Forcing their doors open

This one`s at least a week old, but I wanted to write about it here because open-access and open government is one of my pet projects as a journalist. Though it`s not being maintained while I`m on fellowship, the "Open your doors, Oxford" section of my newspaper's political blog is a good example of some of the work I've done trying to educate people on why they should care about when their councils meet behind closed doors.
The Record was the newspaper excluded from covering a Waterloo Region District School Board committee meeting on Oct. 4. Two days later, it published the article linked above with the director of education and chair's apology to the Record and reporter Luisa D'Amato for kicking her out of the meeting.

“There was no malice, and I really regret that it happened,” Waterloo Region District School Board chair Mike Ramsay said Tuesday.
The meeting at issue was Monday’s agenda development committee, which was deciding when to hear a motion about school bus service for 400 students.
The Record was interested in the meeting because families were anxious to make their case to trustees as soon as possible. There were, however, some concerns that the motion would not be considered high priority and would not be heard by trustees promptly.
On Monday, the Record was denied access to the meeting. Ramsay, who also chairs the committee, had said it was a “management meeting.” Education director Linda Fabi had said that the meetings of this particular committee are not open to the public, and the board has always done its business this way.

I'm curious as to what kind of reaction this has drawn among the chattering classes in the Region of Waterloo. D'Amato explained in the article that much like municipalities, school boards and all their committees are bound by (in this case) the Education Act's section on closed-door meetings. I suspect that like at the WRDSB, boards have a tradition of being very unaware of this. Already struggling to attract any sort of public crowd on a good night to regular board meetings, it's no surprise to me that many committee meetings attract nothing but staff members and/or trustees. That doesn't mean they're closed to the public, as this board had assumed.
I rallied against the continual abuse of closed-door provisions in the district board that I cover, given they'd built a provision into their bylaws (one that contravened the act, by my read) -- Sec. 5.19 on page 11 -- that allows for closed-door "focus groups." The board was holding an average of two of these a year until halfway through this term. As much as I would write about them, no one cared. Which only made my blood boil even more, since these focus groups were being called to discuss things like the budget, school accommodation and other issues where there was actually a public interest.
When I polled trustees, one replied he didn't want the public to see the trustees' "family feud," and that certain trustees wanted a smaller setting to express their views. My reply was that elected office is a challenging responsibility-- if a trustee couldn't respectfully state their opinion and disagree during the discussion of a certain issue then it should cause that person to question why they're an elected official.
Anyway, kudos to the Record for pushing back and getting the apology.