Openness and Transparency

Wednesday, July 08, 2009

  I don’t think a politician has ever run on a platform of being “closed” and “opaque.”  Still, I think “openness” and transparency” are key traits that we need to keep in mind.  Remember when the current Board tried to find a new superintendent, and they kept the names of applicants secret?

Check out this review of newspaper articles from the time…

On February 19, 2008, Ben Fischer from The Cincinnati Enquirer wrote an item entitled “CPS debates public access.”  The article included the following excerpts:

Details of the board- appointed advisory panel aren’t prepared, but the group will likely meet in private and be asked not to discuss the search publicly, board president Eve Bolton said.

Professional search consultants prefer as much confidentiality as possible, said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council for the Great City Schools, because many candidates will withdraw their names rather than let their current employer know they’re looking.

But CPS board members, acknowledging deep public dissatisfaction with the system, say this time may have to be different from the last two superintendent searches.

“We do have to be more inclusive, and we have to be more open,” said Eileen Cooper Reed, chairwoman on the board’s public engagement committee. “I just don’t know how to define that yet…”

The board’s ability to keep the search secret is severely restricted by the state’s open-records laws, said Jack Greiner, a lawyer for Graydon Head & Ritchey, who represents The Enquirer.

Courts have regarded full disclosure as a greater public interest than protecting applicants’ identities, he said. Any paperwork submitted to, or created by, the school board, its search firm or an outside advisory panel is subject to dissemination.

“It’s hard for me to imagine how they could do a legitimate search without creating a record,” he said.

The last two CPS superintendents were hired with little public deliberation…

A month later, and The Cincinnati Enquirer had filed a lawsuit against CPS for refusing to release public records.  The Board decided to send applications to a mailbox, and they decided not to open anything from the mailbox - claiming that documents could not be considered public records if the Board never retrieved them from a P.O. Box and never opened them.  Talk about playing games!

Check out this item from a March 19, 2009 story by Ben Fischer entitled “School Board to open mail”:

The contents of P.O. Box 198008 in the Corryville post office have been a secret guarded so closely that even the school board doesn’t know what is inside.

“I have no idea” how many people have applied, said school board President Eileen Cooper Reed.

Opening the mailbox will trigger the public phase of the school system’s fourth search for a new superintendent this decade. Whoever is picked will become one of the region’s highest-paid government employees and oversee nearly 34,000 students, 2,700 teachers, a massive construction program and a $445 million operating budget.

Working quickly, a community advisory panel will make the first cut, culling the applications to a smaller pool of viable candidates by Friday afternoon. The school board will then begin an in-depth review of the remaining candidates, in hopes of selecting a winner by June 1. The salary is negotiable, but Rosa Blackwell earned $203,820 annually when she retired in 2008.

It’s unclear precisely when the names will go public this week.

On Feb. 11, Cooper Reed said the board would share the names immediately upon opening the mailbox today, and then release the paperwork as soon as confidential information is redacted, possibly one day later.

But on Friday, she said it may be Tuesday morning before anything is public.

How the search will proceed depends heavily on how many candidates apply.

During last year’s failed search, about 30 people applied, and many of those were immediately dismissed as not viable. The board is not using an outside search firm this time, instead conducting its own recruitment.

Board members have been reaching out to nonprofit agencies, education think-tanks, professional associations and elsewhere to solicit applications from viable candidates.

On March 5, The Enquirer filed a lawsuit seeking to force CPS to open the mailbox immediately to respond to a public-records request, arguing the contents of the box are public records whether or not anyone has looked inside. The lawsuit is still pending, but Enquirer attorney Jack Greiner said the newspaper will continue to press the case.

“It violates the law to set an arbitrary date and refuse to look for those records before that date,” Greiner said. “While the resumes will be made available before the court hears the case, the principle needs to be established - a public body cannot manipulate the law in this fashion.”

Cooper Reed said the lawsuit has not changed the board’s tactics, and again defended the use of the mailbox to delay disclosure of the names.

How much additional money does the current board waste when paying fees to The Enquirer’s lawyers?

So when politicians talk about being “open” and “transparent,” what do they mean?  Do they mean setting up secret mailboxes and playing hide-and-seek games with the public?  Or, instead, should everything be open and public from the beginning?

I opt for transparency all the way around.