A few notes on Worcester School Committee and the superintendent's contract

As we now have a posted meeting for Wednesday night--UPDATE: this has now been moved to Thursday at 7 pm--(posted on Friday, as we can now see, thanks to the Worcester Sunshine Group) with a single-item agenda, I thought a few notes might be in order.

• The meeting is posted as an executive (closed) session, as it is contract negotiation with the superintendent. In Worcester, executive sessions commonly are held in the Mayor's office, as this one is scheduled to. However, all executive sessions must open in public session. Thus even as the meeting is held in the Mayor's office, the beginning of the meeting--the call to order, the roll call, the vote to go into executive session--is a public, open session.
• At the announcement of the reason for the executive session, the chair must also announce if the committee will return to public session. The committee can recess (end the meeting) straight from executive session, however--
• Votes of contracts--including that of the superintendent--must be made in public session. Thus the contract negotiations can and will be updated in executive session, but no contract vote is effective until it has been made in public session.

While superintendent contracts are public documents, to my knowledge, no one has made a records request for Superintendent Binienda's current contract. Thus the options open to the Committee at this point (bewilderingly) haven't gotten covered. A few points on that:

• the superintendent's contract has a renewal clause: the Committee had to inform her by December if they did not intend to renew. As such, simply not renewing is not an option they have at this point.
• The Committee can--and by all public indications has to chosen to--negotiate to renew her contract on whatever terms both parties agree to. However--
• there is also a clause in the contract allowing the Committee to renew for a single year. If they opt to do so, she can refuse, which would end her employment as of June 30.
• And committees do sometimes buy superintendent contracts out. See, most recently, Salem.