No Teacher Cuts, What's with the Closed Doors?

The city is scraping up $130,000 to put into the school budget, which is good news, but what's with the School Committee meeting in executive session to discuss the superintendent's evaluation?

We have a pretty good understanding of the open meeting law, in that local government reporters are trained early and often to sniff out any possible violation of the law. We take a reporter's view of the law -- that the law narrowly restricts the reasons for executive session. That said, we're no legal experts, but it seems as if the committee may have violated the law. We'll be interested to see if the Sentinel pursues a ruling on this issue.

While it's good the city is putting $130,000 into the school budget (thus sort of ending our constant cries over the "missing" $100,000), let's not paint the city as heroes here. First, a big chunk of it, $70,000, comes from the city saving on unemployment costs because there are no layoffs. So it's really $60,000. Second, it shouldn't be that hard for the city to make a modest investment in the schools. This money barely covers the layoffs, and doesn't begin to get into textbooks and other areas to be cut, like "energy."

The city should be investing more in schools, but clearly that's not going to happen without a major battle. Mayor Dan Mylott will announce tonight where he's cutting on the city side to cover the new school costs. We'll be interested to see what areas he considered cut-worthy.

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MEDIA ALERT: Jason is going to be on "Politically Speaking" this Thursday, June 22, talking up city politics and policy with host Ralph Romano. We're also going to be making a joint announcement on what we think is a pretty major step forward for our respective outlets, and something this is good for Fitchburg. We can't let the cat out of the bag just yet, but we're both pretty excited about it. Warm up the TiVo.