Asheville City Schools board narrows how members request contract information, citing staff burden

Asheville City Schools Board Chair Sarah opened a work‑session discussion about a series of detailed board member requests for contract and memorandum information, saying she had directed the matter to a public meeting after legal counsel advised it was appropriate to discuss in public.

The board’s immediate decision: staff are not obligated to answer the full backlog of voluminous questions submitted about contracts approved in August–October. Instead, members agreed that long lists of queries that create substantial staff work should be distilled into a few broad, pattern‑oriented questions or raised as possible projects for the full board to consider.

Why it matters: multiple board members said the volume and depth of the requests were pulling district staff away from core work. One board member summarized the concern: “It took me hours this weekend to read these,” and several administrators noted that answering dozens of detailed items can require multiple staff days. Superintendent Maggie Fuhrman and central‑office staff said short, targeted questions and standardized cover‑sheet responses (for routine procurement information) would reduce repeated work.

Legal counsel advised a clear email process: sharing a list of questions with the board is permissible so long as members do not engage in a back‑and‑forth that would constitute a serial meeting. Counsel said the chair can monitor high‑volume requests and, when appropriate, place them on a public agenda for a board decision about whether staff time should be invested in detailed follow‑up.

Board members described a middle path: a board member may continue to research and compile long question sets, but the requests should be summarized into key themes when routed to the superintendent or chair. The chair said that if a request appears to be a project that requires substantial staff time, the superintendent and chair will decide whether to assign staff time or bring the item back to the board for a determination.

What’s next: the board did not adopt a formal written policy change at the meeting, but asked that future high‑work requests be flagged, that staff prepare general cover‑sheet answers for recurring procurement questions (for example, whether Social Security numbers have been redacted, or whether multiple quotes were sought), and that the chair and superintendent coordinate on whether a request should become a board project.