Last week’s all-day meeting, the work session on Wed., 10/30, was really a great meeting filled with all kinds of fantastic information. We heard from all three major departments, as well as many of the individual branches of some of them, and we were able to gather needed information for making good decisions. We got to hear about our students and their progress, our facilities and the various ways we might consider allocating funding for their needs, and then we talked about the budget and our priorities and some exciting ways to support our teachers better. It was 8 hours of exactly the kind of information one would expect a Board of Directors to be given about the operation of an organization, including statistics on the measurable components of progress and improvement, detailed and well-constructed presentations about areas of need, well-developed forecasts of revenue and expenditure — and where to find a lot of that on the state’s website for school districts.
I realize I am a bit of an outlier, but I actually enjoy meetings. This one, however, was a bit of an outlier, as it was a very interesting meeting the whole time. I believe that most everyone would have enjoyed it with all its different exciting parts.
Normally, I would now point you to where you can find the public broadcast of the meeting — sadly enough, however, the public won’t get to hear or see any of this one. The Board decided to change the way it’s been live-streaming all meetings and work sessions for the past 4 years, and this one was neither broadcast nor recorded.
It was an issue I raised last year, the need to improve transparency and accountability by recording and archiving the live-streams for public consumption later. (All meetings, including the work sessions, were already being live-streamed, and had been since Covid in 2020.) But they weren’t being saved. So if the public missed the meeting time, they were out of luck. The month after I was elected, we discussed the idea of saving those broadcasts, the admin took a month to study it, then the board voted unanimously the next month (July 2023) to start saving the broadcasts of the meetings and sharing them on the website. The practice began in August and continued with all meetings, including the work session a few months later in October 2023.
Last month at the September 2024 board meeting, recalling the difficulty at the spring work session when the broadcast did not start until after a few people contacted us to tell us the Zoom link wasn’t working at the beginning, I asked the admin to clarify that the fall open meeting work session would be live-streamed, something especially beneficial because so many people work or are otherwise occupied during the day. The superintendent assured us it would be.
The night before the October 30 all-day meeting, however, I was told the board president had decided not to live-stream it.
When we went into the meeting the next day, it was not set up to live-stream, so I asked for his help understanding why. His answer was that I could make a motion if I wanted.
After a lot of discussion, the Board ultimately voted not to live-stream (nor record for later viewing) the meeting.
I am pretty sad that the public is not able to see nor hear the valuable information shared and will not be able to celebrate the all demonstrations of the good being accomplished, nor will the people be able to hear ways to work with us to help improve in a few areas.
I am greatly disappointed to see the board seeming to take a step back in transparency, making it more difficult for the public to see what public business is being conducted. When the public business being conducted is harder to see, then less accountability is possible. We — all of us — need accountability to keep us on the right track.
Thoughts? I would love to hear them. Contact information is at https://www.ozarktigers.org/school-board or, if that doesn’t work for you, you can always write me at ChristinaforOzark@yahoo.com
As always, I speak only for myself and do not at all intend to represent the Board to you in anything I write or post.
I do, however, fully intend to do my job representing YOU to the Board!