Request By:
Donald L. Armstrong
Executive Director
Kentucky Press Association, Inc.
332 Capitol Avenue
Frankfort, Kentucky 40601
Opinion
Opinion By: Steven L. Beshear, Attorney General; Carl T. Miller, Jr., Assistant Attorney General
You have requested an opinion of the Attorney General as to whether a special call to meeting of a school board can deal only with a matter or matters designated in the call of the meeting.
A special meeting may be called as provided by KRS 160.270 and the part of that statute which is pertinent to this opinion reads as follows:
"Special meetings may be called by the chairman. On request of three members of the board the secretary shall call a special meeting. Each member of the board shall have timely notice of each meeting and the nature, object and purpose for which it is called."
The Kentucky Open Meetings Law, KRS 61.805 to 61.850, also has a provision for calling a special meeting, KRS 61.825. Under that statute, however, it is not required that the call of a special meeting of a public agency must include an agenda of the subjects to be dealt with in the special meeting. The answer to your question, therefore, depends only on an interpretation of KRS 160.270.
It is our opinion that a special meeting of a school board may deal only with matters which are stated in the call of the meeting of which each member of the board receives timely notice unless all of the members are present and unanimously agree to consider an additional subject which was not included in the call. We believe that the call of the meeting can be amended by unanimous consent of all the members of the board because the advanced notice of the purpose of the meeting is for the benefit of the board members, not for the benefit of the news media or the public. A board member, relying on the announcement of the purpose of the meeting, may choose not to attend and it would be improper to include additional subject matter in the meeting of which the board member had received no notice. By the same token it would be improper to revise the call of the meeting to include a subject which a member, being present, believes he is not ready to discuss. The chairman or three members of the board could call another special meeting to deal with an additional subject. Timely notice of the additional subject to be discussed should then be given to all the members of the board.
To state our opinion in another way, we believe that when all the members of the Board of Education are present and all the members agree to take up an additional subject matter the required advanced notice of the subjects to be discussed in the meeting may be waived. The waiver must be by unanimous consent.