Surprise: Special School Board Meeting April 3

Imagine my surprise when I happened by the "sacred window" and noticed that the School Board has scheduled a Special Meeting to discuss the Superintendent search with consultant Dr. Dan Patterson. Here is the Agenda for that meeting. Interestingly, this agenda was taped to the outside of said sacred window, probably since the Administrative offices have been closed since Wednesday. I don't know when the meeting was set, since it would appear that Mr. Hancock dated the notice of this meeting back in December! (I wonder how valid an unsigned notice of a meeting is...)

Also, here is the Notice of the meeting that the board has been talking about, scheduled for April 7.

For the past month the board has been talking about and setting meeting dates. Never was there any mention of an April 3 meeting. I have sent the following email to board President Bill Denney and Superintendent Hancock (and cc'd all of the Board members) formally asking for a robo-call to give the public a heads-up on this Special April 3 meeting.

Hello Bill and Tommy,

Since this April 3 meeting has never been addressed in a public forum, and since it is for the discussion of the Superintendent search with the Board's consultant, would you please issue a robo-call to inform the parents that it is going to take place?

Thank you
Margo

Resumes of Superintendent Candidates

I have received the resumes of the six candidates for Cloudcroft Superintendent. One of the candidates, Audie Brown, has taken another position so James "Scott" Sparks is filling that slot. Some of these resumes were faxed, so the best I could get was a fax of a fax...therefore the quality is poor.
Travis Dempsey
James "Scott" Sparks
Kenneth Lyon
Bobbie Gutierrez
Adan Estrada
LeAnne Ellis

I decided to do a little Googling to see what info was out there on each candidate. The higher the profile of the candidate, the more that was out there. I'm including links to what I came across in my searches:
"School Board Opts to Buy Out Superintendent's Contract" the Santa Fe New Mexican
Capitol Report, New Mexico - Editorial Talking About the Santa Fe School Board
"A Week of Bobbie Gutierrez' Emails" - The Santa Fe Reporter
Harper vs. Lyon (and others) in US District Court
"Leadership Changes in the Aztec School District" March 2007
"Differentiating the Norm to Reach the Unteachable" a presentation by Sparks at the 2010 New Mexico Summer Institute

School Board Meeting of March 20, 2012

The podcast of the meeting is available at http://cmsbears.podbean.com or via the iTunes store (it's a free podcast).

One change from my last posting. The Superintendent interviews that are to be conducted by the various committees appointed by the board will NOT be open to the public as previously stated. While they certainly could be open to the public, the Open Meetings Act does not require that they be open to the public, therefore our school board has somehow decided (since there was no vote or open discussion about this) that they will not be open to the public. However, the school board IS required to conduct their interviews in a public setting, therefore the public can watch those interviews on April 7.

Since I'm not feeling the transparency here, I might also point out that while the Bernalillo school board gets dinged by the Attorney General's Office for discussing the job description for a new superintendent in an executive session versus an open meeting (see March 8, 2012 posting of the news article), our school board somehow managed to develop our superintendent's job description/criteria without any meeting at all. According to Dr. Patterson, the Board's consultant, the criteria for the job description were developed via emails between him and board members.

My understanding from Dr. Patterson is that the resumes for the candidates are public information. Therefore I have officially asked for them pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act.

In other Board matters, Superintendent Hancock discussed the latest buzz word that we will all be hearing more and more. New Mexico is now one of 46 states that have adopted the "Common Core" standards. According to Mr. Hancock, this is basically a retooling of what was going on in the 70s, only now it has a new name. Anyway, our students will be required to go to these standards starting this August for the elementary students and next August in the high school (this according to the Special Education Director). I didn't catch where the middle school falls in the adoption of the standards.

School Board Meeting Tomorrow Night

Here is the agenda for tomorrow night's regular school board meeting.

Also, the school board has released the names of the six finalists and three alternates for the position of superintendent. They are (in no particular order): Audie Brown, Travis Dempsey, Leann Ellis, Bobbie Gutierrez, Adan Estrada and Ken Lyon. The three alternates (in the event one of the six isn't available) are 1. James Sparks, 2. Amy Lane and 3. Jeff Gorum. Although I saw on Arlan Ponder's Facebook account that Amy Lane has asked that her name be withdrawn. (Actually, when I say this information has been "released" I mean that Arlan Ponder emailed the info...I don't know whether it is taped to the window of the school or anything like that.

