THE Board of Education, which has five elected members, failed to organize on Tuesday due to lack of a quorum.
The law states that the “presence of four voting members shall constitute a quorum for transaction of business at any board meeting.”
Also under the law, the board is supposed to have organized on Jan. 9, but the process was delayed due to a “variety of reasons” according to the board’s legal counsel, Tiberius Mocanu who served as chairman pro tempore.
The law requires the board to elect a chair, vice chair, secretary and treasurer “during the regular January meeting of each year.”
The board held an organizational meeting on Feb. 1, but was not able to elect new officers because two members, Herman Atalig and Andrew L. Orsini, walked out of the meeting.
During the meeting, Orsini made a motion to go into executive or closed-door session prior to electing new officers so they could “discuss critical matters important for the Public School System.” He said the board “needs to be updated because it hasn’t convened since November last year.”
But BOE Chair Gregory P. Borja said he didn’t see why they had to discuss things behind closed doors. He insisted on an open forum “so that the community knows what we are doing.”
Besides Borja, the board vice chair, Antonio L. Borja, and the secretary/treasurer, Maisie B. Tenorio, voted against Orsini’s motion.
Orsini and Atalig voted yes.
After the roll-call vote, Atalig said, “I disagree. I don’t want to be part of this Mickey Mouse stuff.” He and Orsini then walked out even though Mocanu warned them that walking out of a regular meeting was “a dereliction of duty.”
The board adjourned and re-scheduled the organizational meeting for Tuesday, Feb. 14.
But because Orsini was off-island and Atalig was scheduled to go off-island for medical reasons, the board still had no quorum to elect a new set of officers and had to adjourn again.
In an interview, Education Commissioner Alfred B. Ada said, “the lack of quorum at today’s BOE meeting is a board matter.”
“It is my hope that they will meet very soon to establish committees for this year,” he added. “We need these committees to appraise the issues and policies presented to us at the PSS level so we can move forward and operate efficiently.”
In a phone interview, Orsini reiterated the need “to discuss critical matters important to PSS that the board needs to be updated since the board hasn’t convened since November.”
Gregory Borja
