A district court ruling against four Douglas County school board members last week doesn’t affect other government boards, councils and commissions, but it could persuade judges who examine similar cases concerning the legality of serial or daisy-chain meetings under the state’s open meetings law.  

A serial meeting occurs when two members of a local public body — or fewer than a quorum — meet privately by email, text message, phone or any other means to discuss public business and relay what is said to additional members of that board or council.

In his Friday decision, Douglas County District Court Judge Jeffrey Holmes found that the four majority members of the school board violated the Colorado Open Meetings Law by discussing the job performance of then-Superintendent Corey Wise in a series of one-on-one meetings in January 2022 — outside of public view — and deciding to “end Wise’s involvement with the district either by resignation or by termination.”

The judge also found that the school board’s subsequent formal decision to fire Wise in a public meeting on Feb. 4, 2022, “was a rubber stamping of the discharge discussion and decision that constituted the COML violation by the Individual Defendants and the violation, therefore, went uncured.”