School Board Makes a Habit of Closed Meetings

The Los Angeles Board of Education meets more often in secret than in the open, and routinely hashes out far-reaching decisions in the comfort of a sequestered room away from public view.

Locked in a culture of secrecy, the board spends hours behind closed doors deliberating everything from pay raises for top administrators to addition of another teaching day to the school year with virtually no public give and take.

A Times review of meeting records and interviews with board members and district staff shows that the school board meets 90 minutes in closed session for every 60 minutes in public, and typically conducts unrecorded straw votes on difficult issues until a majority emerges.

The board’s practice is in sharp contrast to those of other government agencies and stretches the spirit of the state law that requires all elected officials to conduct business in public, with few exceptions.

The board holds closed meetings three or four times a month and almost always before its regular public meetings, which are held every other Monday. For those kept waiting hours while the secret sessions drag on, the open meetings that follow are little more than scripted shows that seem to be for the benefit of the television cameras.

As a consequence, the public is cut out of discussions about important topics, such as the site of the new district headquarters. Parents, students, teachers and other members of the community are denied the opportunity to see how their elected officials make decisions: who persuades, who capitulates and how they stand up to pressures from the district’s formidable bureaucracy.

“Sometimes, people go to meetings and say, ‘Why am I sitting here? Eighty percent of it is going to be closed anyway!’ ” said Steven Soboroff, an advisor to Mayor Richard Riordan who was outraged last month when the board secretly overturned a recommendation of the school bond oversight committee he heads.

“We still don’t know what happened, who influenced it,” Soboroff said. “That’s the problem with the closed session. No one knows.”

Members Blame Lack of Discipline

A majority of board members interviewed for this story defended the amount of time they spend in closed session. They emphasized that they comply with the letter of the state law governing public meetings, which allows private discussions of personnel matters, labor or land negotiations, litigation and threatened litigation.

Two board members conceded that the closed meetings run too long and blamed a lack of discipline. “I think the board is in need of training,” said member Victoria Castro.

The district’s general counsel, Richard K. Mason, said it is wrong to judge the propriety of the closed meetings by their length. The public interest is best served, he said, when the board members take all the time they need to absorb complicated legal issues. He also said secret sessions are useful because board members are able to have more candid discussions about their options in private than in public.

But a former board member who now works for the J. Paul Getty Trust said he concluded during his eight-year tenure that the public’s interest was abused by a tendency to sweep too many issues under the broad protection of confidentiality.

“I think the district board and staff have fallen in the habit of using closed sessions . . . on a routine basis to discuss almost everything that falls under the categories permitted, rather than in the rare instances that something is particularly sensitive,” said Mark Slavkin, who retired from the board last July.

A Times review of board minutes from the annual meeting last July to Feb. 23--the last date for which minutes were available--shows that the board met 161 hours in closed session, an average of five hours per meeting, compared to 107 hours before the public.

The time in closed session is largely devoted to giving direction to staff on litigation and negotiations, and receiving briefings on items that will later be voted on in public after open discussion.

The state’s public meeting law, called the Brown Act, does not limit the length of closed sessions. But a sampling of other governing agencies, including the Los Angeles City Council, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, and the state’s four next-largest school districts, shows that the Los Angeles Unified school board spends a far greater percentage of its time behind closed doors. A clerk for the Los Angeles City Council estimated that its members spend five times as long in public session as in closed discussions.

“Either this board is in a lot more trouble than the average, or they’re using closed sessions for a lot of discussions that should be public,” said Terry Francke, general counsel for the First Amendment Coalition, which monitors Brown Act compliance.

Few regular meetings scheduled after a closed session started on time, and many were delayed as much as three hours.

Last summer, the runaway closed sessions became an embarrassment when groups of students and teachers were regularly kept waiting hours to receive commendations at the beginning of scheduled meetings.

Rather than shorten its meetings, however, the board solved the problem by moving the proclamation ceremony to another day.

‘Staff Dollars Being Wasted’

The following examples give a flavor of what the board has done in closed session:

* Spent several weeks reviewing accountability standards for about 30 top administrators. Later approved in public session, with little discussion, these standards triggered a 3% pay increase.

* Received a briefing by staff members on a proposed land swap with the state to acquire a site at 1st Street and Broadway for a new district headquarters. Although a tentative agreement has been signed, the proposal was not reported to the public.

* Hammered out a decision to spend millions of dollars on bungalows that will function as classrooms. There was no discussion when the board cast its vote in public, overruling a recommendation by the bond oversight committee that considered the bungalows too expensive.

That decision was particularly galling to committee Chairman Soboroff, a fervent advocate of government openness.

Soboroff and another member of the bond oversight committee, Los Angeles Deputy City Manager Timothy Lynch, said they have been alarmed by the amount of time the school board spends in closed meetings.

Lynch said he is shocked to see highly paid school officials waiting until 10 or 11 p.m. to make presentations to the board.

