Dist. 158 closed session staying closed
Despite earlier pledges to release the minutes and a recording of a controversial closed-session meeting, the Huntley Unit District 158 school board Thursday voted not to release either.
The meeting in question was the Nov. 13 closed session in which the board decided to appoint former board President Mike Skala to a vacant seat on the board.
Board members said they voted against releasing the minutes and an audio recording of the meeting because they did not receive the consent of all four of the candidates who interviewed for the vacant seat.
"I've read the minutes and I can understand where people might be upset about derogatory things that were said about them," board member Larry Snow said.
Other board members said that while they honored the candidates' wishes, there wasn't much objectionable in the minutes.
"It's a pretty public process. I don't know why they'd have problems," board Vice President Tony Quagliano said. "There's nothing that was said that was horrific about anybody."
School boards are not required by law to release closed-session minutes but can do so at their discretion.
District 158 board members had previously expressed the desire to release the Nov. 13 minutes to clear up a dispute over what was said in the closed session.
After Skala was appointed to the board, Snow and board member Aileen Seedorf accused their board colleagues of not giving all the candidates fair consideration -- a charge the rest of the board denied.
Two days after the meeting, Seedorf filed a police report accusing Quagliano of threatening her during the closed session, which Quagliano denies.
The release of the minutes and the recording was supposed to shed some light on the competing claims.
At the Nov. 13 meeting, board President Shawn Green said he would make it a priority to release the audio recording.
It was later discovered the audio device recorded only about three minutes of the meeting because its memory was already nearly full from a prior meeting.
Besides the audio recording failure, two DVD recorders and a VCR failed to record most of the open-session meeting on Nov. 13.
The district has since taken steps, including purchasing a high-capacity iPod to record closed sessions and streaming meetings on the Internet, to prevent a repeat of the Nov. 13 recording debacle.