The interviews will be at a public work session on April 7. If it is anything like the last work session, they will break into three different rooms so each candidate is essentially interviewed three times...once by the board and once by each community/teacher committee.

Clarification on Upcoming Special Board Meetings and Workshops

As I stated in the post about the special meeting to be held March 14, 2012 at 4 p.m., I wanted some clarification as to what the executive session was for. I emailed board president Bill Denney and CC'd all of the board members (my email is at the tail end of this). Arlan Ponder must have forwarded my questions to Dr. Patterson, who is the consultant the board hired to help with the superintendent search. Arlan has given me permission to post our email correspondence, along with Dr. Patterson's reply. Here it is...

Margo,

Following is a part of an email I receive from Dr. Patterson when I asked about the executive session. 

Since he has been doing this a while I would think he understands the Open Meetings Act better than most and would do everything to ensure it was done properly and in accordance with the law.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Arlan

1.  The training of the Board and committees, as well as the work of the committees and board in developing questions for the interviews will be "work sessions."  Work sessions are open to the public so anyone who wants to spend 2 to 4 hours listening to the discussion are welcome to attend, although they will not be able to participate.

2. The part being conducted under executive session is for the screening process in which only the board members and those they invite are welcome to attend.  Without quoting all the law which is many pages long, The Open Meetings Act, NMSA 1978, Chapter 10, Article 15 lists the many reasons a meeting for the Board to be conducted in public.  10-15-1.H lists meetings in which the public meeting is not required. Paragraph (3) of that section states: Limited personnel matters; provided that for purposes of the Open Meetings Act, 'limited personnel matters' means the discussion of hiring, promotion, demotion, dismissal, assignment or resigantion of or the investigation or consideration of complaints or charges against any individual employee......."

An example of this is given further on in the Compliance Guide in example #42:  "A school board meets to consider applicants for the position of superintendent.  Discussion of the applicant's qualifications is conducted in closed session, but the final decision or vote of the board with respect to hiring one of the applicants as superintendent must be taken in public session."

A commentary on that example included in the Compliance Guide also states:   It may appear that to require final actions to be taken in open session is a meaningless formality since the actual deliberations may be closed.  This requirement, however, serves the purpose of ensuring that all final actions on personnel matters are announced publicly and the position of each member on the issue is recorded in the official minutes."

Selecting finalists to be interviewed would fall under the same standards as the actual hiring discussion because the qualifications and in many cases confidential information regarding those candidates will be discussed.

As for the actual interviews on April 7, again, those are "work sessions" which are open to the public should they desire to spend 8 hours observing the process.  Although they may "observe," they may not participate or interfere. The discussion by the board for the actual selection will again be an executive session with the actual open session and voting on the candidate being held on April 24.

Sent from my iPad

On Mar 8, 2012, at 9:23 PM, Margo Whitt <sendmargomail@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello Bill,

The agenda for the special board meeting notes an executive session to discuss "limited personnel matters screening of superintendent candidates."

I have posted some information to my blog, www.cmsbears.net, which deals with the subject of screening of superintendent candidates.

My understanding of the open meetings act is that executive session is only warranted if discussing a specific applicant and that applicant's qualifications. At the last meeting, it didn't sound like there were any specific applicants yet. 

Can you give me some more details as to what you are going into executive session for?

Thank you

Margo

Special School Board Meeting Scheduled for March 14, 2012

Here is the agenda for the meeting, which starts at 4 p.m. My understanding from the last public meeting is this meeting will include the consultant and the various committee members to teach them how to interview candidates.

They also note on the agenda that they will be going into executive session, which is supposed to deal with limited personnel matters. My understanding from reading the news and the Attorney General's Open Meetings Act Compliance Guide (specifically page 23, example 43), the executive session is only valid if discussing the specific qualifications of a specific candidate. I'm hoping to get some clarification of how they are justifying executive session at this stage, since the last meeting made it sound like they didn't have any specific candidates yet and were not going to be interviewing until April.