School Superintendent Stan Sawyer defended this week an informal meeting of School Committe members in a room at the high school on April 11.

The meeting took place after a City Council meeting in a room near council chambers. No members of the public were present.

Sawyer argued that no substantive School Committee business was discussed at the gathering, and that he met with the committee members to discuss possible dates for a future School Committee meeting to discuss the budget.

In a prepared statement, Sawyer said he met with the four members in attendance at the council meeting, Chairman Colleen Hilton and members Tim Crellin, Don Perkins and Cheryl Roma to gauge what the board wanted to do regarding budget deliberations.

“At the recent City Council meeting, the mayor called for a zero increase in the school budget,” said Sawyer. “I realized that the School Committee would have to hold a meeting to talk further about the budget. Knowing that I would have to contact each member at home to explain why the board needed to meet and choose a date, I took advantage of the fact that four members were at the City Council meeting.”

Sawyer said the committee did not discuss any business at the meeting, though they did discuss the reasons why a meeting was necessary to respond to the mayor’s call for a flat-funded school budget.

“We talked about why we needed to hold a School Committee meeting, namely that we would have to find a way to make cuts or reorganize in order to reduce the budget, and I asked them when they were free to have a School Committee meeting,” Sawyer said. “While I suppose I could have called each member individually, I was trying to expedite the process so that the School Committee could discuss these important issues at a meeting as soon as possible.”

Amy Serino of Prince, Lobel, Glovsky and Tye, the Boston-based law firm that runs the New England Press Association’s media law hotline, said last week that according to law any gathering, even an informal one, at which a quorum is present constitutes a meeting, and should be held in public. In the case of Westbrook, four of the seven members would constitute a quorum. Serino said that if in fact, School Committee business was discussed, the meeting should have been held in public.

“If they’re talking about the school system or the budget, that woule be business that needed to be discussed in an open meeting,” Serino said. “Everything’s supposed to be out in the open.”

Serino said that “business” could be defined as any substantive discussions regarding issues facing the board. Even if a vote is not taken, all business issues must be discussed in a public meeting.

The only execption to this is when a board discusses an issue in closed executive session. Serino said boards such as the School Committee are allowed to discuss sensitive issues in executive session. However, she said that for a board to recess into executive session, a vote must be taken in public session.

Following the release of his statement, Sawyer told the American Journal that he received information that Hilton was going to be out of town this week, and he wanted to see how the board wanted to proceed regarding budget deliberations. “It was indicated to me that the full board wanted to discuss the budget,” Sawyer said. “I needed to be sure that the full board was going to be there on May 11.”

While the School Committee is scheduled to meet tonight (April 27), the budget is not on the agenda for the meeting. At the last School Committee meeting on April 13, the board directed Sawyer to come up with a plan to save some money by formulating a restructuring plan for the school administration. The committee gave Sawyer until its meeting on May 11 to come up with a plan.

Roma, another committee member present, declined to comment on the meeting this week.

Perkins, another member present, referred comment to Hilton, the chairman of the committee, last week. He did not return a call seeking comment this week.

Hilton downplayed the significance of the meeting last week. She said Sawyer simply wanted to remind members of when the next meeting was and said the door to the room was open.

Crellin, one of the committee members at the meeting, said last week that when Sawyer and the School Committee members gathered in a room after the City Council meeting, Sawyer said he wanted to discuss budget strategies and how best to deal with the mayor’s call for a flat-funded budget.