When New Haveners voted for the first time for school board members this week, they created a body that is larger than the law allows.
City officials knew it, and scrambled behind the scenes to fix it. To no avail.
Now it’s up to the Board of Alders to solve a problem it created. Board President Tyisha Walker said Thursday night she and her colleagues intend to do so by the time the new Board of Education takes office in January.
A charter referendum approved in 2013 created new positions on the BOE: two elected members and two non-voting student members. But it also required the board to have seven voting members. With the new members elected Tuesday night (Edward Joyner and Darnell Goldson), it will have eight.
An apparent glitch in the drafting of the charter left out language that specifically addressed how the board would end up with the seven members. Walker said that she has been made aware of the problem.
“We’re requesting information on what their proposal is at this point,” she said. “I haven’t seen the proposal in writing. We want to see exactly what it is because we don’t want any surprises.” She noted the alders have three more meetings scheduled through the end of 2015, during which time they can make a decision.
The revised charter doesn’t account for how the old board of eight appointed members will become a new “hybrid” school board of only seven voting members, two elected by the public and four appointed by the mayor, plus the mayor herself..
Newly-elected board members Joyner and Goldson will replace two formerly appointed board members, Alex Johnston and Susan Samuels, both of whose appointments will expire in December. The appointments of two more board members, Michael Nast and Alicia Caraballo, are set to expire at the end of 2016.
Johnston said his and Samuels’ terms were extended from September 2015 to December 2015, to synchronize with the start dates of the two elected members.
“If the referendum hadn’t passed, I would [have been] off in September,” he said.
A Sept. 1 memo from Superintendent Garth Harries and Chief Operating Officer Will Clark to Mayor Toni Harp and Corporation Counsel John Rose, obtained by the New Haven Independent, alerted city officials to the charter’s flaw.
According to the memo, “as of January 1st 2016, there will be 8 duly selected voting members – two elected in the upcoming elections, the mayor, and 5 members whose terms have not yet expired. Two members terms will expire at the end of 2016, leaving only one seat for reappointment at that point – but the charter includes no provisions for the transition year of 2016. Our sense is that the issue is an unintended oversight in drafting, and or a misunderstanding of when current board member’s terms actually expire, or both.”
Harries and Clark proposed in their memo that the board should remain at eight members until Nast and Caraballo’s terms expire at the end of the next year. The memo did not propose asking a board member to step down before the end of a term.
Nast said no one had asked him to step down a year earlier and that he would not want to. “I would like to finish out the term I was appointed for,” he said. Caraballo could not be reached for comment.
“At the time [the end of 2016] the Mayor will then have the ability to appoint one member resulting in a Board of seven,” wrote Harries and Clark. “In that transition period, the approach to quorum and voting described below will ensure that Board of Education approved actions remain valid and appropriate. For the year of 2016, when 8 members are seated but the charter calls for 7 members, the Board of Education would preserve a quorum of 5 voting members. For purposes of voting, any member that does not attend, or any member that abstains from voting, would be deemed a ‘non-voting’ member for that particular vote for purposes of the charter.
“If fewer than 8 members are present at a meeting, then, the vote could then proceed along normal majority wins rules, where approval is required for action. That is, four votes would be required to pass an action if 7 or 6 members are present and voting, and three votes if 5 members are present and voting. If 8 members are present, and all are voting, then a five vote super-majority would be necessary for approval – making irrelevant the question of which vote is the ‘additional’ vote compared to the 7 member charter.”
Clark and Harries requested an opinion from Rose regarding their proposed handling of the problem with the charter, to advise them on whether any further action by the Board of Alders would be needed.
On Oct. 6 Rose responded with his own memo to Harp and Harries acknowledging that “there is no question but that the City Charter revision which took effect January 1, 2014 incorporates a flaw in the provisions concerning the composition of the Board of Education.”
Rose said that “the transition language of the new Charter fails to reconcile the reduction in the number of members of the BOE in good standing effective on January 1, 2016,” and he indicated that Clark and Harries had proposed a solution that “can satisfy the existing Board make-up, provide for an appropriate quorum of five (5) voting members at every BOE meeting and, I believe, ensure that the important work of the Board of Education goes forward.”
He recommended that the Board of Alders be made aware of the problem, which Walker indicated it was, and the proposed solution, which apparently has not been formally communicated yet.
“I believe that a formal Resolution of the BOA can be structured to deal with the matter and I propose to work with counsel for the Charter Revision Commission to draft that Resolution,” Rose wrote. “In addition, the sitting voting members of the Board of Education ought be specifically apprised of this issue and of the proposed resolution.”
Aliyya Swaby contributed to this report.
It just never ends. Can we make recommendations of who should quit? Any number should exit for being ineffective, and either one of the newly elected ones should bail for wanting to make decisions before sitting in their first meeting. The NHPS is doomed. Cue the music from the Titanic.