Over the years, we have seen and covered many school committees, in Greenfield and across the county. Some worked reasonably well at overseeing their superintendent and developing budgets that are responsive to the needs of children and taxpayers. We’ve seen some school boards that were so passive and enthralled by their superintendents they never noticed red ink all over the central office floor until the superintendent left.
We’ve seen some committees whose members worked well and respectfully, and we’ve seen boards fractured with bickering, badgering and bad blood.
We’ve seen school committee members who have quarreled openly with their fellows, over policy and priorities, but often tinged with animosity.
None of those circumstances are healthy, or what voters elect school boards to do.
We are also staunch advocates of the public’s right to know and sticklers for adhering to the state open meeting and public records laws. In fact, we’ve taken a previous Greenfield School Committee to Superior Court over a violation of the open meeting laws and won.
Yet, despite all that, we found it peculiar to learn that the Greenfield School Committee chairwoman has filed an open meeting law complaint against her own budget subcommittee for discussing busing costs at a meeting about next year’s budget.
Chairwoman Adrienne Nunez, in her formal written complaint to the state Attorney General’s Office, asserts that her subcommittee discussed transportation costs even though that topic was not explicitly listed in the evening’s agenda. State law requires public boards to post their meetings and agendas so people know whether they want to attend. So, straying from the agenda can been seen as subterfuge.
“I just felt an obligation to Greenfield and other committee members to ensure folks know what’s getting deliberated,” Chairwoman Adrienne Nunez said Wednesday in explaining why she filed the complaint.
But what seems so odd is that the school board’s own chairwoman felt she needed to complain to the AG about how her own subcommittee operates, as though it were a foreign body.
When asked why not handle this internally, Nunez offered explanations that didn’t seem all that clear. She said she wanted the process to feel fair and wanted “our administrators to feel supported … I want the community and the committee to understand what’s deliberated.”
We don’t know how the AG will rule on this complaint, and we aren’t arguing the merits either way. It just seems that most people who noticed a subordinate conducting a meeting inappropriately would handle it directly and internally. And we would be OK with that as long as the law were followed in the future. Even this newspaper has started with a friendly warning about the open meeting law if it seemed a violation was innocent.
It’s hard to escape the feeling that something else is going on here, something having to do with politics or personal antagonism, especially when Nunez in her remarks seems to excuse subcommittee Chairman Cameron Ward and makes far less exculpatory references to two other subcommittee members present for the meeting in question: Mayor William Martin and former school Superintendent Susan Hollins.
“I do not believe this to be an intentional violation on the part of Chairperson Ward,” Nunez said in her complaint. “It is my understanding that he may not have had a clear understanding of the (open meeting law) at the time of the meeting. However, the group consists of senior members of the committee that have all been exposed to and reminded of (the open meeting law) on multiple occasions.”
She makes references to “big personalities” and “tension” on the committee and said the complaint is about holding the group to a high level of “accountability and integrity.”
Well, we’re not sure exactly what’s behind this complaint, and we hope it results in all Greenfield School Committee meetings adhering to the open meeting law, because that’s good for the public. But we worry there is something else going on in the background here that – sadly – may not be so healthy and conducive to smooth operation of the school committee.