“That’s valuable staff dollars being wasted,” Lynch said. “You have to really wonder if that is a level of disrespect, or are they so wrapped up in all their little troubles that they’re oblivious to it?”

Soboroff said his former experience as a harbor commissioner convinced him that closed meetings discourage public participation. When he joined the Harbor Commission, no one attended the meetings.

“We figured it out,” he said. “Why would someone come to the meeting when all we do is bang the gavel down and go into closed session?”

Once he curtailed the closed sessions, people began to show up. “Now, hundreds of people go to those meetings,” Soboroff said.

School board President Julie Korenstein said the closed sessions are necessary to handle the district’s huge volume of litigation and matters related to employee relations.

But Castro and board member Barbara Boudreaux acknowledge that the meetings last too long, and hold their fellow members responsible.

Castro says the meetings are slowed down by what she calls the game of “40 questions” played by some members who don’t trust the district staff.

Boudreaux said some members are constantly “filibustering” when they can’t get others to go along with them, and bring up topics that are not on the agenda, including personal disputes.

“It gets pretty close to being dysfunctional,” Boudreaux said. “They take the closed session as a dress rehearsal for open meetings.”

Another board member, David Tokofsky, said he blames district staff members who want to manipulate the board. They use long briefings to line up board members on sensitive initiatives, such as employee reorganization plans.

“The symbolism of it is they make sure there are more than seven people from staff,” Tokofsky said. “They always outnumber the board. It’s how staff drives things, unfortunately.”

Another theory is that the board members fear alienating their constituents.

“It’s sort of a security blanket they use,” said Los Angeles teachers union President Day Higuchi. “The reason the Los Angeles board spends such a long time in closed session is that it’s the only time they have time to hash things without constituents in the room.”

The use of closed sessions helped the board avoid the wrath of constituents while it considered eliminating citizen advocacy commissions for minority interests, such as blacks, Asians, Latinos, Native Americans and gays and lesbians.

Knowing that the commissions represented strong constituent groups, the board wrestled with the decision during five closed-door session meetings, stretching from December through April.

A board spokesman said the majority had worked hard to make the vote unanimous, so that no member would look good at the expense of another.

Publicly, board members said they were disbanding the commissions on the advice of counsel, who said they were not in compliance with Proposition 209, the 1996 initiative ending preferences in hiring and contracting. The potential for litigation provided the justification for talking about it in secret.

But leaders of the various commissions said they believe the secrecy was merely a cover for a more self-serving purpose: eliminating rival powers that made life difficult for the board.

“The posture has been not to let any information out,” said said John Fernandez, executive director of the Mexican-American Education Commission.

Mason argues that the extensive private briefings were appropriate because they were part of a broad analysis of Proposition 209 that could have provided grist for a lawsuit attacking the district’s entire desegregation program.

The public’s right to know was served, he said, by the board’s public vote, which was subject to the influence of the audience and open debate.

Voting Behind Closed Doors

Because participants in closed sessions are not supposed to disclose what occurred, it is difficult to determine if the Brown Act has been violated.

But information that has leaked out of closed sessions indicates that the board may have stepped over the line on occasion.

One troubling practice, according to Francke of the First Amendment Coalition, is the use of straw votes to settle an issue before the members vote on it in public.

Castro described the process as “this unofficial thing we do.”

“If we have an agreement and an understanding there are four votes there, that gives direction whether to go forward. Or is there a need for further discussion?” Castro said.

Francke said that process constitutes a preliminary secret ballot, which is prohibited by the Brown Act.

Mason argues that the secret ballot prohibition applies only to open session, precluding votes made in the restroom, for example. Nonetheless, he strongly asserted that the board does not take straw votes.

On the vote to abolish the advocacy commissions, he said, even though some members strongly urged unanimity for the good of the district, he left closed session not knowing the outcome of the vote. He said he could not explain the fact that a senior staff member came out of the closed session and told reporters how the board would vote in public.

Secrecy of Meetings Defended

Francke identified several other items on the board’s closed meeting agendas that he thinks should not have been shielded from public view.

The board was on shaky ground in April when, according to members, it considered censuring Tokofsky for leaking information from a prior closed session. Censure of an elected official can only be done in public, Francke said.

Mason defended the secrecy because the deliberation concerned personnel matters that Tokofsky leaked.

Another case was a board decision a few months ago to pass up millions of dollars from the state to add a teaching day to the school calendar, Francke said.

Board members considered it too much trouble to negotiate with the teachers union for the extra day’s work, board members said. The decision was never reported to the public.

“A board of education’s decision not to take advantage of state funding is never confidential,” Francke said.

Mason countered that a public decision to take the money would have violated labor laws by “jamming” the union with a hard-and-fast position that is subject to negotiation.

While sticking by his judgment that the item merited secret deliberation, Mason conceded that there is a cost to the public’s right to know when such items are kept secret.

“I think it’s a question of degree,” he said. “There are some areas that are gray.”