Milford School Board Non-Public Sessions

The Sunday July 22nd editorial in the Nashua Telegraph was titled "A Disturbing Trend in Sealing Minutes." This is a link to the editorial, but you may need to be a subscriber to view it.

The editorial was part of a several months long review by the Nashua Telegraph regarding the Nashua Board of Education's (NBOE) practices for non-public sessions, and the minutes that they keep from the meetings.

The main points that the Nashua Telegraph has been making is that it appears that the NBOE has not been following the spirit nor the letter of the law regarding non-public sessions. You can read the Telegraph to learn all the specific complaints that they have regarding NBOE, and I'm not going to reiterate them all here.

What I do want to say - in my probably biased opinion - is that the Milford School Board (MSB) does a good job of following both the spirit and the letter of the law regarding non-public sessions and the minute taking of those sessions.

New Hampshire Statutes RSA Chapter 91-A details the law regarding meetings and minutes for groups such as the MSB. 91-A lists at length all the specifically-allowed events and the specifically dis-allowed activities. The expectation is that maximum openness of activities is presumed unless there is a specifically-allowed activity that overrides the general guidelines.

These are some of the key non-public session points of 91-A, and the corresponding Milford practices:

* Non-Public sessions must be posted in advance with a description of the reason for the non-public session. All MSB meeting are posted as per the detailed requirements. The specific section of 91-A that allows a non-public session to occur is referenced in the posting.

* Only topics specifically allowed to be discussed in non-public session can be discussed in non-public session. The MSB does a good job of staying on topic during non-public sessions. We are careful to stay on topic and not drift to discussions of items that are not allowed to be discussed in non-public. There have been several instances where we have cut-off discussions when we were moving to a topic that is not allowed to be discussed in non-public.

RSA 91-A lists the topics that are allowed to be discussed in non-public. An example is 91-A:3 II. (a) The dismissal, promotion or compensation of any public employee... As per this particular section, we routinely discussion compensation levels of district employees in non-public session rather than in public session. I view this as a good practice, since it allows us to be more open with our questioning and discussions about an employee, and it allows us to come to a better understanding of the situation. We want to know all the good points and all the bad points about an employee when setting salaries. If we had to be in public session, then the bad points might not be addressed since we would not want to accidentally disclose something that might not be accurate.

* Non-public minutes need to be kept and publicly disclosed. The MSB provides minutes of all non-public sessions. Any decisions that are reached are recorded, and any votes that are taken are listed along with the names of the members and their votes.

* Minutes can be withheld (commonly known as sealed) if certain specific guidelines are met. The MSB will occasionally seal the minutes of a non-public session if the guidelines of RSA 91-A:3 III. are met. The minutes are unsealed if the reasons for the sealing are no longer valid. A hypothetical example would be if we were discussing the purchase of real estate and we voted for the district representative to make an offer on the property along with specific approvals for counter-offers. We would seal the minutes that outlined our negotiating plans until the negotiations were complete. We would then unseal the minutes.

Once a year at the final meeting before the election of new board members, the MSB reviews the status of the minutes that are still sealed to see if there has been a change in conditions that would allow the minutes to be unsealed. There are usually none that have had a change of status, and they just remain sealed. An example of a non-public minutes that will probably remain sealed forever would be one that was a disciplinary hearing for a student. There would be no point in opening-up this type of thing to public scrutiny, and discussing things that would affect adversely the reputation of any person is one of the items that is specifically allowed to be withheld from public inspection.