New Public Participation Procedure

The District's new Public Participation Policy worked pretty well last night. The District had collected 63 comments from the public, and they were read to the board by Libby Roof, Chief Communications Officer for the District.

Had the public been speaking, the first Public Participation segment on the meeting agenda would have allowed 15 minutes for comments and then a second 15 minutes toward the end of the meeting. Each member of the public could have read his/her comment, but the administration decided that the comments would be read.

How does that jibe with the official, written Policy? It doesn't.

Mrs. Roof did a great job of plowing through the comments. She identified the person who had submitted the comment and then read the comment. The submitted comments were shown during the meeting and will be given to the board members. I suspect the board will receive an electronic copy of the comments. This will mean that most board members will never read them.

Unfortunately, the images of the board members were not shown during reading of the comments. Thus, it was impossible to know whether they were paying attention  This should be corrected in future Zoom meetings. The images of the trustees should be visible during the entire meeting.

One member of the public had submitted several comments, which were combined. All comments, except one, were on the topic of schools re-opening.

Two board members will look at the comments and probably even print some of them. The others? Out of sight, out of mind.