A new superintendent and a newly seated board president have not been enough to change some old habits at the Mobile County Board of School Commissioners, according to board watchers who say two commissioners held a private meeting with a school system employee outside of public view earlier this month.
Board members Fleet Belle and Hazel Fournier were the subject of scrutiny after the closed-door session came to light, drawing renewed criticism of a board that has spent much of the past few years dealing with turnover and turmoil at the top. The meeting took place away from cameras and the public agenda, the kind of informal gathering that has repeatedly put the board at odds with expectations of transparency in how it conducts the public’s business.
The episode is a reminder of just how much scrutiny falls on the board that operates out of the historic former Barton Academy building in downtown Mobile, the 19th-century structure that for generations has served as the administrative home of the county’s public school system. Alabama’s Open Meetings Act generally requires elected bodies, including school boards, to conduct their deliberations and decision-making in sessions open to the public, with only narrow exceptions such as certain personnel and legal matters. Gatherings involving individual members and staff that fall outside that framework tend to fuel suspicion that the real decisions are being made away from the public record, even when no law is technically broken.
The concern comes at what should be something of a fresh start for the board. Roy Nichols took over as superintendent only weeks earlier, succeeding Harold Dodge, whose departure had itself been a source of upheaval within a system that had also seen a sitting board member impeached and removed from office in recent years. A relatively new board president had likewise just taken the gavel, raising hopes among some that the board’s culture might shift along with its leadership.
Those hopes are now being tempered by skepticism. Critics of the board’s practices say they see little evidence so far that the change at the top has translated into a change in how business gets done, and they are watching to see whether Nichols is willing to press the board toward greater openness even as he settles into a superintendent’s post that comes with a substantial salary and plenty of institutional pressure to avoid rocking the boat.
For a school system that educates tens of thousands of children across Mobile County and controls a budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars, the question of whether its governing board conducts business in full view of the taxpayers who fund it is more than a procedural footnote. It goes to whether the public can trust that decisions about hiring, spending and policy are being made on the merits, in the open, rather than worked out beforehand behind closed doors.