Last year, when Denver’s school board was on the cusp of hiring a new superintendent, its directors moved part of a public meeting into executive session so they could discuss which of the three finalists for the job should lead Colorado’s largest school district.

But roughly five hours away in the small mountain town of Pagosa Springs, someone was keeping watch — an attorney.

Matt Roane scoured the agenda, minutes and a recording of the public portion of the May 2021 meeting for more information about what Denver Public Schools’ board discussed behind closed doors. With his search unsuccessful, Roane submitted a public records request for a copy of the recording of the closed session.

The district denied Roane’s records request. So he sued.

The lawsuit, filed in September, is one of at least 32 lawsuits filed by Roane against Colorado school districts and their governing boards in the past two years. He has gone after districts large and small for allegedly violating the state’s open meetings law. Districts in Denver, Boulder, Durango, Colorado Springs, Gilpin County and Montezuma County are among those to face lawsuits from the attorney.

Almost all of the cases were dismissed after Roane and school districts privately resolved their disputes. One case, involving the school board overseeing Creede School District, made its way to the Colorado Court of Appeals, which in 2021 affirmed that a district court ruling that the board “properly convened in executive session to discuss materials barred from public disclosure under (the Colorado Open Records Act).”

Why Roane has focused his attention on school boards is unclear. He declined an interview request from The Denver Post, saying, “The school districts and I are making progress to ensure better compliance with the open meetings law. But like making sausage, the process is not always pretty or smooth.” 

The attorney moved in 2007 to Pagosa Springs, where he began “helping the little guy fight for his rights,” he told The Durango Herald in 2020.

Roane has found his niche in an area of law that not many attorneys practice in Colorado, despite the ever-growing scrutiny of school boards across the state, said Jeff Roberts, executive director of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition.

“We need people who are interested in making sure that these open-government laws are upheld and abided by,” Roberts said, adding that the point of the state’s open meetings law is to make sure policy decisions aren’t made in secret. 

Nationally, interest in local school boards has grown as they’ve become partisan battlegrounds for parents, teachers and others to debate COVID-19 mask policies and how to teach students about race and gender identity. 

In Colorado, that scrutiny has been most notable in Douglas County, where there’s a high-profile lawsuit that alleges four members of the local school board held a series of one-on-one phone calls to purposely circumvent the state’s open meetings law when they were deciding whether to fire the former superintendent. (That lawsuit was not filed by Roane.)

A judge has ordered the four directors to stop having one-on-one meetings to discuss district business privately. The four directors, who hold the majority on the board, asked the judge to reconsider or clarify the preliminary injunction, but the request was denied.

Roane’s more recent lawsuits tend to focus on what happens when school boards move into executive session, including whether they properly cite the law and provide enough detail about what they plan to discuss privately. 

Local public entities, including school boards, must identify “the particular matter” they plan to discuss in executive sessions before they can meet privately, according to the state’s open meetings law. The Colorado Court of Appeals ruled in 2020 that Basalt town councilors violated state statute by going into four closed sessions without telling the public specifically what they would be discussing, according to the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition.

Roane’s most recent lawsuit — at least as of this story’s deadline — was filed Tuesday against Harrison School District Two in Colorado Springs. In the four-page document, Roane alleges the district’s board of education moved into a closed session during a public meeting in May but did not say what personnel matters the members planned to discuss behind closed doors.

The board should have at least identified the nature of any personnel or employment matters it planned to discuss, which it could have done “without compromising the purpose for which the executive session was authorized,” Roane wrote in the lawsuit.

In another lawsuit filed last month against the Aspen School District, Roane alleges the school board violated state statute in May because it “failed to sufficiently identify the particular matter it intended to discuss” and didn’t provide the proper citation before moving into a closed session to discuss property.

School districts, including Denver Public Schools and Harrison School District Two, declined to comment for the story. The president of the school board in Aspen also declined to comment. 

In May 2021, the Denver school board decided during executive session to select Alex Marrero as the district’s new superintendent, Roane alleged in his lawsuit.

The district publicly announced Marrero was selected for the job 12 days later when it held a press conference at South High School. The school board didn’t vote to hire him until June 3, 2021.

While the state’s open meetings law lets school boards discuss personnel matters related to current employees behind closed doors, it does not let them go into closed sessions to discuss the candidates they are considering hiring, Roane alleged in the lawsuit.

That means the discussion should have happened in public and that the board’s selection of Marrero as superintendent violated the state’s open meetings law, the lawsuit alleged.

The case was dismissed in November after Roane and the district resolved their dispute.