Losing patience in the face of what he called "more badgering," Center Area school director Ben Fratangeli gave a glimpse of what's been going on in the minds of the board's new members.

That glimpse last Thursday night showed a group skeptical of the information compiled under the previous board in support of a merger with the Monaca School District, but pressured and harassed as they try to assess the numbers for themselves.

Mr. Fratangeli said that the members who were elected in November and seated in December, felt pressured to go forward with the consolidation immediately.

Instead, they slammed the brakes as a way of getting control of the process.

He also said the board wants to talk over the information and particularly wants to meet with their counterparts from Monaca, but he has been hampered by criticism that such meetings would violate Pennsylvania's Open Meetings Law.

"I'm not going to put myself in a position where I have to defend myself," Mr. Fratangeli said, claiming that attempts to meet have gotten the board "hammered in the press."

He got little sympathy from a largely pro-consolidation audience, however.

Tom Sylvester told board members, "If you don't want to have meetings in public and take the badgering, then I have a suggestion: You can always resign."

The comment had a familiar sting; the new board majority has been juggling a hornets' nest since December, when its first meeting agenda included a motion to withdraw the consolidation application filed two months earlier.

That brought a wave of phone calls from state officials, who support consolidation, and the board backed off after getting a letter from state Education Secretary Gerald Zahorchak promising that the board would face no deadlines.

The board has since encountered a swarm of critics, especially online, most of them criticizing the board for its silence, for the perception that members are hiding something and making claims that members have ulterior motives to oppose consolidation.

The Post-Gazette, meanwhile, criticized what it perceived to be violations of the Open Meetings law at the new board's initial meeting and a couple of subsequent private merger meetings, and wrote that a Feb. 12 meeting between the merger committees of the two school boards would be in violation if it took place. The meeting did not occur.

The Open Meetings law says that any school board discussion leading to a decision must be held in public, unless certain circumstances make privacy necessary. The Post-Gazette contends that those circumstances do not cover consolidation talks.

Mr. Fratangeli said the previous board had met privately during the two years it spent working on the merger.

But Mike Rossi, who was president of the board before losing the November election, said that "if we did something wrong, it's because we didn't know it was wrong."

Mr. Fratangeli noted, though, that the new board has had only a few months to study a financial consolidation report done by Education Management Group of Harrisburg and released by the previous school board Sept. 24. And it doesn't have background, doesn't know how the report's figures were generated.

"We are compiling our questions," Mr. Fratangeli said. "I see numerous discrepancies in the EMG report."

Board vice president Bob Martini, presiding over the meeting in place of absent president Richard Nicastro, said the new members were planning to post a list of questions on Center's Web site and also were planning to use that forum to answer some of the questions that have been posed to them.

That did little to appease those attending Thursday's meeting.

"What have you done since December to gather information?" asked Skip Sylvester -- Tom Sylvester's brother. "I would like a timeline; when can we get some answers?" The board did not respond to that question or others.

"If you can answer questions," Mr. Rossi said to Mr. Fratangeli, "why can't the rest of the board?"

First Published: February 28, 2008, 11:15 a.m.