Planning meetings isn't easy, especially when you're a boardmember on a taxpayer-funded organization. Then your meetings have to follow a bunch of rules. Mainly, they must be open to the public and generally easy for the public to hear about and attend.
It may surprise you to learn that the attorneys who make the decisions for Prime Prep Academy, Deion Sanders' charter school that's never in the news, are having a really hard time figuring out how to plan these public meetings.
Back in December, in fact, a Prime Prep Academy board member filed a lawsuit accusing the board chairman of violating state open meetings laws by scheduling meetings at the last minute, with little notice.
Chairman T. Christopher Lewis denied the allegations to reporters. And this year, Prime Prep officials promptly emailed reporters to inform everyone about a meeting that was supposed to take place last Thursday. I showed up and found myself on an empty campus. It turned out, the meeting got moved. It was now on a Saturday night.
First it was scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Saturday. Then the board moved the meeting again to Saturday at 10 p.m., an absolutely fantastic time for a board meeting if taking shots and dancing are on the agenda.
But at 7 that night, the News reported that the meeting had been rescheduled again. It moved to a new time: tonight.
As of this afternoon, the website of Uplift Fort Worth, the nonprofit that sponsors Prime Prep and posts the meetings, still wasn't giving a straight answer about a time or location. One tab said it was tonight at 5:15 in Fort Worth. Another tab listed tonight's meeting at 6:30 in Dallas.
"The meeting is at 6:30PM tonight, at the Dallas campus (330 E Ann Arbor Ave. Dallas, TX 75216)," a Prime Prep employee named Ben Goerz tells us via email. "I have corrected the upliftfortworth.org website, which was reflecting an old time published at the beginning of the year. Sorry for any confusion."
All right, parents, put this in your datebook, definitely in pencil: The board meeting, for real, is happening tonight at 6:30 in Dallas. Meanwhile, here's one potential roadblock to planning meetings: New Prime Prep Superintendent Ron Price is now reportedly looking for 100 computers that have gone missing.
