So, just how important is transparency to Judge Maryann Sumi in Wisconsin?
Taxpayers trying to follow the curious case of the Madison teachers’ job action that closed down the district’s 48 schools for four days in February will get an incomplete picture from official court documents.
There is no official court record of the beginning of the February 18th court hearing during which Madison Metropolitan School District requested an injunction to end its teachers’ sickout. The MacIver News Service has learned that Dane County Circuit Court Judge Maryann Sumi began that hearing without a court reporter present.
On Friday, February 18th,the Madison sickout had been going on for three days, and the district was looking for ways to force teachers back into the classroom.
“As I understand it, MTI communicated that the teachers would be back Tuesday but had no assurances for Monday, and so the district went forward with the legal action on Friday afternoon,” wrote Ed Hughes, Madison Board of Education member, on his blog. “It took some time to find a judge who could hear the motion, but Judge Sumi took the matter on late Friday afternoon.”
Tara Monthie, a court reporter, was on her way out when she got called back to record the hearing.
“It was odd,” Monthie told the MacIver News Service. “I got there and it had already started.”
Ironically, it was Sumi, who issued a temporary restraining order blocking publication of Governor Scott Walker’s budget repair bill which restricted the collected bargaining powers of Wisconsin’s government unions. In that case she was concerned that Wisconsin’s open meetings law may have been violated during the process of passing the law (it wasn’t).
“This was something that would and did catch the public unaware,” Sumi said when issuing the order in March. Sumi said the Conference Committee’s hurried meeting, allowable under legislative rules, amounted to a “closed session of a body … propelling legislation forward.”
Yet she had no problem, just weeks earlier, commencing a high profile hearing in her court room, on the very same subject no less, without a court reporter present.
Curious.