(The Center Square) — Rhode Island’s highest court heard oral arguments Tuesday in a three-year-long legal challenge over the South Kingston School District’s decision to block a parent from attending meetings of an advisory panel focused on racial and gender issues.
The case involves Nicole Solas, a South Kingston mother who teamed up with the Goldwater Institute to sue in 2022 after she was denied access to closed-door meetings of the school district’s taxpayer-funded Black, Indigenous, and People of Color Advisory Board. A Superior Court judge rejected the lawsuit last October after ruling that the BIPOC board wasn’t subject to the state’s open meetings laws, but Solas appealed the ruling.
During a hearing before the court Tuesday, Goldwater Institute Attorney Jon Riches argued that because the BIPOC board has advisory power over the school committee and because it receives taxpayer money for its activities, it is a “public body” whose meetings should be open to the public. He said the board advised the school committee on racial and gender issues that ultimately became part of its districtwide policies.
“The record is uncontroverted on this point: The school committee created this board, funded this board, appointed its members, and then the board had regular and occurring meetings for the expressed purpose of advising the school committee, which it then did,” Riches told justices in the live-streamed oral arguments. “The open meetings act is to be broadly construed and interpreted in a light favorable to public access.”
Riches told justices that the Superior Court’s ruling, if not overturned, would allow school committees and other governing boards in the state to avoid public scrutiny on controversial issues by delegating work to an advisory committee. He said the public should have full access to “the deliberations and the processes that go into the creation of public policy.”
“If the lower court’s decision is allowed to stand, nothing would prevent any public body within the state of Rhode Island from simply evading the open meetings act by contracting out public functions to that private body,” Riches said.
But Attorney Deidre Carreno, who represents the South Kingston School District, argued Tuesday that the BIPOC board was an “ad-hoc” group that isn’t subject to the state’s public records law and urged justices to uphold the lower court’s ruling.
“Notably, both the office of the Attorney General and the Superior Court have rightly concluded that the BIPOc board is not a public body,” she told justices.
Justices didn’t tip their hat on which way they were leaning, but several were skeptical of claims that the BIPOC board was a “public body” that would make it subject to the open meetings law.
Solas’ fight garnered national attention last year after news stories detailed how the Town of South Kingstown had slapped her with a nearly $74,000 bill for a public records request for information about the district’s implementation of “critical race” and gender curriculum. She filed a lawsuit over the fee for the request, and the town agreed to a settlement last year that included an $8,000 fine and release of the documents.
The Goldwater Institute says Solas’ lawsuit challenging the closed-door meetings is a legal fight “that seeks to uphold one of the most basic principles of democracy: that the public’s business must be conducted in public.”
“The Rhode Island Supreme Court has the opportunity now to reaffirm that when a group is publicly created, publicly funded, and charged with advising on public matters, its meetings must be open to the public — even if it’s facilitated by a private contractor,” the group said in a statement. “The public’s business should always be open to the public, especially when it comes to the important work of educating students.”
