Bost says that he solicited votes for his plan before the meeting. He says that he wasn’t the only board member doing that. And he says that nothing he did violated the state’s open meetings laws.

“First and foremost, Ithink it does not violate the letter of the law, nor the spirit ... just about all factions of the school board were doing it,”Bost said Thursday. “I did seek votes, there’s no doubt about it, but I think at the same time the other side was seeking votes as well.”

Other school board members and attorneys agree that if Bost’s conversations were one-on-one with other board members, or even if only three met or spoke at any one time, then no one broke any laws.

In North Carolina, if less than a majority of a board meets in some form — in person, by telephone — to talk, even about the public’s business, the gathering is not required to be an open meeting.

But an attorney for the N.C. Press Association says this sort of lobbying method is a way to skirt existing statutes by building a majority before votes are cast in public. And she said it violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the law.

“That not only sidesteps the law, but it deprives the public of seeing how policy is debated and set,”said Amanda Martin, who also represents the Salisbury Post and other newspapers. “For that reason, I think it’s bad public policy, even if it is legal.”

Other states, including Florida, prohibit even two members of a public body from deliberating the public’s business in private. And in others, including Louisiana, California and Michigan, courts have declared other methods of gaining consensus out of the public eye illegal.

The quick adoption Tuesday of a school redistricting plan left some on the Rowan-Salisbury Board of Education crying foul and many in the public wondering how it came about.

The school board had labored over the issue for weeks, had listened to public comment and was holding a work session to hear a revised proposal from Superintendent Dr. Joe McCann.

Some suspect political skulduggery is behind the 4-3 vote that passed Bost’s redistricting plan, patched together from pieces of other proposals and options.

Some residents said the outcome seemed too predetermined, the votes too lined up when Bost interrupted McCann’s presentation to offer his own.

Written on a yellow legal pad, Bost’s plan contained mostly what McCann had proposed in his two plans, but shifted several areas from the first and second versions of McCann’s plan.

Bost said he doesn’t think another public hearing was necessary, because the public had seen all the pieces of his plan, if not put together as a whole.

After brief discussion and a few questions, the board split, with L.A. Overcash, Clyde Miller and Dr. Ada Fisher siding with Jones. Dr. Bettie Starr, Bruce Jones and Kay Norman opposed.

Bost said he painstakingly researched the issue and during recent weeks spoke with every board member except Norman.

“I had some clear sense that people shared some opinions of mine,” he said. “I did not know ahead of time what to expect from Dr. Fisher.

“Frankly, I did not know with certainty that my proposal would pass, be delayed, tabled or the administration would present another proposal.”

Bost had stated in earlier interviews his belief that Granite Quarry should remain undivided and that subdivisions on N.C. 150 just west of Salisbury should attend schools in the city.

He said that a section of the East district his plan shifts to the North district, north of Bringle Ferry Road, is necessary to eliminate overcrowding at Erwin Middle School.

“I had discussions with others about that and tried out that concept,” said Bost, who last year made the motion that kept elementary students in that area in the East district schools.

Starr said she doesn’t think seeking votes or privately discussing certain options with other board members violates the spirit of the open meetings law.

“Board members have conversations, and I think that happens with some regularity,” she said. “I think one board member talking to another ... doesn’t violate the letter or the spirit.”

But she is troubled by the way the vote seemed to her to take shape.

Specifically, she pointed to the moment when Bost was discussing shifting the East district students, elementary through high school, to the North district.

“All I know is that some board members knew things I didn’t know,” she said. “There was no mention of elementary feeders in any proposal Ihad, but Mr. Miller immediately said ‘But Ithought the elementary students were going to Dole.’ ”

Some residents who attended the meeting Tuesday said they believe that section was part of a deal, and one letter writer to the Post asked if the area was “payback” for Miller’s vote.

Miller and Bost deny that. They say it’s simply a matter of numbers.

“I don’t know what mix Clyde wanted or would have done differently,” Bost said. “But he felt that North could handle it.”

Still, he said, after seeing McCann’s latest proposal, he came “within an eyelash” of supporting it, even though it left the N.C. 150 subdivisions in the West district for high school.

However, after talking with school system administrators and principals, Bost found he couldn’t support the proposal. So he went to work on his own plan and sought allies.

“What every board member tries to do is seek consensus, and I would have enjoyed having seven votes instead of just four,” he said. “Other people share their views, and you try to build consensus.”

It’s all part of the “political process,”all legal, he said. No “chance meeting, not a get-together, not a pow-wow of any type.”

