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.

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.

Formal Request for Better Sound at Board Meetings

Here is my formal request for better sound at board meetings. There have been ongoing verbal requests for about a year, but nothing has been done on a consistent basis. There are some questions as to whether some of these meetings (especially those in the commons) are in violation of the open meetings act since so many people cannot hear what is going on.

Open Letter from Dulaney Barrett

Dulaney Barrett has asked me to publish this letter which is his response to the Special Board Meeting held to address the School Board's violation of the Open Meetings Act when appointing D'dre Brock and Ed Woten to the School Board.

In his letter, Dulaney refers to various blog postings from cmsbears.net. To help you follow his letter, I have linked to those postings:
Open Meetings Act notification (dated February 5, 2010)
Request for Letters of Intent (while I requested copies of these letters in November, I only received Dulaney's letter and was not successful in obtaining a copy of Ed's)

Summary and Podcast of School Board Meeting held April 5, 2010

You can find a podcast of the meeting at http://cmsbears.podbean.com. For convenience sake, you may choose to listen to the podcast in ITunes, which will let you skip to the chapters that you are interested in. Just search for Cloudcroft in the ITunes store and you should find the podcast. Sometimes it takes them a day to update their podcasts.

To briefly summarize the meeting, the board approved all of the Action Items with the exception of appointing the Audit Committee, which they tabled. If you are interested in serving on the Audit committee, it will consist of two Board members, plus a parent of a student in the school, plus a community member with knowledge of accounting/auditing principles. They should be selecting the committee at the next meeting.

The Finance Committee will consist of Ed Woten and Jackie Cates, who also serve on the Budget Committee.

The Board approved consolidation of the School's bank accounts. Apparently, the school has 7 different bank accounts, which the Business Manager Sharlotte Lund explained makes it very easy to kite checks and misappropriate funds (per the Auditor) so the auditor has recommended that these accounts be consolidated. What was not addressed publicly was (1) how long ago the auditor made these recommendations, (2) have any of the other auditors made this recommendation and (3) how long has the school maintained multiple accounts. As a member of the public, I found this odd. The board agreed that the opportunity for fraud was there and approved consolidating the accounts.

The Board approved the Open Meeting Resolution, which is the same as last years' only with a date change. Doug Porch did note that the Agenda has not been getting posted in the Cloudcroft Post Office and asked that Teresa fax him a copy when it is done so he could personally take it over there (right now Teresa mails it to the post office.) I also couldn't help but pipe up and ask once again that they post the agenda to the school's website, which was supposed to start happening last July. See: (http://cmsbearsinfo.blogspot.com/2009/06/school-board-agenda-publication.html). It sounds like Teresa is sending the agenda to Wanetta Ferguson (wife of the school's Technology & Network Administrator Joel Ferguson) and assuming from there that they are being posted. I assured her that I check on a regular basis and they are usually not posted.

Next year's school calendar should look very much like this year's, and was approved by the Board.

Summary of Special School Board Meeting of March 22, 2010

A complete podcast of the meeting can be found at http://cmsbears.podbean.com/ (podcasting is a new thing for me, so please leave me input if you have any problems with it!)

Being a "special meeting," business was conducted a bit differently. Board president Terry Butram read a statement, which can be found here. The statement/script of the meeting refers to the following documents:

Section II Open Meetings Act
V. Section 10-15-3 Invalid Actions; Standing
Local School Board Vacancies

To summarize the whole thing, the Board (through the script) acknowledged that they should not have discussed the board appointment/applicants in an executive session. They summarized what took place in the executive sessions and re-voted to appoint Ed Woten to the school board.

The Alamogordo Daily News covered the meeting in this article.

Special Board Meeting Scheduled for This Monday

This agenda was posted today for a Special Board Meeting to be held this Monday at noon. The board will be addressing open meetings act violations.

Open Meetings Act

In researching the Open Meetings Act on the New Mexico Attorney General's website, I came across example 40, which reads:

"A local school board, pursuant to statutory authority, meets to appoint a person to fill a vacancy on the board. This paragraph does not authorize closing the meeting to consider that appointment because a board member is not an employee of the school district."

So, it would appear that the executive sessions to appoint both D'dre Brock and Ed Woten to the school board were in violation of the Open Meetings Act.

I have forwarded this information to the school board for their review. 

Superintendent's Contract Extended

Last night's school board meeting ended with the school board going into executive session to discuss the Superintendent's evaluation. They then called the superintendent into the executive session to discuss his evaluations with him. When they came out of the meeting, the board voted unanimously to extend the superintendent's contract another year, which now gives him 2 1/2 years remaining on the contract. There was no public discussion on the matter, which leads me to conclude that the discussion took place in the executive session. I have sent the following email to each school board member:

"I'm interested in knowing the content of the board's discussion with regards to extending the superintendent's contract for a year. From the agenda, I assumed that the contract discussion would be public, but it appears that the issue was decided in the executive session. Can you explain what went on and why the contract was extended when there was already 1 1/2 years left on the existing contract?"


I anxiously await any reply...

School Board Agenda Publication

I asked the school board and Superintendent Hancock at the June 8, 2009 school board meeting to start posting the school board agenda on the outside window so it could be visible to the public outside of normal administration business hours. Superintendent Hancock and Administrative Secretary Teresa Housler agreed to this. Mr. Hancock also said that the agenda would start being posted on the school's web page www.cmsbears.org at the beginning of the next school year.

According to the Open Meetings Compliance Guide published by the New Mexico Attorney General http://www.nmag.gov/pdf/AGO%20OMA%20Guide.pdf
"Meeting notices shall include an agenda containing a list of specific items of business to be discussed or transacted at the meeting or information on how the public may obtain a copy of such an agenda. Except in the case of an emergency, the agenda shall be available to the public at least twenty-four (24) hours prior to the meeting. Except for emergency matters, a public body shall take action only on items appearing on the agenda. For purposes of this Subsection, an “emergency” refers to unforeseen circumstances that, if not addressed immediately by the public body, will likely result in injury or damage to persons or property or substantial financial
loss to the public body."