AMHERST - Five concerned School Committee chiefs are investigating whether blog postings written by public officials and the often-anonymous threads that follow them somehow violate the state's Open Meeting Law.

On May 18, the leaders of all the Amherst-area school boards - Shutesbury's Michael DeChiara, Amherst's Irv Rhodes, Leverett's Kip Fonsh and Farshid Hajir, and Pelham's Tracey Farnham - sent a letter to the Northwestern district attorney's office seeking a legal opinion on the matter.

"State law has not kept pace with online communications, in particular blogs and online forums," said DeChiara, the principal author of the letter to the district attorney's office. "My concern is maintaining the integrity of the public decision-making process. Having more information available to the public is a good thing. But how that happens needs to be clarified to ensure fairness and legality."

--Read the letter from the Amherst-area school boards

In the chairpeople's letter, they sought an opinion on eight separate subjects, ranging from whether a series of anonymous comments posted by public officials can constitute a quorum to whether public officials can comment on blogs run by officials from other boards. The basis for all of the questions is the commonwealth's Open Meeting Law, DeChiara said, which states that a quorum of committee members cannot discuss public business outside of a public meeting.

The law also requires that government meetings be open to the public, that notice of the meetings be publicly posted in advance and that accurate records of such meetings be kept.

Neither the Northwestern district attorney's office or the attorney general's office returned phone calls seeking comment for this article.

Removing the uncertainty

Rhodes said that he doesn't have any problem with any of particular blogs or the bloggers themselves.

"I think they are exercising their First Amendment rights," Rhodes said. "However, if people feel that there needs to be some clarity on the way these blogs or bloggers operate, (a legal opinion) would remove some levels of uncertainty.

The issue of public officials maintaining blogs has become particularly important in Amherst, where School Committee members Catherine Sanderson and Rick Hood operate blogs that see large volumes of web traffic. Screen shots of their blogs were included in the letter to the district attorney's office.

Sanderson - who was not informed by Rhodes that the letter was being sent - said she felt the letter to the district attorney was designed to intimidate and impede blogs like her myschoolcommitteeblog.blogspot.com. Her blog has been the subject of criticism online, in print and at School Committee meetings from people who, for one reason or another, found it to be improper.

"If one reads this letter in its totality, it seems quite clear that they are intending to raise a number of issues that would make blogs impossible," Sanderson said. "If the decision is reached that communicating by blog is not allowed, it seems to me that it is a very slippery slope in terms of other forms of communication. Are school committee members allowed to appear on television shows and share their views? Are they allowed to submit letters to the paper? Are they allowed to share their views at a public forum?"

Blog crop

Elsewhere in the Valley, Granby Selectman Mark Bail maintains a blog, as does Amherst Town Manager Larry Shaffer, although neither writes with any great frequency. In Northampton, Ward 3 City Councilor Angela Plassmann maintains a website where she regularly posts information relating to the council's work. Larry Kelley, a Amherst watchdog blogger who posts frequently about "The Vagina Monlogues" and "West Side Story," is also a member of the town's Redevelopment Authority.

Hood, whose www.amherstschooltalk.org blog was also cited in the letter, said he thought the subject needed legal clarification. The posting of meetings or discussions online is an especially grey area, he said.

"How do you post a meeting on a blog, because blogs are sort of like ongoing 24-hour meetings?" Hood said. "They never really stop or start."

But the issue also has statewide if not national implications, said Robert Ambrogi, the executive director of the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association and a lawyer who specializes in new media law.

"Clearly it is an issue that officials all across the state, and indeed the country, are facing," Ambrogi said. "Certainly one of the problems under the current or former Open Meeting Law, depending on how you look at it, is that it was written before the advent of Internet technology."

The Open Meeting Law is in the process of an update, with new regulations going into effect on July 1. The state Attorney General's Office will also be responsible for investigating alleged violations under the changes. Formerly, such investigations were conducted by district attorneys' offices.

The comments

"In my view, the danger is not the blog, but the comments," Ambrogi said. "If other committee members - enough to equal a quorum - post comments to the blog on the same issue, the sum of their comments could be considered a open meeting violation. In my opinion, the only safe course for a school committee member who wants to write a blog is to turn off the comments."

In a recent blog post, Hood noted that he was the only committee member posting, as other users must sign in and register to add comments.

Steve Fox, the multimedia journalism coordinator for the University of Massachusetts Amherst Journalism Program, also believes that technology has moved ahead of the law, but he stopped short of saying that opinions shouldn't be aired.

"I can understand the idea of not wanting to violate the Open Meeting Law," Fox said, who noted that the intent of the law is to prevent secret meetings take place. "It strikes me as a little odd, that you would not register your opinions and not pursue and open and thoughtful debate out of fear of violating Open Meeting Law. That seems a bit contradictory to me."