If a meeting takes place, but the public wasn’t invited, did it really happen?
The panel charged by state law with creating a teacher evaluation system by July 1 has not met publicly since Feb. 6, but the Malloy administration has said subgroups of the public panel are meeting. Repeated requests by The Mirror for times and dates of those meetings have gone unanswered. It is also unclear who sits on these subgroups.
State law is clear that public advisory councils, and their subgroups, must follow the Freedom of Information Act.
It’s kind of like the longstanding unanswered question, if a tree falls in a forest, and no one’s there to see it, did it really happen?
Jacqueline was CT Mirror’s Education and Housing Reporter, and an original member of the CT Mirror staff, joining shortly before our January 2010 launch. Her awards include the best-of-show Theodore A. Driscoll Investigative Award from the Connecticut Society of Professional Journalists in 2019 for reporting on inadequate inmate health care, first-place for investigative reporting from the New England Newspaper and Press Association in 2020 for reporting on housing segregation, and two first-place awards from the National Education Writers Association in 2012. She was selected for a prestigious, year-long Propublica Local Reporting Network grant in 2019, exploring a range of affordable and low-income housing issues. Before joining CT Mirror, Jacqueline was a reporter, online editor and website developer for The Washington Post Co.’s Maryland newspaper chains. Jacqueline received an undergraduate degree in journalism from Bowling Green State University and a master’s in public policy from Trinity College.
