On Tuesday, the day after Mary Brown was fired as assistant superintendent, the Greenwood School Board met for a regularly scheduled meeting.
Some mention or board action on the termination might’ve been expected.
If it came up, though, this reporter certainly missed it.
In fact, even though a number of votes were taken during the brief meeting, it’s tough to say what, exactly, the board acted on at all.
As has become standard practice for the Greenwood School Board, the board members flipped through thick printed packets, with Superintendent Montrell Greene pointing them to particular pages before taking a vote.
What exactly was passed was never noted. Even the general outlines of the topic at hand — personnel decisions? changes to board policy? purchase agreements? — were tough to decipher. The board’s printed agenda usually provides a vague map but few concrete clues about what’s actually under discussion.
Discussions and debates occasionally break out at board meetings, but far more often, written proposals are quietly voted on. Even when items come up for brief discussion, board members usually speak cryptically, giving minimal indication of what it is they’re actually looking at.
A public records request can usually turn up the documents — and the details — that were voted on, but public bodies have up to seven business days to respond to any request, meaning the district can wait until nearly its next board meeting before turning over any records.
Voting on written proposals without any open discussion is likely legal under Mississippi’s Opening Meetings Law.
Even if this practice stays true to the letter of the law, though, it certainly runs afoul of its spirit.
Outside of certain exemptions for discussions of sensitive issues, such as ongoing legal matters or the personal details of individual employees, public bodies are required to hold their meetings out in the open and make their decisions in public view.
By staying mum on the topics up for a vote — even when the “yays” and the “nays” are voiced publicly — the board leaves the public in the dark about just what the district is up to.
The Greenwood School Board is hardly the only public body that tries its best to skirt around the law, and it isn’t the worst. Plenty of other government bodies across the state have earned reputations for holding unannounced meetings or conducting votes in unjustified closed meetings.
Closer to home, the Leflore County School District’s board was cited by the state Department of Education for holding too many unnecessary specially called meetings and too many unexplained executive sessions before the district was taken over by the state last October.
Still, the opacity of the Greenwood district’s meetings is problematic, not least because the air of secrecy leads to suspicions — justified or not — of shenanigans and shady dealings.
It’s understandable that the Greenwood school board members and district administrators might not want to air out all their discussions and decisions in public — especially given the sensitivity of some of the board’s decisions and the board’s vocal critics in the community.
Still, even if all the board’s actions are aboveboard and made with the best of intentions, the district owes local taxpayers, parents, students and district employees a greater degree of openness and candor.
Transparency — and, occasionally, controversy — may create some headaches for district administrators and board members. Those, though, are the costs of working in the public sphere.
The public has a right to keep close tabs on what’s going on in its public schools. The district should do a better job of pulling back the curtain.
• Contact Bryn Stole at 581-7235 or bstole@gwcommonwealth.com.
