The complaint was submitted early in June 2007 and was based on the fact that a meeting was held on May 9, 2007, by a sub-committee of the "High School Planning Team" for the purpose of devising questions to be posed to the "Community Response Team" (CRT). No public notice, as required by law, was prepared for this meeting, and the resulting questions were not made public before posing them to the CRT. At least 2 other meetings of this group had been similarly held without public notice.
Open meetings laws were enacted to ensure that government remains by the people and FOR the people. These laws require all government bodies to conduct their business in public setting. The public has to be properly notified.
This is not the first time that the Sun Prairie School Board has been the subject of complaints regarding violation of Open Meetings Law. The most recent prior incidence occurred in 2004. As a result of that complaint, the Board was required to undergo intensive re-training regarding open meetings law. Current board members Mary Ellen Havel-Lang and Caren Diedrich were on the board at that time, so they should certainly know better. That training costs the taxpayers approximately $10,000 at the time. Well, at least now, administration could pay such a bill without having to obtain school board approval first! The point is that these elected officials should know the law and abide by the law to avoid these costs to the taxpayers.
What SP-EYE finds most incredible regarding the current complaint, which was written up in the July 26, 2007 edition of the Sun Prairie STAR, is that if STAR readers check out the "Winnowings" column on page 5 of Section 2, there is a note that "10 years ago, July 24, 1997, the Sun Prairie School Board conceded that they "may have violated open meetings law" when they voted on a re-organization plan for District administration in an improperly closed session.
As President Bush was once quoted,
"There's an old saying ...that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."
The Department of Justice has developed a great primer on open meetings law in Wisconsin that can be downloaded at:
http://www.doj.state.wi.us/AWP/OpenMeetings/2005-OML-GUIDE.pdf
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