Litmus Test of Transparency and our School Board

Promising "a new era of openness in our country," President Obama signed executive orders Wednesday relating to ethics guidelines for staff members of his administration. “Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency," Obama said on his first day in office.
The new litmus test required of publicly elected officials is transparency. Transparency does matter. We need not look any farther than the front page of the Wall Street Jour-nal, NY Times and Washington Post (or any newspaper in the nation) to realize collu-sion, lack of oversight and greed are the main reasons behind our world recession. Transparency is required to ensure fair and ethical representation.
Our School Board, publicly elected to overseas our school administration, should be held to the same standards of ethics, of transparency, as all other publicly elected offi-cials. We elected The School Board in good faith to manage our school district and to work in private with our Superintendent in what appeared to be a well choreographed, well planned and well orchestrated transition of power without benefit of public discloser, discussion or participation.
There are no disputes that for months, the School Board has know Allan Gordon was planning to retire. I have know for months Mr Gordon was planning to retirement. Mr Gordon asked me to set up meetings with various schools in Bordeaux (to discuss the possibility of forming exchange programs) for him in September 2009. I asked Mr Gordon directly, given the timing of his trip, if that meant he was retiring and he said yes. I sat in a meeting with Mr Gordon on Monday, April 6th. At that meeting, Mr Gordon was asked point-blank if he has retiring. Mr Gordon said yes. He was then asked what he was going to do. He clearly laid out the 3 consulting projects he would work on for the district and that he would be open for hire starting July 2009. He quickly ask all present not to mention his retirement before Thursday since it would be dis-closed at Thursday’s School Board meeting, April 9th. It requires weeks and months of discussion to agree to retirement plans, job promotions, special consulting projects. All this these discussions took place behind closed doors without any public forum and without the benefit of transparency.
There are commonly accepted best practices for hiring a new Superintendent, the same that were used when hiring Mr Gordon. We benefited from hiring Mr Gordon, a result of a rigorous and well performed search. By following the established best practices (post-ing the job, recruiting a pool of qualified candidate, setting hiring criteria, creating a committee of Board members, parents and teachers to interviewed a narrowed down list of candidates, making recommendations given the Board input which helps them hire the best candidate) provides the best guarantee of finding the most qualified candidate. It also provides needed credibility that a new hire needs to effectively lead. Why would our School Board breech public confidence, deny our community the opportunity to find