At the same time, he said, another school board faction sought to build its own majority.

“Frankly, I’ve heard that Bettie Starr, Bruce Jones and Kay Norman had kind of worked out their own proposal and that was to keep the high schools ... as a separate proposal,” he said. “... and they were looking for another vote.”

Bost accused Norman of “heavy politicking” to save Summerfield, where she lives, from being shifted to the Salisbury High district. He pointed to an earlier meeting when a Westcliffe parent accused her of offering Westcliffe in Summerfield’s place.

Norman has denied that, and she said Friday she took no part in any effort to build a majority. She submitted her own proposals to McCann, and they would have been discussed Tuesday, but the meeting got away from the superintendent when Bost’s plan came up, she said.

“I did have a call from Bruce Jones, and I told him I had put my comments in writing to Dr. McCann,” she said. “There was no thought in my mind that there would not be opportunity for public comment on this plan.”

School board attorney Don Sayers says board members have the right to lobby each other.

“I don’t think it’s a violation of open meetings law for someone to call and ask support for something,”he said. “If I’m a school board member and I want to get something passed, I can call one of my fellow board members without violating the open meetings law.”

Bob Joyce, assistant director of the Institute of Government at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, agreed.

“It’s clearly not a violation of the law,”he said. “In order to violate the open meetings law, there has to be a meeting, and a meeting is defined as when a majority of them get together, either in person, or by telephone, or other means.”

Sayers and Joyce, who is also an attorney, declined to say whether they thought lobbying privately for public votes violates the spirit of open meetings law. Martin, who specializes in First Amendment issues, said she believes it does.

“The open meetings law was designed — not to pose technical, tricky hurdles for people to overcome — but so the public could see public business conducted publicly,”she said. “The public is concerned not with the technicalities of the open meetings law, but with seeing policy worked through by elected boards.”

The courts have ruled on a case of polling by telephone in this state. But in that case, a school board in Jacksonville conducted the vote solely over the telephone and never in a public meeting. The N.C. Court of Appeals ruled that violated the open meetings law.

Other states have taken stronger measures than North Carolina to ensure that public boards don’t do business behind closed doors. Some don’t require a majority be present to constitute a public meeting.

Florida has had a “Government in the Sunshine Law”since the late 1960s. That law says that any meeting of two or more members of a public body to discuss matters the board could act upon will be open to the public.

The Florida law also requires that reasonable notice of the meeting be given to the public and that minutes are taken, whether the meeting is formal or casual in nature. It applies to elected or appointed boards.

In effect, if two or more officials “get together to discuss anything that could come before them in their official capacity, they are covered by the Sunshine Law,” said Barbara Petersen, executive director of Florida’s First Amendment Foundation.

She said the law has been “very effective,” although the state’s “government officials complain about it bitterly and our legislature basically tries to undo it.”

The Florida Supreme Court has ruled that two board members talking over the phone violates the law. An administrator, such as a city manager, polling board members and relaying information is also illegal, she said.

The state deems the law so important that its government amended the constitution in the early 1990s to guarantee Florida citizens access to public meetings, Petersen said.

That’s because action taken at meetings is “the least important part, frequently, of an issue,” she said.“We have a right ... to participate in the entire political process.”

Other states are taking steps in that direction as well, though not all of them with legislation.

Last year, in a case that went to the Louisiana Supreme Court, a judge ruled that the Baton Rouge School Board violated that state’s open meetings law by meeting in non-majority groups.

Members of the board met to discuss a desegregation case in groups that didn’t constitute a quorum but that allowed all the board members to take part in the discussion.

Louisiana courts found that the school board’s meetings constituted a “walking quorum,” which occurs when a board meets in small groups to avoid having a quorum.

Similarly, in Michigan, the court of appeals found that two closed “mini-meetings” held by a city council with an attorney violated that state’s law, though no quorum was present at either.

A California court also banned “serial communications,” which refers to a series of non-quorum meetings held to conduct public business out of the public eye.

Those meetings can be held one-on-one by telephone, as was the case in California, where a local redevelopment agency used a series of private telephone conversations — each between an agency member and its attorney — to line up votes for public action.

A California appellate court ruled the agency violated that state’s open meetings law, even though California law only requires that a meeting be open if a quorum is present, like North Carolina’s law.

Regardless of what’s happening in other states, none of the authorities on N.C. law contacted by the Post challenged Rowan-Salisbury school board members’ legal right to privately seek votes, even to build a majority before the meeting.

An attorney himself, Bost said there’s no doubt.