Kansas City Strip
No virgins in the whorehouse: Surprise, surprise — the coven that hastily fired Superintendent Benjamin Demps in a back-room school board meeting in April has something smelly to rub in the face of Patricia Kurtz, who has sued her colleagues over the legality of that meeting.
On September 5, Kurtz was on a witness stand at the Jackson County Courthouse arguing that five of her school board colleagues had violated Missouri’s open-meeting laws when they met behind closed doors to fire Demps. “That, to me, is serious business when a public body is acting cavalierly with regards to the law,” she said, referring to the fact that Michelle Hensley, Lee Barnes Jr., Elma Warrick, Michael Byrd and Duane Kelly had convened an emergency meeting without giving the public 24 hours’ notice.
But on September 10, the tables turned on Kurtz: She sat in the board’s executive committee meeting trying to explain why her “discontinued-buildings committee” had recently worked behind closed doors.
The board had received a letter from a lawyer representing the Derrick Thomas Academy, which had lost an emotional bid to open a charter school in the old D.A. Holmes elementary school building. The letter complained that Kurtz’s committee had opened bids in a closed session. Kurtz tried to explain that it wasn’t until she got home from the bid-opening that she realized her committee might not have followed protocol, and that she’d called a lawyer with the Missouri School Board Association who confirmed her concerns. Alan Hallquist, a lawyer for the board, advised her to reopen the bids in a public meeting.
Barnes, who last week defended his own closed meeting in Kurtz’s open-meetings case, was having none of that. “Wait a minute,” he said. “You opened the bids in closed session. That’s illegal.”
“Well, we made a mistake,” Kurtz said.
“But we can’t just gloss over it as a mistake,” Barnes countered. “Those people have no idea what you did behind closed doors.”
We’re just glad the board didn’t — as far as we know — hold an illegal meeting to discuss Kurtz’s illegal meeting. That’s progress.
