A Texas grand jury indicted school board members for having secret meetings on implementing a “racial agenda.”
The grand jury indicted the Carroll Independent School District (CISD) president and vice president over charges of violating of the Open Meetings Act after they spoke in private on implementing a “racial training” program that was widely opposed by their constituents.
“The board is required to meet in public, but the text [messages] allegedly involved enough school board members that it may have amounted to a secret, unofficial meeting under the law,” according to the Daily Wire. “In December, a judge separately instituted a restraining order prohibiting the school officials from moving forward with work related to a District Diversity Council, which in August issued a 34-page plan that included a proposal for racial training in schools that would cost $425,000 the first year, including $35,000 for speakers.”
“The cultural competence plan called for hiring ‘a Director of Equity and Inclusion’ and ’embed[ding] diversity and inclusion training for students as an ‘enrollment to graduation’ process in all grades.’”
The text message group included at least five board members, according to Community Impact.
The Texas Open Meetings Act requires “meetings of governmental bodies to be open to the public, except for expressly authorized closed sessions and to be preceded by public notice of the time, place, and subject matter of the meeting,” according to an official Open Meetings Act handbook.
