Scottsdale Unified Held a Board Retreat - and Didn't Want You to Know Too Much About It
So I filed yet another Open Meeting Law Complaint yesterday...
Last month I sat through hours and hours of an Arizona Board of Behavioral Health Examiners meeting waiting to (successfully) argue my petition to repeal their 21-year old policy on the Practice Authority of School Counselors. I was struck by the members’ professionalism, their openness to dialog, but also by their executive director. She is a fireplug of efficiency, organization and diligence. She exudes competence and integrity. She clearly takes her role seriously to inform the board, address serious, weighty matters, and run that agency according to law and her board’s directives. All on-time and under budget. There is zero ego, just the job that must be done. And she knows her role.
By contrast, meetings of the Scottsdale Unified School Board run by their chief administrator, their superintendent, are amateurish and tense. Lots of formality (“President” this, “Board member” that), lots of gobbledygook words strung together in the way an academic, removed from normal life, twists their tongue into multisyllabic pretzels that obscures meaning and muddles clear thinking - but they shoot it off anyway with the haughty air of a know-it-all. It’s all so inflated, so contrived, so…artificial.
When in life you encounter a person like this, if you have any street smarts, your gut immediately says he’s working an angle - so, who’s the mark?
If you don’t know the answer, that means you are.
And so it was immediately obvious to me when this week the superintendent held a board “retreat” to bring in “facilitators” - a former school board member and a guy with a PhD affiliated with the Arizona Superintendents Association to tell our school board members how they don’t really have the authority they think they do, how they should defer to the superintendent - just give “oversight” and let the experts in school administration run the show. Oh, and let’s agree tonight on how you’re going to do that…we’ll have a “shared agreement,” a “board norms” document that memorializes just how you’re going to defer your job to him. Your board meetings will be so much more efficient this way!
The problem?
They didn’t agendize the meeting. They literally failed the most basic, most fundamental requirement of the open meeting laws to include in the notice of meeting a description specifying what subjects they would be discussing. First, they went to an off-site location 20 minutes drive from their administrative building - a small elementary school library with limited seating tucked away in Paradise Valley. Second, they announced in advance they would not livestream the meeting as is customary. Third, they wouldn’t disclose what they were planning to talk about. What gives?
Mind you, this occurred within days of receiving a follow up attorney general opinion that cautioned the district that their reading of the open meeting law is too narrow, that their objections to the AG’s disposition of my 2021 complaint are still missing the point, and that this superintendent’s past practices (on subcommittees, on the infamous “2x2x1” private sessions) to make board meetings more efficient actually violated the law.
So I filed another complaint. Available here.
How to explain this behavior? What is going on when a school district is so committed to keeping information from the public that when chastised by a state attorney general for violating transparency laws they look NOT to increase transparency, but to find ways, any way, to get around it? They are so committed to this institutional culture of secrecy, so preternaturally opposed to openness, that they will spend more time tying to get around the law rather than just, you know, OPEN UP?
Beats me. But I’m not a mark.
End.
Keep at it, @alegalprocess!
Is there an update on the Scottsdale School Board meeting? When will they release the information and when will the public know?