Wait. What did he say?

Yesterday, The Lens filed two reports on the same meeting of the New Orleans College Prep Academies Charter board. Here are two different versions of what I take to be the same conversation.

The first version.

The state open-meetings law allows private meetings for a handful of specific purposes. When asked later in open session by The Lens whether the topics discussed behind closed doors met those legal requirements, board members said little. “We don’t have to answer that,” Chairman Kenneth Polite said. The other members remained silent. Members later admitted to planning the new charter school in closed session, which would seem to fall well outside the legal exemptions that allow for barring the public from the meeting.

And then later in the "clarified" version we get this.

The state open-meetings law allows private meetings for a handful of specific purposes. Board Chairman Kenneth Polite explained to a reporter during a break in the meeting that the board was discussing sensitive matters involving the future of the school. He said it would be premature and perhaps detrimental to make such matters public.

While that's certainly a more.. um.. polite way to relay Polite's remarks, one is left wondering  if it's actually what he said.


In any event, my unsolicited advice to any charter board (or to BESE, for that matter) is to just follow the open meetings law.  Whatever they do or say is much less likely to draw any attention if nobody suspects their trying to hide it.