Secrecy hurts public trust, Everett school officials acknowledge

EVERETT — Everett school officials say they wish they had handled recent questions about the investigation of a principal in a different way.

In the past, staff and elected board members weren’t always forthright with the public, School Board President Ed Petersen said. That’s caused suspicions over trust and secrecy to linger to this day.

“We need to be open, in open communication with the public,” Petersen said. “The processes that we go through and the conversations we have need to be transparent, and we’ve been working this year to create processes and structures to reinforce that.”

Experts say it will take time, and sustained commitment, for district officials to restore credibility in the public’s eye.

Trust in the district took center stage last month, after school officials fielded questions about an investigation into a principal.

The Herald received an anonymous accusation of misconduct against the principal.

When a reporter asked about it, district spokeswoman Mary Waggoner said there was no investigation under way. She didn’t tell the reporter that one had recently concluded, clearing the principal of any wrongdoing.

The accusation itself proved to be of little news value, since it was unfounded.

But, as the district’s internal e-mails quickly demonstrated, the way in which the School District had communicated with its board members and the press caused a stir.

School leaders said they followed the law, and their lawyers’ advice, when responding to questions about the completed internal investigation. The principal’s privacy was their foremost concern.

Experts said that alone won’t do. In part, that’s because trust hinges on public perception, not legal opinions.

“The fact is that every agency says they’re committed to openness and transparency and accountability. We’ve all heard it a thousand times,” said Toby Nixon, president of the Washington Coalition for Open Government. “The fact is that most agencies try to scrape by with the bare minimum legal requirements.”

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Everett School Board member Jessica Olson was among the first to fault the district’s response to questions about the principal investigation. She won office in 2009, campaigning on open government issues, and is a vocal critic of her fellow board members and Superintendent Gary Cohn.

“I agree the allegations were unsubstantiated … but to me that’s not the issue,” Olson said.

Olson has broken ranks before with the five-member board, and Cohn, on open government issues.

Other board members say she is out of step, pushing transparency issues to the extreme.

“I think she perceives herself as fighting the good fight for open government, which is in fact a good fight, but it’s being fought without perspective,” said board member Jeff Russell, who also won office in 2009 campaigning on open government.

During the summer, Olson said it was wrong for the School Board to use an executive session — a meeting held behind closed doors — to talk with Cohn about preliminary student scores on the new state tests.

Cohn and the other board members said going behind closed doors was justified because the student test scores reflected on his performance. Cohn has been with the district just over one year.

In response to Olson’s criticism, Cohn released the district’s early test scores.

The board also decided to ask Tim Ford, the state attorney general’s open-government ombudsman, to brief them on executive session practices.

At a meeting two weeks ago, Ford told district officials that they may have not done anything illegal when they discussed the test results behind closed doors, but suggested that going beyond legal requirements in favor of openness may help establish public trust.

“Where the concerns usually pop up is that there’s a perception that decisions or votes are being made in an executive session,” Ford said.

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This summer’s internal investigation of the principal appeared to be another attempt by top School District officials to stifle information, Olson said.

The community, she said, must remember that only two years ago district officials lied about installing a surveillance camera in a teacher’s classroom.

That action was part of a struggle with the teachers union and others that eventually cost the district more than $200,000 in legal fees, its superintendent and, some argue, its reputation in the community.

When Cohn came to the 18,700-student district in July 2009, the dust, and the drama, hadn’t begun to settle.

Before Cohn was hired, the Everett School Board decided to not schedule a time for him to meet with the public. While not required, that type of public meeting has become a traditional part of the hiring process in many school districts.

That decision now is viewed by Olson and others as part of the district’s decisions to again cut parents, voters and taxpayers out of the public schools’ business.

Cohn said his intention always is to release as much information as he can.

Personnel matters put him in a tight spot, where he must weigh an employee’s rights to privacy with the public’s need to know, he said.

In this instance, legal advice about employee rights, and past tensions with the newspaper, led district officials to field the reporter’s questions about the investigation the way they did, Cohn and Petersen said.

“Generally the instant response should be, ‘How can we give them that?’ not, ‘How can we protect that?’ ” Cohn said. “Whenever we talk about personnel records, whenever we talk about student records, we always have to be exceptionally careful.”

Questions about the investigation should have been handled differently, Petersen said. (You can read a letter he asked be printed in full with this story here.)

“We want to provide the relevant information we can provide, and be clear about what we can’t,” Petersen said. “Somehow, that wasn’t able to happen.”

Cohn agreed.

“The district has received some bad press around records,” he said. “Unless there’s a reason we can’t, I’m going to give you everything I can.”

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Everett school officials still are feeling their way forward on how best to handle those candid, private conversations with the board.

Olson recently asked that the board be briefed on future investigations into faculty that involve attorneys. The board now is considering making that change.

District officials also are evaluating how they handle questions from reporters, and the public, that might involve sensitive information.

One tool that exists is the off-the-record conversation — a discussion between a journalist and a source that does not see print. Those conversations often are used to address controversial information, said Loren Ghiglione, a journalism professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

“They can in effect tell you what happened, that there isn’t a story there,” Ghiglione said. “And if you then check out what they claim to be true and confirm it, then you perhaps don’t publish the story.”

While Olson said she still doubts the superintendent’s commitment to open exchanges, Cohn has won supporters.

After questions about the district’s response to the investigation were raised, the Everett Education Association — the teachers union — sent the School Board a letter praising Cohn. Principals are not members of the 1,100 member union, which was harshly critical of Cohn’s predecessor, Carol Whitehead.

“We have been impressed with the commitment that Dr. Cohn has shown … ” union leaders wrote. “No matter the size of the issue, members will receive a reply to any e-mail or verbal inquiry that is made.”

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The lingering nature of the surveillance camera scandal underscores a point.

Once a government’s credibility has been damaged, the institution has to work twice as hard to restore itself in the public eye, said Thomas Volgy, a professor in the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona.

“It has to prove itself over and over again,” said Volgy, a former mayor of Tucson, Ariz.

Cohn and Petersen said they are taking steps to make that happen.

Petersen, who was appointed to the board in 2006, took over as board president in December.

In the past year, the district has held several sessions to solicit public input on the direction of the district. They established a Fiscal Advisory Committee made up of staff and people the district serves.

The district also began posting its full agendas online in September. And earlier this year, it launched a podcast, letting people download audio recordings of school board meetings.

Many other public institutions have long posted meeting agendas online, but the law doesn’t require the School District to do so, Nixon said.

“If they really are as committed as they say they are, then they will be going beyond the minimum legal requirements … ” he said. “Posting their agendas online, that’s an example of going beyond.”

Andy Rathbun: 425-339-3455; arathbun@heraldnet.com.