On December 3, Tucson Unified School District Governing Board (TUSD) member Dr. Mark Stegeman advised federal Judge David Bury that the District appears to have misled the Court in the matter of Board member Michael Hicks’ letter to the Court advising it of the District’s effort to undermine the Special Master in the 30 plus year desegregation case.
Stegeman also alleges that the District violated A.R.S. 38-341 in its November 20 filing.
At issue is the statement in the filing that the “TUSD Governing Board has engaged the services of an independent investigator to investigate the allegations the [Hicks] letter contains.” In his letter to the Court, Hicks reported actions by the District’s Superintendent H.T. Sanchez, and the Board majority led by president, Adelita Grijalva, against the Court and its court-appointed Special Master Willis Hawley.
A.R.S. 38-341 relates to the duties of school boards, and as Stegeman notes, “is generally understood to require a public vote before any public statement of the board’s will.” The subject of Hicks’ letter has never come before the Board in public. There has been speculation that his letter was the subject of Executive Session of the Board, but because it is illegal for anyone to reveal discussions in Executive Sessions, it remains only speculation. However, had the subject been addressed in Executive Session, any action the Board might discuss would have to be voted on in Regular Session in public view.
According to Stegeman, the Board “has never held a public vote, or even a public discussion, that could be so construed” to have engaged the services of an independent investigator to investigate Hicks.
Stegeman, a professor of Economics at the University of Arizona known to be exceptionally cautious with his language, was very candid in his assessment of the District’s actions. He wrote:
Dear Judge Bury,
The Tucson Unified School District’s (TUSD) November 20 filing with this court, recorded as Document 1871 of the Fisher-Mendoza case, compels this response.
The statement in the filing, now part of the public record of the case, that the “TUSD Governing Board has engaged the services of an independent investigator to investigate the allegations the [Hicks] letter contains” is misleading. The TUSD board has never held a public vote, or even a public discussion, that could be so construed.
The statement in the filing is, ipso facto, evidence of a violation of A.R.S. 38-341, which is generally understood to require a public vote before any public statement of the board’s will. Perhaps the district’s administration believes that some historical public vote of the board has given it carte blanche to investigate board members in the name of the board, but I do not know when that vote occurred. In the absence of such a historical vote, the district is apparently reporting an illegal decision that a quorum of the board made outside of an agendized meeting or is committing the multiple errors of illegally disclosing a decision that a quorum of the board made during an agendized executive session and presenting that decision to the court as if it were a public action. These three alternatives appear to be logically exhaustive; I see no fourth.
Such issues of state law presumably lie outside the concerns of this (federal) court, but it is important to clarify that, despite the statement in the filing, the corporate public entity that is the TUSD Governing Board has taken no such public action, that I consequently have had no opportunity to vote for or against such an action, and that I am in no respect a party to either the district’s November 20 filing or the investigation that it describes.
I file this letter as one member of the TUSD Governing Board, not representing the corporate entity. As far as I know, I never received notice from the district of the November 20 filing, hence the delay in this response.
Respectfully,
Mark Stegeman