Opinion

Secrecy provokes public mistrust


Published: September 2, 2008

The people who run our public schools seem to have missed a lesson everyone else learned during the Watergate scandal of the 1970s: that the cover-up is always worse than the crime.

How else to explain the penchant among school superintendents, committees and administrators to keep public information from the public?

In Lawrence recently, the School Committee tried to hide its vote on whether to grant Superintendent Wilfredo Laboy a pay raise.

Now, in North Andover, we learn that Superintendent James Marini kept secret from both the School Committee and parents that the New England Association of Schools and Colleges had placed the high school on warning. The accreditation agency informed Marini of the downgrade in status in late May. Yet the School Committee and parents did not learn about the warning until the committee's Aug. 19 meeting.

The warning is a laundry list of improvements the agency says the high school must make in order to retain its accreditation.

Marini said he kept the information secret because he hoped to confront the agency and get it to lift the warning immediately. Apparently, that didn't work. High school Principal Carla Scuzzarella two weeks ago drafted a letter to the NEASC asking the agency to remove the warning at its Oct. 15 meeting. The principal argues that many of the issues cited in the warning have been corrected.

We don't think the accreditation warning is a big deal. It's part of a song-and-dance the former educators at the NEASC perform to help current educators wrest more money from taxpayers.

But clearly, North Andover school officials put great stock in the warning, as evidenced in their desire to have it lifted as soon as possible. And some parents have said had they known the high school was on warning again, they might have sent their children to school elsewhere.

Marini had a piece of information he knew was important both to North Andover school leaders and parents ¬­— yet he chose to hide it. That is unacceptable.

Now some parents are on the Internet blogging about possible "ulterior motives" for Marini's secrecy.

There likely is no ulterior motive. But this kind of fallout is what Marini deserves for keeping the public in the dark.