Christopher Peak Photo
Darnell Goldson and Ed Joyner talk bylaws at a Governance Committee meeting.
Board of Education members must fill out disclosure forms, recuse themselves from awarding contracts to their employer, and avoid trading emails outside meeting times.
Those new rules are among the changes that made it into revised bylaws approved by the Board of Education at a meeting Tuesday night at Celentano School. After scrapping some controversial provisions and saving a few technical issues for a later meeting, the board voted in those revisions unanimously.
While the tedious, page-by-page process that had several board members yawning, President Darnell Goldson upheld his promise to create a more transparent board by overhauling bylaws for the first time this century.
The newly approved 49-page bylaws set out the board’s overarching goals, the makeup of the hybrid membership, its leadership positions and standing committees. They set a date in January by which all meetings will be scheduled each year, plus deadlines for posting notices and minutes. They finally resolved a quorum issue that led to effective boycotts last year during the superintendent search, allow votes to phoned in, and prohibit unruly conduct at meetings.
Each board member will be hooked up with an official district-run email address and loaned computers, modems and other hardware. According to new rules that line up with the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act, board members are prohibited from deliberating with each other on those accounts. A process will be worked out later for releasing any inadvertent email communication that constitutes a meeting.
The bylaws describe an orientation process for incoming members, and they allow further professional development through school events, board retreats, conferences and magazine subscriptions for which they can be reimbursed. The board will cover legal expenses for members who file lawsuits based on board business as long as the lawsuits maintain the board’s integrity “as a separate and distinct legal entity” or “reasonably benefit” all board members.
Other new rules prohibit board members from participating in discussion when they have a conflict of interest for family ties, business relationships or monetary gain. A three-member ethics committee will issue advisory opinions and enforce the rules.
For months, with assistance from the Connecticut Association of Boards of Education (CABE), the Governance Committee has been revamping the bylaws, the board’s guiding document that hadn’t been looked at much since the rules were first adopted in 1999, despite a charter revision that substantially changed the board’s makeup.
Not So Fast?
Liam Brennan: Some of these bylaws weaken anti-corruption measures.
But some proposed last-minute additions led to an uproar. The watchdog group NHPS Advocates collected signatures from more than 100 parents and teachers opposing specific changes.
“[O]n the whole these bylaws bring a much-needed structure to the Board’s conduct. However, after analyzing the draft bylaws, there are a number of proposed provisions that appear to weaken anti-corruption protections, bind future Boards of Education and, thus, future generations of students and parents, and concentrate power in the hands of the Board president,” the letter stated. “These are concerning measures that impose significant burdens on the New Haven school system and threaten the public’s already tenuous faith in the Board of Education.”
Most controversially, NHPS Advocates said, one proposed change gave the president power to reprimand, suspend and expel colleagues, after a vote by the full board.
After hearing from the Advocates, the board scrapped that and a few other contentious provisions.
But the board members kept the new rules that allow members to seek reimbursement for out-of-state conferences and to obtain computers for setting up a district-managed email.
They also stayed firm that any change to the bylaws should require a two-thirds vote, rather than a simple majority, which they said is a standard practice at other governing bodies.
Most of the comments Tuesday focused on the president’s power to take control of meetings. Coming a week after Goldson apologized for appearing to target additional school closures at leaders on the Board of Alders who didn’t support a $5 million budget increase, several speakers said no board member should have the ability to shut down discussion or censure other board members.
“Culture and rules in our institutions are important. They shape our behavior and our expectations,” said Liam Brennan, a public-school father of four and until recently a federal prosecutor who handled corruption cases.
“I am sure you can understand how increasing the vote requirement to change bylaws while assigning more power to the president might raise red flags for parents, particularly after the various incidents the Board of Education has had over the last year: the cancellation of interviews with possible superintendent candidates, the well-televised disagreements between board members and then the unwelcome playing of politics or whatever mistake was made with these six schools. These actions do not instill confidence, and when new rules seem to increase power to certain members while taking it away from other members and then make it harder to change the rules back, that’s concerning.”
In their letter, NHPS Advocates pushed back on three proposals would have allowed the president to decide all questions of order, to make the public obey his directives and to punish fellow board members, if he had support from the rest of the board.
Mayor Toni Harp: “We’re adults.”
Mayor Toni Harp said she wasn’t sure that the school board had power to remove members whom she had appointed or the voters had elected. At the meeting, she asked for the language about “punishments” to be removed.
“We’re adults,” she said.
Goldson quickly gave in. “Because it’s so confusing, we’ll just take it out,” he said, as soon as those bylaws came up for discussion.
But some questioned why Goldson brought it up at all. Andrew Elliot, an Edgewood parent who called the rules “antidemocratic,” said, “I’m concerned that these two large issues” — school closures and the president’s powers — “have been thrown out there, the public has seen them, and they’ve kind of been brought back. That feels like a test of if it’s acceptable, and it’s not acceptable.”
Jamell Cotto and Darnell Goldson, with a stack of bylaws.
After the meeting, Goldson said he’d felt the changes were necessary to define conduct at board meetings. He said the board pulled language from CABE and the BOA for the draft.
“We have to have order. That’s about taking care of our business and moving forward,” he said. “We may have disagreements, but that’s why we have rules.”
He added that he felt attacked by NHPS Advocates.
“I have no interest in taking power,” he said. “I think it’s a political attempt to weaken and damage me and other board members. I don’t think it’s mistrust, because we haven’t done anything to be mistrusted for, as far as I’m concerned. Nobody seemed to have any issues when other people were running the board, when this stuff was happening. When we try to correct it, all of a sudden, it’s the same people who are saying the same thing and providing misinformation.”
In the coming months, the board will turn its attention to the hefty task of updating the rest of its 521-page policy manual, which covers almost every topic imaginable, from disciplining students and administering medication to setting graduation requirements and selecting new school sites.