MARIETTA - At the urging of board member Alison Bartlett, a last-minute push to add an item to the Cobb School board's agenda on Thursday night failed because of a lack of unanimous consent.

After facing past issues with adding agenda items at the last minute and not giving the public proper notice, the board tabled a vote for a driveway easement at Teasley Elementary School on Spring Hill Road in Smyrna. The vote, which will give the county permission to work on the Teasley property, has been moved to a special called meeting at 1 p.m. on Monday. The board voted down the motion made by Holli Cash to add the Teasley item by a vote of 4-2, with Bartlett and Dr. John Abraham dissenting. In order to add an agenda item the board must approve it unanimously.

"While I agree the Teasley easement is something that we need to discuss and vote on for the safety of our kids, I am concerned it was added on the agenda at the last minute," Bartlett said.

The district has been working in cooperation with the Cobb County Department of Transportation for the past few months on the Teasley project, Cobb DOT director Faye DiMassimo said Thursday. In May, the Cobb Board of Commissioners voted 4-0 approving the expenditure of $246,206 to create a right-turn lane into the 587-student elementary school in attempts to mitigate heavy traffic during morning and afternoon hours. DiMassimo explained that the original plan was for the district to do the construction and the county to reimburse them for the work.

Meantime, CCSD's attorneys at Brock, Clay, Calhoun and Rogers objected to the contract between the district and county, saying it had legal issues. The county then took matters into their own hands and found a bidder that would do the work for around $192,000 and committed on Tuesday night to funding it. DiMassimo said she emailed and met with the district's SPLOST chief Doug Shepard several times about the county's plans and that Cobb DOT was ready to go on the project.

"We started sending plans back and forth to make sure that they were getting everything that they needed from us because they already had their contractor on board at that point," DiMassimo said of e-mails sent between herself and Shepard. "We've gotten an awful lot done in a two-week period. We're rockin' and rollin'."

In his introduction of the agenda item to the board, Superintendent Fred Sanderson said it was critical that the district allow the county to begin work on the project so it was finished before the end of the school year.

But Bartlett wondered why district officials had not planned to put the project on the agenda beforehand.

"This has been something that has been going on for two months in the negotiations," she said. "And so my concern is once again, we're adding something on our agenda that we've had in the back works and have been working on, which we should have been working on that we should have dealt with at the work session."

The board came under fire in July 2009 when Dr. John Crooks was called for a vote to allow a 150-foot cell tower to be built at Eastvalley Elementary School, a proposal many parents and residents opposed as an unsafe eyesore. Crooks placed the cell tower matter on the board's agenda the day of the July meeting without advance notice. Several families then filed suit against the school district, arguing that the board violated state Open Meetings Act by failing to give proper advance notice on the vote. The move also prompted the recall effort.

Crooks, however, was not at Thursday night's meeting because of a family emergency.

In other action, the board voted to uphold the recommendation made by a three-broad member tribunal last week to not renew the contract of former Hillgrove High School biology teacher Dr. David Deru.

In a motion made by David Morgan, the board voted 5-1 to extend the $1.6 million Ombudsman Educational Services' contract by $891,000, giving it the responsibility of overseeing the new Oakwood Digital Academy. The board also voted down the contracts for two five-year charter schools, Kid's Community College or Cobb County Charter School, which was proposed for either Kennesaw or Mableton, and Foundation Charter School, Inc. or Cobb Charter Academy, proposed for west Cobb.

In its consent agenda, the board approved a waiver to increase class sizes, a measure that Dr. Judi Jones, the district's chief accountability and research officer, said at the board's June 9 meeting will give the district flexibility if they need to go beyond the former state-mandated maximum class size.