In back-to-back posted open meetings held Wednesday, March 14, the School Building Committee and its “working group” or subcommittee repeated earlier meetings that were the subject of an Open Meeting Law complaint by Deborah Skauen-Hinchliffe of Still River. First, the subcommittee repeated its Jan. 29 deliberations on several cost-saving changes to the project. Then the building committee repeated its Feb. 2 approval of those changes and its vote to set $54 million as the maximum cost for the project.
After the two public meetings, the building committee remained for a training session on the Open Meeting Law.
Both the meetings and the training session were remedial measures proposed by Skauen-Hinchliffe and accepted by the Harvard schools’ legal counsel, Caroline R. Thibeault of Deutsch Williams Brooks DeRensis & Holland.
The committee also agreed to prepare minutes of several unposted working group meetings and to make those minutes publicly available. Superintendent Linda Dwight wrote in an email Tuesday that she expects the minutes to be completed by the end of this week. Publication of the minutes is the final remedial step the committee has agreed to take.
Through its lawyer, the building committee rejected Skauen-Hinchliffe’s second allegation—that a Feb. 15 unanimous vote on the $54 million maximum, which was part of a package of reports, drawings, and other documentation for submission to the Massachusetts School Building Authority, also violated the Open Meeting Law. The committee contended that this vote, which had been listed on the meeting agenda and was taken in open session, was not a violation.
In an email to the Press this week, Skauen-Hinchliffe said she had decided to submit both of her complaints to the attorney general.
Note: John Osborn contributed to this story.
