Photo: Ribbon cutting ceremony at Pagosa Peak Open School, August 2017.
On March 22, the Board of Directors at Pagosa Peak Open School left the school’s upstairs meeting room and convened behind closed doors, in an executive session, to discuss the three finalists for the School Director position. The Board had scheduled this as a ‘special meeting’ — a meeting not listed on the Board’s annual calendar — and the meeting room at that time held more than a dozen PPOS staff and spouses and parents and community members, eager to hear the Board’s decision.
But the audience would have to wait, in expectation, while the Board discussed the candidates privately, in another room.
Disclosure: I currently serve on the PPOS Board of Directors, but this editorial reflects only my own opinions and not necessarily the opinions of any other Board member, or of the Board as a whole.
‘School Director’ at PPOS combines a number of jobs into one challenging whole. The School Director is School Principal, CFO, COO, director of Human Resources, substitute teacher, mentor, fundraising director, and a few other jobs, rolled into one.
Following the executive session — which was allowable, in the Board’s opinion, according to the Colorado Sunshine Law — the Board joined the waiting audience and voted unanimously to enter into salary negotiations with the school’s current Assistant Director, Emily Murphy.
A week later, the Pagosa Springs SUN featured an editorial by the paper’s editor, Randi Pierce, entitled, ‘Partly Cloudy’. Ms. Pierce, and several other members of the community, had attended the March 22 meeting via Google Meets (a video app similar to Zoom) so she — and the other video participants— also had to wait in expectation while the Board met behind closed doors.
Her editorial began like this:
We at The SUN, not surprisingly, sit through a lot of meetings.
We do that not only to distill down what’s going on for you, our readers, who may not have the opportunity (or desire) to sit through countless meetings, but also to keep an eye on the boards to help ensure they’re following pertinent laws, namely those to do with open meetings and government transparency.
Lately, however, we’ve found ourselves shaking our heads quite a bit, not because boards were necessarily in violation of the state’s Sunshine Laws, but because they stopped short of full transparency when it seemed unnecessary…
She noted that the PPOS Board had conducted interviews with the three finalists on March 18, in a public meeting, but apparently Ms. Pierce had been unable to connect to the Google Meets video, and so missed the interviews. She also noted that the Board did not record the interviews for later reference (on the advice of the PPOS attorney) which was another disappointment for Ms. Pierce.
Two situations where the PPOS Board may have — as Ms. Pierce suggested — “stopped short of full transparency.” A third incident took place on March 22, when the Board reconvened in open public session, following a lengthy executive session, and voted to select Emily Murphy without explaining to the gathered audience why Ms. Murphy was selected, and why the other two candidates were not selected.
Ms. Pierce wrote:
While the decision was met with cheers and applause, giving us comfort that those with a stake in the situation are pleased and the correct decision was made, we left the meeting unsure of what set Murphy apart from the other finalists. Most of the board members never stated their views on the matter publicly.
At times it felt like some of the board members were doing anything they could to avoid open, public discussion on the topic.
I am sympathetic to Ms. Pierce’s complaints. The SUN and the Daily Post have regularly challenged our local government boards when they fail, in our opinions, to live up to the transparency requirements detailed in Colorado law. CRS 24-6-401 begins with this statement:
It is declared to be a matter of statewide concern and the policy of this state that the formation of public policy is public business and may not be conducted in secret.
There are, however, several situations where Colorado law allows a government board to enter ‘executive session’ and discuss information that should not properly be made public. But the Sunshine Law prohibits a board from voting or making final decisions during an executive session. Votes and decisions must be made in open public session.
The discussion of finalist candidates for School Superintendent or for the School Director at a public charter school (PPOS is a public charter school) falls into something of a gray area. On the one hand, we might argue that, in order to honor the intention to be transparent and to make policy openly, a Board should explain publicly why they are making a certain decision, following an executive session.
On the other hand, we are talking about a candidate’s reputation and the damage that might ensue… if character weaknesses, for example, are discussed openly in a public meeting.
On March 22, the PPOS Board of Directors made a choice to refrain from discussing, in public, why certain candidates were not chosen. Presumably, the reasons were various, depending on each director’s values and concerns. And presumably, the same can be said for why Ms. Murphy was unanimously chosen — that each director had their own reasons for voting ‘Aye’. Those reasons, whatever they may have been, were not shared with the public.
Nevertheless, the audience burst out in loud applause, in response to the unanimous vote.
Perhaps, in the end, the audience did not care about the underlying reasons for each director’s vote. But Ms. Pierce is correct, in noting that the process was not as transparent as it might have been.
How many of us would be willing to apply for a job if we knew that our qualifications would be discussed — and perhaps criticized — in an open public meeting? Curiously, that’s precisely what took place recently, when the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners interviewed candidates for the County Coroner, and for the Director of the Public Health Department. The Town Council also conducted open public interviews, and discussions about qualifications, when they hired their new Town Administrator David Harris.
In those cases, the open discussions did not seem to hinder the selection process, or cause damage to the candidate’s reputations.
I personally would have been comfortable with a more open and public decision-making process, during the hiring process at PPOS.
But that’s one of the joys about serving on a functional board or committee: the decisions are made by the whole group, not by individual board members.