to “equalize funding for all charter schools and public schools” – which also would settle the lawsuit, he added almost as an aside. The motion passed 4-3 although the general topic of equalizing funding was not on the agenda, nor was the existence of a settlement offer or any discussion of whether to accept or reject it.
After a brief silence, Hofmeister asked, “Is there another motion for the board to consider on any of the other items we discussed in Executive Session.”
Smith paused: “I’m reviewing my notes – is there anything else?” Hearing no reply, he shook his head, Hofmeister took a unanimously approved motion to adjourn and the circus ended.
Most discussion afterwards focused on how charter schools would receive added funding, which supporters applauded, while traditional public schools would lose money, which triggered outrage among that sector.
Lost was an important long-range implication: After that meeting, the teeth of the Open Meeting Act apparently have all been pulled and its promise of full transparency shattered by a boulder like that thrown by a protester who never heard that the constitutional guarantee of the right of citizens to air and seek redress of grievances required peaceful, lawful assembly.
Who can blame citizens for being cynical, especially since it is hard to fix blame for the fiasco?