A fair amount of time at Monday's board meeting was spent on declarations - occasionally passionate - in favor of "opening" the CACs (Citizen Advisory Committees). As you certainly know by now, this would allow members of the public to attend these meetings – something the board had previously indicated it was prepared to do. (I said as much back on November 12th.) Since we were already in agreement on this point, the issue for the board was not whether to do it, but how.

As is often the case, the real work of the board begins with the recognition that every decision involves trade-offs – you seldom get an easy choice between doing “the right thing” or “the wrong thing”. It is also the responsibility of the school board to think through the potential consequences of its decisions.

As satisfying as it would be to create a blanket policy that would make the CACs open to the public under all circumstances, it quickly became apparent that for some tasks, confidentiality is important - one example would be a discussion that might occur in the CAC for Safety regarding the status or location of security cameras. But it also became apparent that no board member knows enough detail about how each CAC works to understand what all those tasks might be.

So we concluded by asking that the various CACs provide us with their assessment about when a public presence at a CAC meeting might compromise their work. The board will then have to make some decisions about what to do with that information.

One option would be for the board to approve a list of exceptions, or perhaps criteria for exceptions. But it may be that when confidentiality is important, those tasks would no longer be the CAC’s responsibility - resulting, ironically, in less public input into those decisions.

Another issue that remains for the board to resolve are when and how the public will be given time to speak in the CACs.