Friday, February 23, 2007

School Board Minutes Takes Weeks

An article in the Maryland Independent today reports on the inordinate amount of time it takes for Board Minutes to be available to the public.

View the article here (link to be posted when available).

Just an idea...
maybe a good compromise, just to start with, would be for the Board to approve the minutes from the Board meeting at the work session. For example, the minutes from 2/13 Board meeting could be approved at the 2/26 work session. They could then be available to the public by the end of the month and prior to the next Board meeting where action items or voted on. I will attempt to make suggestion at our discussion at the work session.

In addition, contrary to a statement in the article, DRAFT minutes ARE made available to the public when they are posted on the agenda for the Board meeting. Unfortunately, this is done only a few days to a week prior to the meeting. My point being, if the DRAFT minutes are being posted as DRAFT minutes on the agenda a few days prior to the meeting, why couldn’t they be posted as DRAFT minutes a few weeks before the meeting?

UPDATE: Sorry for the misinformation. The minutes are NOT posted for public on the agenda until AFTER the Board approves it. Anyone out there with any legal background? Is there any legal issues preventing the Board from posting DRAFT minutes?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Draft minutes are NOT posted prior to the meeting where they are approved. It does show on the public site that members will be approving the minutes but an attachment with the draft minutes are never posted.