GUEST
Jacob Hafter, attorney
BY MARIE ANDRUSEWICZ -- The decision this week to officially install interim superintendent Pat Skorkowsky caught some by surprise, and not in a good way. In fact, some observers suggest the board’s stealth Tuesday night pick may have violated Nevada open meeting laws.
Attorney Jacob Hafter is one such critic– he says the Clark County School Board needs to look more closely at their procedures, and whether they’re giving the public fair access.
“There are pros and cons to elevating an internal candidate as opposed to engaging in a national search,” says Hafter. “Those pros and cons were being debated for several months and I don’t think a decision was ever made. And I don’t think that people had a chance to fully vet the current candidate who was promoted.”
School board president Carolyn Edwards acknowledged that most of the public didn’t know that the superintended selection was taking place Tuesday night. But she also said, “If you really wanted to know what we were doing, you should have been watching.”
Edwards added that two months of town hall meetings provided ample opportunity for public input.
But Hafter says that this isn’t the first time that the board has failed to include the state in its process “and it probably won’t be the last.”