If actions in fact speak louder than words, then Denver’s newest school board members’ earliest moves show they are not the community-focused group they promised to be.

We all know the “sausage-making” of public policy can get ugly and contentious. All the more reason it should be conducted in public.

The newly sworn-in board decided not to live-stream its first-ever meeting, a daylong retreat Dec. 9 that included a discussion about how to approach charter school contract renewals.

Then, in its first substantive action, the board decided to extend new Superintendent Alex Marrero’s contract from two years to four, with a fifth year all but automatically built in. In the resolution to extend his contract, there’s language that evaluations the board conducts of Marrero each year will be kept confidential “to the extent permitted by Colorado law.”

To which news the stalwart Colorado Freedom of Information tweeted a quote from Colorado state law: “The evaluation report of the chief executive officer of any school district … must be open for inspection by any person at reasonable times.”

Hiding its evaluation of the one employee the board supervises is a slap in the face to the community.

At the retreat, Board President Xochitl Gaytán said the meeting wasn’t streamed because board members needed a “safe space” to do their early work, which included discussing results of personality-type tests, and how to work together moving forward.

After negative publicity about shutting out the public, the board did post a partial video of the session on its website, something that wasn’t in the original plan.

The posted video begins with a discussion of collegiality and working together, led by Kevin L. King of Denver-based Transformation Point, a performance management and leadership development consulting firm.

The first few minutes of the video demonstrate why this board might face some interpersonal challenges, and why they might have been happier keeping their airing of dirty laundry from public view.

The obvious fracture point is the former board’s censure earlier this year of board member Tay Anderson, by a 6-1 vote.

The censure focused on inappropriate, flirtatious behavior by Anderson on social media toward two DPS high school students.

That behavior was uncovered during an investigation into more serious charges leveled against Anderson that were found to be unsubstantiated.

Three of the people who cast censure votes are no longer on the board, but three remain — Carrie Olson, Scott Baldermann, and Brad Laurvick. Apparently, unless they apologize and beg forgiveness for their censure votes, they will be on the outs with the new board majority.

There’s no indication any of the three have second thoughts about their votes.

Anderson and his new board ally Scott Esserman made it clear that at least the two of them are neither forgiving nor forgetting.

While stressing that he won’t let personal resentments interfere with board work, Anderson said: “I am (still) struggling…to work with some people at this table, based off of the last year that I’ve had…we still have people at this table that do not feel safe with folks at this table, and do not feel as we have addressed devastating harm that has been caused at this table.”

Esserman, who in his early days on the board has proved to be a highly assertive presence, made no such disclaimers.

“You can’t move forward without restoring what has been done,” Esserman said, clearly referring to the censure. “We have to have honest conversations.”

Esserman said “a lot of what happened in the last year had a lot to do with personal feelings between board members. To sit here and pretend and try to move forward and say ‘well now we’ve got three new people in the room, that changes the dynamic for the board,’ without acknowledging those individual relationships, I’m struggling with.”

Olson, Laurvick and Baldermann stayed silent through this portion of the conversation.

Facilitator King tried to steer Esserman and Anderson in a more productive direction, while carefully not singling them out.

“If we want to get a pound of flesh for grievances that we’ve incurred in the past, the point is that we may not get that and the pursuit of it isn’t really aligned with being able to do the business of the board,” King said.

Now that is common sense. Somehow, I doubt it got through to Anderson and Esserman.

Alan Gottlieb is editor of Denver-based public education watchdog boardhawk.org. Gottlieb covered Denver Public Schools as a newspaper reporter in the mid-1990s, worked as an education program officer for The Piton Foundation and co-founded Education News Colorado and Chalkbeat.