NEWBURGH – The Newburgh school district may have violated a key rule of executive session confidentiality by publicly disclosing the votes tallied behind closed doors in the school board’s efforts to remove a teacher.
Richard Desiderio has been brought up on more than a dozen charges, discussed and voted on by school board members during an executive session, yet the votes by each board member were made public by the district in an attachment to a resolution with the individual handwritten notes.
School board attorney David Shaw disputed the claim of breached confidentiality.
“Those charges were actually revealed to the media by Mr. Desiderio, and since the issue would have been maintaining his privacy rights, that was no longer an issue. So having that attached to the papers to the commissioner, it is certainly within the purview to do,” he said.
Shaw said the district considers the privacy issue to be owned by the individual employee until the disposition of the charges, however, in this case Shaw said the teacher disclosed the charges to the media. So, there wasn’t an issue of violation of executive session confidentiality.
Minutes of the executive session votes on the charges were supposed to be approved within one week, which was not the case. Shaw says they will be addressed at the next school board meeting in November.
