Editorial: School board failing public

Residents are ill-served by district officials who thwart principles of open government.

The Lawrence school district and the Lawrence school board are failing constituents when it comes to open government.

The district’s instinct is to keep the public in the dark about all matters perceived to be the least bit controversial. Sadly, the public’s chosen representatives on the Lawrence school board are all too comfortable acquiescing to that approach rather than standing up for the public’s right to know. School board members Marcel Harmon, Shannon Kimball, Kristie Adair, Jessica Beeson, Jill Fincher, Rick Ingram and Vanessa Sanburn are failing the people who elected them, and it shouldn’t be OK.

This week, the board voted to accept the resignation of a teacher without naming the teacher. The decision to keep the teacher’s name secret conflicts with the Kansas Open Records Act.

The Act makes clear that all records of public agencies are open to public inspection with limited exceptions defined in Kansas Statutes 45-221. Specifically, item (4) of the statute states that personnel records are exempt from disclosure “except that this exemption shall not apply to the names, positions, salaries or actual compensation employment contracts or employment-related contracts or agreements and lengths of service of officers and employees of public agencies once they are employed as such.”

It’s indisputable — Kansas lawmakers went to great lengths to ensure the names, positions and compensation of employees of public agencies are matters of public record.

Contrast what the law requires with what the School Board did Monday night when it voted to approve the resignation of “an employee who was the subject of (a) pending investigation.” Given the opportunity to name the employee, the district and board refused, saying that doing so would violate the employee’s confidentiality.

Except that when it comes to employment status with the district, the employee has no right to confidentiality. Teacher contracts are with the local board of education; thus the board is required to act on contract changes, including teacher resignations. Such changes must be acted on in public session and since state law dictates that the employees’ names and positions are a matter of public record, there’s no valid reason for not releasing them. Put another way, the state has dictated that the public has the right to know the who, what, when and where when it comes to teachers in public schools.

That’s why, until this most recent resignation, the school board has always named employees in acting on their employment status.

The irony of this specific situation is that the board identified the resigning teacher as the “subject of a pending investigation” and then said it couldn’t name the teacher because of employee confidentiality rules. The board could have simply accepted the resignation of the teacher, named him and identified his school and the subject that he taught. Doing so would have met the requirements of the law and protected the teacher’s confidentiality.

One of the important roles that newspapers like the Journal-World play in their communities is to be vigilant in advocating for open government. It’s a lot easier for public agencies to make difficult decisions in secret, and if open records and open meetings violations aren’t challenged, such misguided behavior is reinforced. As this latest episode shows, the Lawrence School Board has demonstrated a disturbing lack of transparency in conducting its business. That needs to change immediately.