Nearly a decade ago, I was writing articles about some of the issues that our community was facing under superintendent Dianne Brown Critchlow. Between December 2010 and July 2015, I spoke at more than 20 school board meetings during the 3 minute public comments portion of the meeting because I could bring “concerns” to our school board as a whole because in 2010, school board members didn’t have individual email addresses like they do now. It took several years of me requesting for that to happen. I wrote articles on my blog and provided examples to our school board of what other school districts were doing in the area such as posting bill payments online for their community as well as board meeting packets and board meeting minutes within days of a school board meeting. Many of the school districts that Dianne liked to compare Fox to also posted audio or video recordings of their school board meetings online for the public to review. Asked to Pay For Bill Payments and Board Packets When I asked for copies of bill payments so I could review them to find out how much Fox was spending in legal fees in order to get around writing a 504 plan, I was asked to pay to get copies of the bill payments via my Sunshine Request because the law allows a school district to charge to provide copies of documents. However, other school districts were posting their bill payments online and were available for free. I pointed this out to our school board members at the time during public comments and via email. It took years for that to occur and it wasn’t until the very end of Dianne’s tenure before that started to happen. One thing that wasn’t posted online was the credit card statements. I asked our school board members during public comments at the February 2014 school board meeting as to whether or not they were being provided copies of the credit card statements with the board packets and bill payments each month for review since Fox had paid more than $2.1 million in credit card bills in the first half of the 2013-2014 school year
It became obvious that they hadn’t been getting copies of the credit card statements when I made a Sunshine Request to get copies of the credit card statements and I was asked to pay between $160 and $170 to provide me copies of those statements. It wasn’t until my Sunshine Request was fulfilled in the fall of 2014 that I noticed that copies of the credit card statements were FAXed to the district. Apparently, getting copies of those credit card statements for the school board was a problem too. Bill Payments Missing from Board Packets I'll never forget the comment I received after a school board meeting from former board member Dan Smith when I asked about posting the bill payments online. He told me that it would lead to more questions from the community. That was a pretty interesting response given the fact that bill payments are public records. Even after the board packets started getting posted online, the bill payments didn't get posted with them. When I asked about that, I was told that they didn't get posted because there were students names on the checks and that it was a privacy issue. It soon became apparent that the bill payments needed to get posted online with the board packets in order to keep the public informed about what was being spent by our school district each month. For ease of access for the community, I started posting copies of school board meeting minutes for the public to review and for me as well for quick access over on my blog. During the 2014-2015 school year, board meeting minutes started to get posted more quickly for the public and archived on the district’s website. I had to pay to obtain many of the board meeting packets in the early days when I made Sunshine Requests for copies of them even though they were already in PDF format. Below is a link to where you can review board meeting minutes and some board meeting packets dating back to the 2001-2002 school year. There's some history documented in those board meeting minutes and board packets of what went on at Fox during that time. There just wasn't a lot of detail. At least not compared to being able to watch video recordings of BOE meetings and being able to download board meeting packets from BoardDocs.