Chicago Board of Education to release documents kept secret since 1995

Chicago’s Board of Education is planning to release a decade of meeting minutes that have been secret since 1995.

School boards are allowed to talk about certain issues in "executive" or "closed" session. Those include personnel and legal issues.

Every six months the board is supposed to review minutes from those meetings and make public those it can. District attorneys determine whether a need for confidentiality still exists.

Chicago’s Board of Education has not released any closed-session meetings since Mayor Richard Daley took over the schools in 1995. The board voted late Wednesday to release minutes from nearly a decade of meetings, from July 1995 through December 2004. The minutes will be redacted but will offer the public the first glimpse at what board members discussed during hours of behind-closed-doors meetings on school board business.

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Board president David Vitale says school district attorneys have been poring over the documents for months. He said releasing them was the right thing to do.

"We’re a public body so it’s our responsibility to be as transparent as we think we can fairly be," Vitale told WBEZ.  "I think it’s significant in the sense that we are trying to be transparent."

Vitale said he didn't expect the public to discover much from reading the minutes. "I don’t think it’s significant in what you’re going to read in there, because almost everything in there has been acted on, and is publicly known."

The release could reveal violations of the Open Meetings Act if board members discussed topics they shouldn’t have. Gery Chico and the late Michael Scott served as board presidents during the period of time covered by the released documents.

Minutes from 20 meetings—including the entire 1997-98 school year—could not be located. Also missing are minutes from July 2000 through December 2000; April 24, 1996; and Feb 25, 2003. Vitale said the district's law department conducted a thorough search for them.

Vitale said the law department is reviewing the next "batch" of meeting minutes-- from executive sessions that took place between January 2005 and December 2011. Vitale said the board intends to release those as well, but is still grappling with how much time should pass before the confidential documents are released.

In a less transparent move, the board also authorized the destruction of audio recordings of all closed-session meetings from January 2004 through June 2010. Those audio tapes are typically not available to the public but can be reviewed by courts. Vitale said most school boards order those recordings destroyed after 18 months.