"Special" Committee meeting 5/16/2022, 5:30PM, R2i2

The following email has been sent to Richland 2 school board.

Please discuss tomorrow what "Special" means for the 5/16/22 Committee of the Whole meeting. On the District's website, the meeting is announced as "SPECIAL COMMITTEE MEETING OF THE WHOLE ON SAFETY AND SECURITY".

Please create a space on the Richland 2 website where meeting content and remarks will be posted quickly after meetings, so that parents, community members, business owners, employees, teachers, students, and staff will be aware of what you are doing.

Please also describe to the public how the Committee is separate from the board.

Please livestream the Committee meetings.

Please explain to the public how your Committee is organized, who is in charge of it, and how you will include the public in the future, since Public Participation is not on your agenda.

If Minutes are kept, please ensure they are more expansive than Board Minutes are.

For your committee work, please describe how it will work with the BeSMART initiative and local organizations, such as Building Better Communities (BBC), that are attempting to reduce gun violence. You don't really have to re-invent the wheel.

Email the board and tell them what you want. Use this string to email add board members:

teresaholmes@richland2.org, ameliamckie@richland2.org, cherylcautionparker@richland2.org, jamesmanning@richland2.org, lashondamcfadden@richland2.org, lindsayagostini@richland2.org, puttingstudentsfirst2012@gmail.com, 

Committee of the Whole for Safety & Security (4/28/2022)

The Committee was created by the school board at its Regular Meeting on April 26, 2022.

On April 28, 2022 the Committee held its organizational meeting in a special-called board meeting. This is the one that blew up in executive session, which may itself have been illegal.

The livestream.com/richland2.com recording starts at 05:21 on the ribbon timer.

When the meeting convened at 4:30PM, Teresa Holmes, as chair of the school board, made an introductory statement before the Motion to enter executive session was made.

During her statement, Holmes said (06:05), "Before we do that (the Motion), let me take a point-of-order [sic] here. I want to make a little clarity to the public tonight. This meeting is the way that we have to get to the public forums that we do plan to have later on. We have to go through committee first, which is what we are doing tonight. And then we'll talk about the things that we we want to do. Dr. Davis and I will come back later after and give a brief little update. But I wanted the public to understand that this is the process that we have to go through first, before we go into private things of having people come in and however we are going to format that."

Then Holmes called for the motion to enter executive session.

This organizational meeting should have been announced as a meeting of the Committee of the Whole, not as a special-called board meeting. Nothing Holmes said qualified the meeting they were about to have as an executive session. The entire meeting should have been open to the public and live-streamed.

What "private things" does Holmes have in mind?

This Committee is part of the public body (school board). There aren't going to be any "private things". 

Or are there?