The Atlantic City school board was set to vote on discontinuing the search for a new superintendent at Thursday night's meeting.
But now it has now been canceled after questions arose about proper notice.
Thursday's meeting was originally scheduled for Jan. 26, but that regular meeting was canceled when not enough members showed up. It was the third of this year's four meetings that couldn't reach a quorum.
But an agenda for the rescheduled meeting was not produced until just hours before the 6 p.m. meeting.
And while the new agenda claims it was posted on the bulletin board inside the Board of Education building on Tuesday, there was no agenda as late as 11 a.m. Thursday. The agenda also claims that a copy was sent to the City Clerk, but that office told BreakingAC in a phone call Thursday morning that they had not received a copy of the agenda.
"It's been brought to my attention this afternoon that notice of tonight's meeting was not posted on the bulletin board of the Citi Center Building," solicitor Tracy Riley wrote in an email to board members.
She then quoted the "adequate notice statute," and said that based on that, "tonight's meeting needs to be canceled and rescheduled to comply with statute.
The move came after a reporter for BreakingAC emailed Riley, the superintendent, board secretary and others with questions about the notice.
"It is the same agenda from last meeting," Board of Education President Shay Steele told BreakingAC at 10:30 a.m., when the website still did not have a Feb. 4 meeting listed.
That was only partially true. The previous agenda that has been online for more than a week does not include a vote that would vote on the "discontinuation of the current Superintendent search," the resolution reads.
It is not clear why the search would end, and no one from the school district has responded to questions about it.
Current Superintendent Barry Caldwell put in his letter of retirement in May, which was read into the record by the board's solicitor at that month's meeting.
The resolution also poses a voting issue.
Because five board members have relatives who work for the district, they normally would not be allowed to vote on the resolution.
But because that would leave the board without a quorum with only four eligible voting members, the resolution looks to invoke the "Doctrine of Necessity."
This allows the conflicted members to vote as if the conflict doesn't exist. Then the resolution is forwarded to the School Ethics Commission.
Thursday's meeting was also set to have two big cases discussed in closed session, including a board member whose residency has been questioned.
Farook Hossain and his wife were listed among the topics to be discussed in executive session.
A special meeting set to discuss just Hossain's case last month did not have a quorum.
At the reorganization meeting -- the only meeting that had enough members to go forward this year -- board solicitor Tracy Riley said she received information from the Atlantic County Prosecutor's Office that Hossain no longer lives in Atlantic City. Hossain's attorney wrote to Riley, asking for evidence and saying the presumption should be that Hossain is a bona fide board member unless proven otherwise.
She did not respond to that request.
Instead, Riley took the unusual step of barring the board secretary from recording Hossain's vote.
The city's mayor is also on the closed-session agenda.
Marty Small and his wife, High School Superintendent LaQuetta Small, have filed a tort claim against indicating they may sue the board and some of its members. That stems from a special board meeting held last year to discuss how Dr. Small handled issues involving her cousin Kayan Frazier, who stopped working for the district in 2017.
Two years later, he was arrested on charges that he created and shared images of children being sexually assaulted.
