A search of Collin College’s website on Monday turned up a surprising gap in transparency: no contact information for the college’s elected Board of Trustees published anywhere on the site.

After reporting this omission to a college employee who was equally surprised by it, our Metroplex Bureau reached out to the college president’s office to request email addresses and/or phone numbers for the nine trustees. Eventually trustees’ email addresses were obtained, though the college maintains that their phone numbers are “protected information.”

With those email addresses now in hand, we then contacted the trustees directly and asked them two simple questions:

Why isn’t any contact information for you, as Collin College’s elected Board of Trustees, publicly available and published online?

and

Why not fix this problem by simply publishing your email addresses on the Collin College website?

As of the end of the day Friday, two of the nine trustees – Mac Hendricks and Board Chair Bob Collins – had responded to our request for greater transparency and agreed that their contact information should be publicly available. However, the seven remaining elected college officials had not yet responded, and the public still can’t find trustees’ email addresses online.

Texas Scorecard will continue to report on how Collin College responds to this and other transparency issues. In the meantime, we’re publishing what the college doesn’t, so constituents don’t have to wait to contact their elected Collin College Board of Trustees:

Contact information is currently available online for the college’s District President Neil Matkin (nmatkin@collin.edu), who along with the elected Board of Trustees leads Collin College, and for the Secretary to the Board of Trustees Shirley Harmon (sharmon@collin.edu).

Constituents can and should be able to contact trustees with questions and concerns about issues affecting Collin County’s community college district, including the $600 million bond proposition that’s on the May 6 ballot.

Erin Anderson

Erin Anderson is a Senior Journalist for Texas Scorecard, reporting on state and local issues, events, and government actions that impact people in communities throughout Texas and the DFW Metroplex. A native Texan, Erin grew up in the Houston area and now lives in Collin County.

RELATED POSTS