SCHOOL BOARD ISN’T TRANSPARENT

Even if — if — a technicality saved the Hamilton County Board of Education from violating the law in the method in which members whittled their list of superintendent candidates by email last week, the process the board used appeared to be deliberately non-transparent.

Although state law is clear that any deliberation done by the board must be public, school board attorney Scott Bennett said the winnowing was not “deliberation because board members are not meeting together to discuss their opinions and working toward a consensus.”

However, cutting down a list from 14 to 10 candidates members may want to interview was clearly working toward a consensus, which is simply defined as “general agreement.” In fact, school board members precisely are attempting to come to a general agreement on a superintendent.

The law itself states, “All votes of any such governmental body shall be by public vote or public ballot or public roll call. No secret votes, or secret ballots, or secret roll calls shall be allowed.”

Nevertheless, Bennett said “the board … could have done this whole thing in an open meeting” but did it “by email for expediency.”

Well, expediency — especially after the district has been without a permanent superintendent for nearly 14 months — is no trade-off for transparency.

As egregious as the secretive balloting was, according to board member Rhonda Thurman, the board was not consulted on how the balloting would be carried out, who choose the rules for the balloting and by what criteria the final list of candidates was determined.

“When you’re running for office, you run on transparency … and then all of a sudden when you get elected you think you’re smarter than the people who elected you and they shouldn’t get the information,” Thurman told Times Free Press education reporter Kendi Rainwater. “… It’s just wrong.”

Deborah Fisher, executive director for the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government, also wondered why the board felt it needed to hide its process from the public.

“Allowing back-room dealing as a way to choose the next director of schools is not transparent government,” she said. “… The candidates’ names are already public. And citizens have a right to know the choices of their school board members on the matter.”

The results of the secret balloting were tabulated by school board chairman Steve Highlander, who is a former Hamilton County Schools teacher, the school board secretary, who works closely with interim Superintendent Dr. Kirk Kelly, and a representative of the search firm hired to find candidates. Based on that balloting, Highlander and Ken Carrick, president of the search firm Coleman Lew and Associates, then determined how many candidates would be interviewed and which candidates those would be. The list was released Thursday.

Complicating the process is that one of the 14 candidates is Kelly, whose name Carrick said more than two months ago would be on the original list of finalists because he didn’t believe it was the firm’s job to judge the merits of a local candidate.

Before approving a search firm last fall, several members of the board had said they’d prefer to name Kelly to the permanent position. But Kelly ultimately asked the board to conduct a search, to which he submitted his name.

Highlander, in discussing with Rainwater when the names would be interviewed, did not elaborate on the transparency of the process. The school board chairman had been upset when the Times Free Press published the original list of 14 names several weeks ago. But when running for his seat in 2014, Highlander told a District 9 forum “ownership” of the school board belonged to the people.

“I’m for total transparency,” he said. “I work for you.” Kathy Lennon, who won her District 2 school board seat by 98 votes last August and had run on a similar platform of transparency and keeping the public abreast of board activities, said she trusts the process the board chairman used and hopes the community will have input when the list of superintendent candidates is narrowed to about three finalists.

“I feel like we’re being transparent,” she said.

In no way, though, was the process transparent, from the private way in which the balloting was conducted to the methodology with which finalists were selected. Behind closed doors, without parameters known by all, anything could happen.

At a time when the Hamilton County Schools district desperately needs to turn a corner in academic improvement and perception, this sordid chapter serves to further convince a skeptical public the board which oversees the schools is unable to do the right and honorable thing. And if the board can’t do that in the superintendent search, what confidence does the public have the board can do right by their children?