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Officials in the Fort Worth Independent School District may have broken the state’s public meetings law last month when they gave school board members a closed-door briefing about the district’s state test scores.
The Texas Education Agency released scores from last spring’s State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR, exams on June 14. Both in Fort Worth ISD and statewide, scores largely held steady or slipped compared to last year.
During a meeting three days before the release, members of the Fort Worth ISD’s school board got an advance briefing in executive session on how students in the district fared on the test. The presentation appeared nowhere on the meeting’s agenda.
In a statement, district officials acknowledged that trustees got a briefing on STAAR scores in closed session, but said it was as a part of a conversation with the district’s attorney about an ongoing lawsuit related to state accountability scores. Fort Worth ISD is one of several districts that are suing the state education agency over its A-F accountability system.
“Any discussion about STAAR Scores with the Trustees on June 11th that may have occurred in closed session was in the context of legal advice and potential litigation as allowed by Texas Government Code 551.071,” district officials wrote. Texas Government Code 551.071 is the provision in the state’s Open Meetings Act that allows governing bodies like school boards to meet in closed session to seek advice from their attorneys about pending or contemplated litigation or settlement offers.
Bill Aleshire, an Austin-based attorney and former Travis County judge, said boards that don’t offer any information about the subjects of closed-door discussions with their lawyers are violating state law. When boards go into closed session to talk to their attorneys, they’re required to post an agenda item stating what they’re getting legal advice about, he said. The Fort Worth ISD board agenda states only that the board would get advice from its attorney, and says nothing about the subject of that advice.
A board could legally meet in closed session to talk to its attorney about the legal implication of its STAAR scores, Aleshire said. But because state test scores are a matter of great public concern, he said, districts need to be as clear as possible about what’s being discussed. There’s case law in Texas that requires districts to provide more clarity about what board members discuss in closed meetings when the topic is a matter of community interest — “The more public interest there is in an item that would be on the agenda, the more specific they need to be about it,” he said.
Kelley Shannon, executive director of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas, said in an emailed statement that meeting agendas need to give the public enough information to understand what their government officials are discussing in closed sessions.
“That’s the whole point of the Texas Open Meetings Act,” Shannon said. “The public has a right to know. Elected officials must be transparent, and vague meeting agendas — especially when something of high importance is under discussion — violates the spirit of the law.”
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