GPA attorney says Dalton school board violated Opens Record Act

Board met in Chattanooga with superintendent hire

By Mark Millican

markmillican@daltoncitizen.com

Although Dalton school board chairman Steve Williams says no violations of the Georgia Opens Record Act occurred in the hiring of a new superintendent, an attorney with the Georgia Press Association says that is exactly what happened.

Board members hired Jim Hawkins, superintendent of the Killeen (Texas) Independent School District, last Tuesday in a called meeting after accepting the retirement of current superintendent Orval Porter, effective in June of next year. Hawkins is set to start in January, when Porter will become “superintendent emeritus.”

Under state law, a school board must “make a decision somewhere authorizing someone to make a search for a replacement superintendent,” said David Hudson, counsel to the Georgia Press Association. “That decision and authorization to proceed had to be made in a public meeting to be legal.”

On Monday, Williams acknowledged that never happened.

Williams said Porter told him “sometime in 2007” that he was thinking of retiring and the board should probably begin looking for a replacement. Williams said he contacted former Dalton superintendent Allene Magill, now the executive director of the Professional Association of Georgia Educators (PAGE), to ask about a successor to Porter.

“I asked her, ‘Who’s out there who would be really good for us?’ and she mentioned Hawkins,” Williams said. “I asked Orval the same question back in the spring— how about a ‘head’s up’ regarding who’s out there?”

Williams said Porter told him there was a guy in Texas who was “dynamite” and the board might want to look at him. Hawkins and his wife came to Dalton in June to talk to Williams and board member Rick Fromm. Williams said he told Hawkins to “get me a resume´” and added after he received it, “I looked it over, not the board.”

Williams said he also contacted education consultant George Thompson, whom he said at one time did work for the school system, for some “friendly advice” about Hawkins on a non-contract basis.

“He told me, ‘This guy is unbelievable — if you can hire that guy you better hire him.’ About that time I talked to the rest of the board and made (them) aware of it, that Rick and I had talked to him and checked into it,” Williams said.

He said the board did not take an official vote authorizing the recruitment of Hawkins and that he had initially acted on his own before contacting Fromm.

Williams also said the full board — including vice chairman Mark Orr, Tulley Johnson and Danny Crutchfield — met with Hawkins in Chattanooga in “the first or second week of September.” Asked if the meeting had been advertised per requirements of the Open Records Act at least 24 hours in advance, Williams responded that since the board was meeting outside the district with a public official, the meeting did not have to be publicized.

Hudson called that reasoning “bogus” under state law.

“This is an exception,” he said in an e-mail about O.C.G.A. § 50-14-1(a)(2), “that allows board members to attend state, regional and national meetings of their particular types of government agencies, or to meet as a group with the governor or some other state official in Atlanta, or to meet with a congressional delegation or an agency in Washington. It does not allow a secret interview of a candidate for office.”

Williams maintains he and the other board members “never violated” the Open Meetings Law.

“We did have a meeting in Chattanooga,” he said. “Technically, did we violate it? No. Did we violate the spirit of it? I could understand that someone could make that argument.”

Williams said he spoke with Sam Harben,who is with a law firm that specializes in representing school boards before the hiring process began.

“I talked to him twice,” he said, “and told him we had identified the guy we wanted to recruit. He told me we would not have to advertise (the position) if we were recruiting, but if we opened it up for applications we’d have to advertise.”

Orr said the board “did seek counsel” from Harben.

“He told us we were within our rights to do it the way we did it,” Orr said. “I guess the intent of the secrecy of the whole process, not as a board but in finding a candidate, was because there are spouses of some of the school board members who work in the system. We wanted to try and keep it quiet before Dr. Porter announced his retirement.”

His wife, Laura Orr, is the principal of Roan School and has been employed by the system for 24 years, he said.

Fromm said “some of the (process) demands secrecy — it’s a necessity.”

“I felt like we acted appropriately,” he said. “We have obligations from a moral, ethical and legal standpoint, and I felt like we served the community well in getting the superintendent. Due diligence was followed in the process.

“To imply that the decision was made in September is beyond false — that’s not accurate.”