We assume the empty room should have alerted the four supervisors that something was wrong on Friday — or at a minimum that something was amiss.

What was missing from their &uot;public&uot; meeting was the public.

Four of the five Adams County supervisors walked into the empty board room Friday morning and proceeded to work on county business without a single citizen there as a witness.

Such behavior by elected officials is inexcusable. The public should — at the very least — be given plenty of notice of such a meeting.

Supervisors have been defending their actions by saying that at the end of Monday’s regular meeting they decided to recess rather than adjourn. Who, other than themselves, realized this? The purpose of this, supervisors say, was to allow them to reconvene at their leisure to discuss plans to make emergency repairs to a leaking jail roof.

While this situation may be convenient for the supervisors, the plan makes it extremely difficult — if not impossible — for members of the general public to know what their elected officials are doing.

And while any such spur-of-the-moment meeting is wrong and does a disservice to the voters who elected the supervisors, deciding to handle a controversial item in the relative privacy of their unannounced meeting is an insult.

But that’s exactly what board members did. In a controversial move, the board voted to give away Thompson School to the AFJC Head Start program.

The school, which was a black high school before integration, remains dear to the hearts of thousands of its graduates — more than 1,000 gathered at the school earlier this month at the annual Sadie V. Thompson Era Reunion.

Whether or not giving away the school was a wise move is debatable, but giving the public a chance to learn about such a deal before it’s complete is crucial.

We expect that from our supervisors and remain disappointed by their behavior on Friday.