Want public trust in public schools? Secret meetings aren’t the answer

Nothing about the decisions facing Kansas school districts right now is easy.

Amid an uncontrolled pandemic, officials have to decide when and how and where to continue school. They also must decide whether to cancel high school sports — a call that already has rankled more people than any about math or history classes.

The options aren’t great. Discussions are difficult. Emotions run high. And school boards’ decisions affect thousands of students and families.

Unfortunately, some Wichita-area boards have opted to delegate those decisions — in whole or in part — to appointed committees. And those committees met in secret to hash out some of the most monumental issues to ever face public schools.

That’s shameful, and it goes against the spirit of openness, transparency and public trust.

A Derby USD 260 committee met behind closed doors for two and a half hours last week to decide how the district will start the school year. That decision — to offer full-time, in-person school as an option for all grades — didn’t even go to the Derby school board for approval.

In Wichita, school board members established a COVID-19 advisory committee to offer guidance on reopening but allowed the group to meet in secret to review a decision to cancel fall sports and other activities.

When an Eagle reporter asked for the time and location of the meeting Monday, district spokesperson Wendy Johnson replied in an email: “As an advisory committee to the superintendent, it is not open to the public.”

We believe the Kansas Open Meetings Act says otherwise.

The law states under KSA 75-4318 that boards, commissions, councils, committees, subcommittees and other groups supported by public funds should be open to the public.

District officials may argue that because committee members were appointed by Superintendent Alicia Thompson rather than elected school board members, it’s free to meet in secret But the committee itself clearly was established by the school board.

Regardless, the group should be subject to the open meetings law and should conduct its business in public, even if there’s a loophole that allows it not to.

For more than a decade, Wichita superintendents have assembled the Superintendent’s Student Advisory Council, or SuperSAC, which meets regularly and hosts an annual dialogue session for students to offer input on issues facing the district. Those meetings are public.

The City of Wichita appoints more than 30 advisory boards and commissions, which discuss issues ranging from planning and zoning to bike paths and historic preservation. Those meetings are public.

Wichita Mayor Brandon Whipple’s small business advisory council and his council on diversity, inclusion and civil rights meet in public and have been livestreamed during COVID-19.

Same with Sedgwick County’s plethora of advisory boards.

Open meetings and open records laws are meant to ensure that elected officials do the people’s business out in the open.

No doubt some public officials — or their appointed delegates — consider such access a nuisance. It’s easier to hash out plans in private, away from meddlesome citizens who will question, challenge, resist or criticize.

But that’s how democracy works.

Justin Kippenberger, president of the Derby school board, must have realized that when he voted against delegating the decision on reopening to a closed-door committee:

“These are very sensitive subjects for everybody in the district right now,” he said. “The public did elect us as the board to come in here and make these kinds of decisions.”

Yes, they did.

The public deserves full transparency from public school leaders and officials. We deserve access to discussions and debates about public school business — particularly monumental ones such as when and where and how classes and activities will be conducted during a pandemic.

We ought to be in the room where it happens.

This story was originally published September 1, 2020 at 1:38 PM.