Medford School District board members held a special meeting Tuesday to approve a resolution exempting the North Medford High School gymnasium demolition and stabilization process from usual bidding requirements in the interest of expediency.

The meeting was livestreamed via Zoom and a recording can be viewed online.

The lone agenda item, titled “Emergency Exemption from Public Procurement Rules,” was for approval of a resolution designating Superintendent Bret Champion and district Chief Operating Officer Brad Earl as staff members authorized to approve bids and processes.

The NMHS gym collapsed Feb. 11, less than four days after a crack was reported during an athletics practice Feb. 7 and the gym was closed and fenced off. The gymnasium received seismic retrofitting last summer as part of a more than $3 million project.

Champion said the resolution would ensure the district, which was still waiting to hear from engineers, “make sure that we are able to move quickly with responding to bids for some of the work.”

District officials provided an update on the gym collapse during a more than five-and-a-half hour meeting Thursday.

Per board policy, during a bidding process, “in situations of emergency,” the board has the authority to designate an individual to authorize an emergency procurement “during which the district is not required to follow general procurement requirements.” District officials plan to operate under emergency conditions until the gym is stabilized and it is fully safe to return to normal bid timelines and requirements.

District officials said during the meeting that external walls of the gym, which were built in the mid-1960s, could be shored up and allowed to remain.

Board member Jeff Kinsella said he felt like “the walls and things needed to be shored up as soon as possible for safety measures, so the sooner this gets done the better.”

Board member Lilia Caballero said she wanted to see a focus on equity during the bidding process and for the district to be transparent and to “dispute any biases that we are gonna be going with a certain company because we’ve been going with them forever.”

Board Chair Wright offered a brief statement regarding misinformation, but did not provide clarification.

“I just wanna go on record as saying that I believe this resolution clarifies a few things, and spreading misinformation and making false accusations about staff members does nothing to support the students of this district. More than ever, we need to come together and support our students and staff as we face the struggles and burdens created by the collapse of the gym,” she said.

“Together, we can get through this challenge, and we can be successful in helping our students get through.”

Board member Suzanne Messer made a motion to approve the resolution with board Vice Chair Kendall Ferguson seconding the motion. It passed with six yes votes and one abstention.

Board member Michael Williams abstained and voiced concern about the lack of opportunity for members of the public to offer comment since the meeting was via livestream.

“There’s a lot of folks who are very concerned about the process,” Williams said.

“There’s a lot of folks who feel that they lack trust, and I think that it would be wise for us as a board to, if we’re going to vote on something like this, to hold this in a … more public way.”

Williams said he read the resolution and understood the reason for it and that his concerns were more for transparency to the public than about the process, noting, “I understand the sense of urgency. I get that.”

He added, “I feel like, given the circumstances and in a step in good faith and ensuring that we are being as transparent and as inclusive with the community as possible, I would move that we hold this vote in a public setting.”