Montgomery County’s school board has broken state open meetings laws multiple times in the past several months, according to an independent ethics board. The state’s Open Meetings Compliance Board ruled that the school board was in violation when choosing its next superintendent and, previously, over a contentious decision to turn an organic farm in Potomac into soccer fields.
The school board should not have met behind closed doors to select residents to interview prospective superintendents, the ethics board said in a three-page opinion: “Discussions about whether and how to involve the public in the hiring process implicate policy matters. … We encourage the county board to unseal and make available for inspection any closed-session minutes, or portions thereof, that pertain to discussions that should have been held in the open.”
