AMHERST — Ongoing executive sessions and the pending evaluation of school Superintendent Maria Geryk have prompted a Shutesbury resident to file a complaint that the Amherst-Pelham Regional School Committee and its members are violating the state’s Open Meeting Law.
On Monday, Michael Hootstein, whose grandson attends Amherst Regional High School, made the complaint against the Amherst-Pelham Regional School Committee, its chairwoman, Laura Kent, and Katherine Appy, chairwoman of the Amherst School Committee.
The complaint relates to the executive sessions the board held July 13 and 20, as well as the executive session the regional and Union 26 school committees held Monday evening.
Hootstein said in a phone interview that he filed the complaint with the regional committee and the Amherst town clerk’s office.
The complaint, he said, is about educating the board and its members about Open Meeting Law rules and the committee’s responsibilities.
“It was my civic duty to do it,” Hootstein said.
The board, Kent and Appy have 30 days to respond to the complaint. The matter could later go to the state attorney general’s office for review.
Appy said in an email that a response will be made in the future.
“We just received the complaint and will review it and draft a formal response within the time allowed,” she said.
In the complaint, Hootstein writes that the board cited an improper purpose and used improper procedures to schedule the executive sessions, and “that meeting notices and stated reasons for the sessions were/are insufficiently specific.”
In the first two meetings, the board’s posted the reason for the closed-door meetings were to “conduct strategy sessions in preparation for negotiations with nonunion personnel or to conduct collective bargaining sessions or contract negotiations with nonunion personnel.”
In the meeting Monday, Geryk was identified as the subject of the session.
Hootstein’s second concern relates to the performance review of Geryk. He writes that individual evaluations about the superintendent were provided to other members, Geryk and her attorneys. This, he wrote, violates the rule that “is clear that all deliberations by a school committee about the professional competence of a school superintendent must be conducted only during meetings open to the public.”
“It is unacceptable for members to discuss matters in private, with the intention of maybe revealing a redacted version (excluding less flattering evaluations) of those discussions in public at some date far, far, far in the future, maybe never,” Hootstein wrote.
During open session of the July 13 meeting, Kent explained that the committee was not yet ready to issue a summary of the evaluation because there were “non-compliant” individual evaluations from members that didn’t follow mandated procedures by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Some written comments, she said, may not have explained why the members gave unsatisfactory, needs improvement or exemplary marks to Geryk.
“What we are going to executive session about is not the evaluation; the evaluation has to be done in a public body and in a public meeting,” Kent said prior to entering executive session July 13.
Third, Hootstein claims that the committee used an executive session to “obstruct” deliberation that should have occurred in open session.