Just 2 points which are relevant first - DH and I were recently approved as foster carers and DH is a governor at our children's school.
Very close to our school is a patch of wasteland. It's owned by the council, and used to be designated as community use, but it's never really been used for anything other than gangs of kids riding mini-motorbikes on and dog walking. It's never been properly turfed and used for football pitches or anything like that. The council were trying to sell it to a housing developer but have recently decided that they want to build a unit on it for educating children who have been expelled from schools for violence, severe behaviour problems, that sort of thing.
Our head and the majority of the school governors do not want it built there as they are worried about violent kids being on the loose near our school (which also has a pre-school and a sure start centre in the same grounds) so all hell has broken out with lots of slanging matches played out in the local press.
DH (& a few other governors) is of the opinion that such a unit is desperately needed and that they need to see the council's plans and how they plan to safeguard the existing school (they'll be sharing a boundary), and that the school and governing body should be engaging with the council rather than going off half cocked, straight in to battle mode.
We have a friend, who used to be head of a similar unit and DH asked him if he would mind coming into a governors meeting and talking to them about his experiences. DH had a meeting last night and this was no 1 topic of discussion, and DH mentioned our friend and that he'd offered to come to a meeting.
It all got a bit heated, culminating in the head saying in front of the entire board of governors
"of course (DH) wants the unit, now they're foster carers, they'll be making good use of it"
Now, A) to me, this comment implies a pretty unpleasant attitude towards kids in care/foster kids
and B) us being foster carers isn't public knowledge, I'm not secretive about it, but it's our business and we've not announced it to all and sundry. The head is privy from a professional point of view (because we've discussed what will happen if we need a school place urgently, and because he had to give us references during our assessment), and some of the governers do know as they're friends of ours, but I think it's completely out of order for him to use this private information to score cheap shots off DH during a discussion about the unit.