Something interesting happened quietly and without fanfare during the regular meeting of the Suffolk School Board in September.

Unfortunately, taxpayers are only learning about the matter this month — and then, perhaps, only because the cat was let out of the bag with the publication of the school system’s budget last month.

It seems that the School Board approved an increase of nearly $23,000 a year to the salary of School Superintendent Deran Whitney. Members of the board gave Whitney this increase during their September meeting without public comment — and, in fact, without the simple courtesy of a statement of their actions.

Suffolk’s school system has been working to implement the recommendations of a consultant in a “pay and classification plan” that examined pay scales for all of its employees, and officials said this week that Whitney’s 14-percent pay increase was a result of their desire to get his salary in line with those recommendations.

Maybe Whitney deserved a raise that — on a percentage basis — equated to more than four times as much of an increase as teachers in his system received. Faced with withering criticism for their action, School Board members are now making the case that he does, and there are, frankly good arguments on either side of the matter.

But what’s truly unconscionable is the secretive way this elected body went about the business of granting this raise. The 2017-2018 proposed school budget is the only public document that alludes to the increase — and that budget gives no indication that most of the “proposal” has already been adopted and put into effect retroactively to last July.

In fact, the vote to increase Whitney’s salary came way back during that otherwise uneventful meeting in September, when the School Board, following a routine closed session to discuss what were thought to have been routine personnel matters, took a routine vote, which passed unanimously to, as the minutes from that meeting record, “approve the Personnel Report as presented.”

The problem, of course, is that the Personnel Report — including the topics of consideration in that report — is shielded from public review under an exception to the Virginia Freedom of Information Act.

And that means the School Board, hiding behind the veil of personnel matters, voted to give its school superintendent a raise far larger than anything front-line personnel can ever expect with no regard for the fact that taxpayers, parents, teachers and others associated with the school system might deserve an explanation, or at least notice, of the action.

In a budget totaling $161 million, $23,000 seems a small sum, small enough, perhaps, that one might have expected it to escape notice during public budget discussions. But Suffolk taxpayers have been conditioned in recent years to expect shenanigans when it comes to elected officials setting salaries for top government administrators, and many of those taxpayers keyed on the large proposed increase right away.

But it’s unlikely that even the most jaded of us expected such a blatant thumbing of the nose to taxpayers.

As we head into Sunshine Week in Virginia, there’s hardly a better case to be made for the need for transparency in government than the one Suffolk’s School Board made last week.