Request By:
Mr. William H. Haines
8600 U.S. 42
Florence, Kentucky 41042
Opinion
Opinion By: Robert F. Stephens, Attorney General; By: Robert L. Chenoweth, Assistant Attorney General
As a member of the Boone County Board of Education you have asked the Office of the Attorney General for an opinion regarding the altering or changing of votes from one meeting to the next. You specifically have asked whether a board member can change his or her vote on a motion voted on at the previous meeting before approval of the minutes of the previous meeting is sought. It is the opinion of this office that the minutes may only be changed in this regard if the minutes inaccurately reflect the vote actually made by a board member.
A board of education is a public corporation. KRS 160.160. All official proceedings of a board of education are required to be recorded by the secretary to the board in a record book provided for that purpose. KRS 160.270(1). The case law is clear that a board of education speaks only through its record as to what was done when acting as a body at a meeting of the board. Lone Jack Graded School Dist. v. Hendrickson, 304 Ky., 317, 200 S.W.2d 736 (1947).
Additional case law holds that the minutes of a school board meeting may be attacked only for fraud or mistake. Creech v. Board of Trustees, Ky., 102 S.W. 804 (1907). As this office stated in OAG 65-887, copy attached, "the reading and approval of the minutes of the previous meeting constitutes an acknowledgement that the secretary has recorded the proceedings correctly. " In Commonwealth ex rel. Matthews v. Ford, Ky., 444 S.W.2d 908, 909 (1969), the Court of Appeals "observed that it is the responsibility of members of public bodies to see to it that their votes are correctly recorded, and if they do not vote on a particular motion, or intend to withhold their consent, the minutes of the meeting should so indicate. In the absence of fraud or mistake they will not be heard to deny what the written record discloses." See also Western Union Telegraph Co. v. Guard, 283 Ky. 187, 139 S.W.2d 722 (1940).
In view of the case law extant on the matter of the minutes of a school board meeting, we believe that the minutes may be amended at a subsequent meeting to conform them to the facts, but not to reflect a change in position on the matter involved in the question voted on. If through inadvertence the minutes have been inaccurately made, for example where the minutes failed to show the yeas and nays as actually voted, it is legal to correct the minutes according to the truth. It would be improper, however, to change the minutes to show something other than what had actually occurred at the previous meeting. To do this would be tantamount to falsification of records.