NC education commission spent 2 hours out of public view

For most of its July meeting, a state commission drafting recommendations on teacher pay and reading instruction debated those issues in virtual rooms the public had no way to enter. At its two previous meetings, similar discussion took place in person, at tables that the public could access.

The director of a statewide open-government group says that format likely violated North Carolina’s Open Meetings Law.

The Blue Ribbon Commission on Public Education met July 27 by Zoom for three hours. The published agenda set aside nearly two of those hours for an item called “Exchange of Ideas and Development of Recommendations.” That block was conducted in three simultaneous Zoom breakout rooms that were not carried on the commission’s YouTube livestream and that required host authentication to enter. The agenda did not mention the breakout rooms.

Members used those rooms to debate topics such as higher teacher compensation, a consistent statewide reading curriculum, mandatory summer literacy camps, and restoring a teacher-recruitment program, as reported by Carolina Journal. Viewers watching the public stream saw opening remarks, roughly 40 minutes of technical troubleshooting, and summaries delivered afterward by staff facilitators, followed by about 25 minutes of member discussion.

The commission’s staff admitted that those summaries would be incomplete. “This is a quick debrief,” Emma Braaten of the Friday Institute, who coordinates the commission, told viewers. “This is not all of the notes, not all of the details, but a high-level capture of what has been shared.”

But the work in those rooms will end up feeding directly into the draft recommendations. Co-chair Don Martin told members the Friday Institute would “refine the draft recommendations based on the areas of agreement, questions, and suggestions that emerge from each breakout group.” He said the sessions were meant “to identify where there is broad agreement, where recommendations could be strengthened, and where additional discussion is still needed,” and that the goal was not unanimous agreement on every word or strategy.

Gov. Josh Stein, Senate Leader Phil Berger, and House Speaker Destin Hall jointly created the 29-member commission in March and appointed its members. NC State’s Friday Institute serves as its administrative lead.

The commission’s notices page tells the public that its meetings are livestreamed and provides a link. That stream did not carry the two hours members spent in the breakout rooms.

North Carolina’s Open Meetings Law requires that when a public body meets by “conference telephone or other electronic means,” it “shall provide a location and means whereby members of the public may listen to the meeting.” Additionally, the law requires that “the notice of the meeting required by this Article shall specify that location.” The commission’s individual notice for July 27 listed a date, two meeting goals, and the agenda.

Pate McMichael, director of the NC Open Government Coalition at Elon University, told CJ the commission’s format is a problem.

“Making breakout rooms inaccessible to the public via host authentication deters public participation and likely amounts to an Open Meetings Law violation,” McMichael said. He said dropping the host authentication would make it more likely that a remote video meeting passes legal muster.

The broader question of whether public bodies may meet remotely at all, absent a declared emergency, remains unsettled. Kristina Wilson, a School of Government faculty member, wrote in a May 2025 post on the school’s Coates’ Canons blog that the statute “does not define what it means to hold a meeting via teleconference or other electronic means, making it difficult to know what types of meetings the statute actually authorizes.”

The commission does much of its work in public. It livestreams every meeting, and the recordings stay online. It takes public comment, shares it with members, approves minutes in open session, and posts research briefs.

Facilitators summarized each group’s discussion on the livestream once the July breakouts ended. No votes were taken in the rooms. No room held a majority of the commission’s 29 members, the threshold state courts have used in deciding whether a gathering counts as an official meeting.

Carolina Journal submitted written questions to the Friday Institute on Aug. 6, asking whether the breakout format was reviewed for compliance with the Open Meetings Law before it was adopted, whether a member of the public could have requested admission to a breakout room or listened to those discussions by other means, and whether the Aug. 31 meeting will use the same small-group structure. The institute did not respond by press time.

Carolina Journal has requested the breakout-group notes, member survey responses, facilitator synthesis documents, and room assignments under the state public records law.

The commission’s next meeting is in person on Aug. 31, when it takes up its second charge, administrative operations. Its published agenda sets aside an hour to review the draft recommendations that came out of the July breakout rooms. Unlike July, that agenda lists named presenters and no extended small-group block. The vote on the first set of recommendations is scheduled for Sept. 28.

“NC education commission spent 2 hours out of public view” was originally published on www.carolinajournal.com.