Fox C-6 Board of Education president Carole Yount said board members will again vote on whether to extend Superintendent Nisha Patel’s contract by one year during a March 3 closed session. The board voted 4-3 Feb. 4 not to extend Patel’s current three-year contract by one year and instead to wait until October to decide whether to extend it.
A motion calling for another vote was made during a public board meeting on Tuesday night (Feb. 18), but Yount would not allow the board to vote on the motion, instead deciding to schedule it for a later closed meeting.
Patel, who was hired last year to replace former Superintendent Jim Wipke, has a three-year contract that began July 1, 2019. She is being paid $182,500 this school year.
The topic of Patel’s contract came up again during Tuesday’s board meeting, and board vice president Steve Holloway made a motion to extend her contract to June 2023. Board member Scott Stewart seconded the motion, but Yount said the motion was out of order and would not allow the vote.
Yount said she believes votes related to personnel issues must be taken in closed session, based on her interpretation of the state’s Sunshine Law and advice she previously got from Missouri School Boards’ Association attorney Susan Goldammer.
While the Sunshine Law allows a board to vote on a contract extension in closed session, it is not mandated. The law says, “Nothing shall be construed as to require a public governmental body to hold a closed meeting, record or vote to discuss or act upon any matter.”
While Yount did not allow the board to vote on Patel’s contract in open session, the board spent about 40 minutes discussing it, as well as other topics, in open session prior to Holloway’s motion calling for the vote.
On Feb. 4, Yount, Vicki Hanson, Jim Chellew and Judy Smith voted not to extend Patel’s contract then and reconsider the extension in October, and Holloway, Stewart and Dawn Mullins voted against delaying the decision to extend the contract.
Typically, the Fox school board reviews the superintendent’s performance in January or February and votes on whether to extend his or her contract by a year.
During the public comments portion of the Tuesday meeting, four community members spoke about their support for Patel, and many in the crowd wore red shirts that said, “Promise, Purpose, Patel.” The saying on the shirts is a play on Fox’s $40 million bond proposal that will be on the April 7 ballot called Prop P, which stands for “Promise, Purpose and Progress for our Students.”
After Holloway made the motion Tuesday to again vote on Patel’s contract and the board began discussing whether the vote should be allowed, audience members began shouting, “Vote, vote, vote.”
Yount said today (Feb. 19) she feels she made the right decision to not allow the vote in public Tuesday and instead to place in on the agenda for the next closed meeting.
“In my opinion any time you start discussing personnel issues in open session you can violate the Sunshine Laws very quickly,” Yount said. “We don’t want that opportunity out there. It’s not that people would do it intentionally. In discussions like this, it could happen so easily and quickly and all of the sudden we realize we have gone too far. Based on the information I had and what was happening, I felt I made the right decision.”
Yount also said she would have been happy to place another vote on the matter on the closed session agenda.
“If anybody would have asked me that (to vote on the extension) before that (Tuesday) meeting, I would have said yes, we can put it on the (closed meeting) agenda,” Yount said. “Anything that any board member wants on the agenda, all they have to do is bring it to me as board president, and I can choose to put it on the agenda. If any board member would have brought that to me anytime after that decision was made (against extending Patel’s contract), I would have agreed to put it on the agenda.”