‘All power residing originally in, and being derived from, the people, all the magistrates and officers of government are their substitutes and agents, and at all times accountable to them. Government, therefore, should be open, accessible, accountable and responsive. To that end, the public’s right of access to governmental proceedings and records shall not be unreasonably restricted."

– Article 8,

NH Constitution

When The Telegraph put in a request for all of the emails sent between Nashua School District Superintendent Mark Conrad and members of the Nashua Board of Education over a six-month period, we weren’t sure exactly what we’d find or how the request would be received.

Accessibility has always been one of Conrad’s hallmarks during his seven years leading the district. He has always been good about returning phone calls and responding to emails, so we were hopeful.

Still, ours was an unusual request. We weren’t sure just how many emails there were, but it crossed our minds that some of them could contain sensitive information that school officials might not be eager to make public.

They gave them to us anyway.

In fact, Conrad responded exactly the way you’d want a public official to respond to such a request.

First, he recognized immediately that most of the information we asked for was public, and he turned it over. More than that, he even provided a list of the emails he couldn’t provide, and explained why they were exempt.

How refreshing.

What we found was that the email exchanges largely mirrored – in tone and content – exchanges that have taken place at public Board of Education meetings. The board members in the emails are pretty much the same people you see at the board meetings that air on your local public-access TV channel. There’s something reassuring about the authenticity reflected in that fact.

We were not reassured to discover that school board members violated the state Right to Know Law, which requires most public business to be conducted in public view. Nor were we surprised, given how casually we all use email to communicate with one another these days.

The most egregious violation involved a back-and-forth discussion among a majority of board members on which the whole board was copied.

But there were lots of other email chains on which the whole board was copied on matters of district policy, but fewer than a majority replied.

Some lawyers might claim that is OK, legally. However, the fact that fewer than five of the nine members commented doesn’t negate the fact that the whole board was privy to substantive discussions from which the public was excluded; in fact, many discussions at in-person meetings involve fewer than a majority of members participating, but that doesn’t render such gatherings a non-meeting. If the same principles are applied to electronic communication, the board was wrong in these instances, whether they acted legally or not.

Nashua Board of Education members should have known better. The more experienced ones probably did, we suspect, but chose to violate the law anyway because they also knew they could with no real consequences.

For such blatant disregard of the public trust, the board owes the public an apology and a promise to hold itself to the highest possible standard when it comes to abiding by the state’s transparency law.

If board members need a role model in that area, they probably need look no further than their superintendent.