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Asheville school board narrows how members should request detailed contract information
Summary
After weeks of voluminous board emails about contracts, members agreed to channel large or repetitive requests to the chair and superintendent to determine whether staff time should be dedicated to responses; the board said routine or distilled questions should be handled without exhaustive document reviews.
At a November work session, Asheville City Schools board chair Sarah opened a wide-ranging discussion about how board members should request information about contracts and memorandums of understanding.
"This board and any board acts as a body," Sarah said, asking whether staff should be directed to provide all information sought in emails or whether inquiries that amount to a project should be elevated to a board agenda. The chair told members to email prioritized bullets rather than sending voluminous lists that require lengthy staff review.
Board member Pepe described his process of systematically reviewing past contracts and producing long lists of questions. "It is my process to go through each contract, figure it out, make a list of questions, and look for the patterns," Pepe said, adding he shared the questions to be transparent about potential process problems such as missed cancellation deadlines and occasional contract oversights.
Superintendent Dr. Maggie (first referenced as Maggie) and central-office staff told the board that very long question lists create a significant workload. "One or two questions is fine ... but when it's as many as it was, that's a significant amount of work," Maggie said, noting staff attempted to answer a handful of queries that day but needed more time to check with vendors and attorneys.
Legal counsel Anna advised the board that circulating a set of questions to all members and asking whether the board wants to consider them as a project is permitted so long as members avoid back-and-forth deliberation by email that would violate open-meetings rules.
Several board members urged a middle path: distill patterns and top-line concerns (for example, whether Social Security numbers are redacted) into a short set of bullets that staff can address on a cover sheet or that the chair could decide to place on an agenda. "If it's something that is to be voted on ... we are talking about contracts. The only one that's up for approval is the one with the Asheville Police Department," Sarah said, pointing to the APD contract discussion as the place where a fuller review might be warranted.
The board concluded it will not require staff to answer exhaustive historic-question lists as routine email requests; instead members should consolidate questions into manageable bullets, and the chair and superintendent will assess whether a request rises to the level of a project that should come back to the full board for direction.
