Why did Blue Valley school board pass the buck on secretive reopening decision?
It turns out the Blue Valley school board never actually decided how to start school this fall — and an attorney says the board’s delegating the decision may have led to violations of the law.
The board relied on administrators and undisclosed members of a “gating criteria” committee to decide whether to restart schools and sports. This, despite the fact that the choice of whether and how to reopen schools during the coronavirus pandemic is any school board’s most consequential decision in years, if not decades. It affects students’ health and readiness, as well as parents’ ability to work and make a living, not to mention the business community’s ability to get by.
“It changes every aspect of someone’s life. It’s incredibly impactful,” says Ryan Kriegshauser, attorney for Blue Valley parent and volunteer Laura Rozell.
Kriegshauser challenged the district in an Aug. 27 letter to better explain how it was decided Aug. 21 to start school remotely for middle- and high-school students, start elementary students in a mix of in-person and remote classes and suspend all extracurricular activities for two weeks.
The Star Editorial Board — while in agreement with Blue Valley’s cautious approach to reopening schools and restarting sports — was as mystified as Kriegshauser by the unexplained sequence of events.
The school board voted Aug. 18 to set out gating criteria that would take into account various data points regarding COVID-19 cases in the area. But after directing the superintendent to launch a committee review and apply the data, the board took no further public action. Instead, the district simply announced school reopening plans on Aug. 21.
Where did those plans come from? It was unclear even Tuesday, some two weeks later, who actually made these crucial decisions.
Kriegshauser argues that if the board delegated its school-opening authority to the superintendent or the committee, it may have done so unlawfully. And even if the delegating was lawful, he claims the committee’s subsequent meeting in private was a violation of the Kansas Open Meetings Act.
Similarly, a Wichita schools advisory committee on canceling fall sports met in private Monday night, which is arguably a violation of the state’s open meetings law.
When a school board is facing such a significant decision, how can it be made in such murkiness in Blue Valley?
Not subject to state open meetings laws
“We don’t know what the decision process was. We don’t even know who made the decision — and what authority they thought they had,” Kriegshauser told The Star Tuesday. Board members, he said, “should do the jobs that they were elected to, and not pass off the responsibility to unelected, unaccountable people.”
At least one board member, Patrick Hurley, seemed during the Aug. 18 meeting to expect further board action on schools reopening. It never came.
The district responded to Kriegshauser Tuesday in a defiant letter arguing that administrators were properly carrying out the school board’s directives, and that such work is not subject to the state open meetings law. The letter also said only “formal actions by the board are relevant,” and not “out-of-context statements by individual board members.”
“It is unfortunate that the Blue Valley Board of Education opted to allow policy to be decided in secret instead of choosing the path of openness and transparency,” said Kriegshauser, who added he was filing an open meetings complaint with the Kansas Attorney General’s office.
“Why is this school board scared of taking a vote on in-person learning?” asked Rozell in a statement to The Star. “What are they trying to hide behind the curtain of bureaucracy and shadow committees? Decisions that adversely affect students’ lives and development require transparency and public deliberation by Blue Valley elected leaders. Instead, school administrators have doubled down on a secret decision-making process that leaves parents in the dark.”
Kriegshauser has been involved in other efforts challenging government decisions during the pandemic, with remarkable success. He was among those who successfully fought Gov. Laura Kelly’s ban on church services; he helped prevent local health department confiscation of businesses’ visitor lists in Linn County; and he helped prevent Johnson County from keeping a fitness facility closed.
Accountability should be demanded in this case. Don’t Blue Valley parents and students have the right to see such monumental decisions as the opening of schools debated in full view? Isn’t that the spirit of the Kansas Open Meetings Act, if not the letter?
This is no small matter. Blue Valley parents are extremely engaged and interested in these proceedings. And even during a pandemic, it’s essential that government decisions be made in the open, and for government officials to be accountable for them.
Parents, students, businesses and taxpayers in Blue Valley deserve no less.
Regardless of the outcome, it’s inarguable that the district and its elected board members could have been infinitely more open and communicative with families on a topic of such tremendous importance to so much of the community.