This week's Richland 2 School Board meeting was two hours forty minutes long. That's absurd.
During the time of the actual Zoom meeting, I was more than bored after two hours and abandoned the meeting. Others in the audience may have fled, too. Today I returned to listen to the question by Dr. Elkin-Johnson's about whether high school juniors and seniors would be allowed to leave campus at lunch time. I didn't think her question was answered, and it wasn't.
Board members, however, don't have the luxury of escaping by merely clicking on "Leave Meeting".
A reasonable maximum length of a meeting would be about 90 minutes.
The August 25, 2020 Regular Meeting didn't even have a large agenda.
It is the Board Chair's responsibility to move the meeting along. Perhaps a count-down timer should appear in front of each board member, showing them how much time remains for the meeting. The Chair should cut off long-winded comments, extraneous comments and remarks that could be stated in 15 seconds, when the speaker rambles on and on and on.
You've heard the sentence, "Work expands to fill the time available for its completion"? Commonly known as Parkinson's 1st Law, wikipedia offers this: "A proverb coined by the twentieth-century British scholar C. Northcote Parkinson, known as Parkinson's Law. It points out that people usually take all the time allotted (and frequently more) to accomplish any task."
And that's even truer when there is no time-limit, as at a school board meeting. It starts, and then it continues until everybody runs out of wind.
Perhaps a Board member (one of the five legal members) will make a Motion or propose a Policy that meetings are to be completed within 90 minutes.
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