A unanimous three-judge panel of the N.C. Court of Appeals has affirmed most of a trial court’s ruling in an open-meetings lawsuit filed against the Wake County school board in connection with a controversial March 2010 meeting.

The trial court had found that the school board had violated the open-meetings law at a March 23, 2010, meeting “by their last-minute adoption of a ticketing policy and by exclusion of members of the public from the [Committee of the Whole] meeting,” but the court also ruled this was a one-time violation and granted no “affirmative relief” to the plaintiffs.

The only change at the appellate level is that appellate judges vacated a part of the trial court ruling involving the failure to accommodate a disabled person “because the Open Meetings Law makes no distinction between access by disabled members of the public and access by non-disabled members of the public.”