School Board Transparency a Challenge in Digital Age
Santa Fe school board members turned over nearly 40 pounds of business correspondence from their personal email accounts.
—Luis Sánchez Saturno/The New Mexican
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CommentsSchool board members are struggling to interpret laws that govern where and how they do business now that as many conversations take place digitally as they do face to face.
As online and digital interactions increase, so too does public concern that officials have more opportunities to violate state open-meetings and open-records laws meant to prevent them from communicating secretly.
At the same time, others argue that today's capabilities for communicating and accessing information instantly are making government more transparent, and the public, in turn, more engaged.
"School boards have to realize most of the ways the open-meetings and -records laws have been written mean there should be an automatic interpretation that using new technology to communicate applies as a meeting and a record," said Mark Blom, a senior staff attorney with the National School Boards Association. "These issues can all be