Montgomery County School Board OKs spending surplus
The Montgomery County School Board voted Tuesday to use most of the unspent money from last year’s budget to pay for a long-planned administrative offices move, not for restoring school bus stops or other measures that residents and board members had sought.
5 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post.
It is really too bad that the School Board elects not to provide video recordings of their meetings for citizens to be able to look at when they are able to do so.
I hear from parents daily about how they are going to Home Schooling because they do not trust public schools here in Montgomery County.
One way to establish trust is visibility! Video taping of those meetings and posting them online would be a good step towards working on trust.
Comment by Carol Lindstrom — August 22, 2012 @ 10:32 am
Why not go in person? I often do.
Comment by Chris — August 22, 2012 @ 2:19 pm
Why not go in person? The two most important school board meetings in the year were held in May when the operating budget was discussed. BOTH MEETINGS LASTED PAST MIDNIGHT. The school board tapes the meetings (audio), but the system is cumbersome and outdated. If you want a copy, they MAIL it to you on a DVD. Good luck getting it to run. On the 3rd try they sent me an audio file in an mp3 format which I could finally use. The Board of Supervisors meetings are videotaped and available for easy viewing. Since around 70% of our county revenue is going to schools (operating expenses plus debt service), people should be able to view the School Board meetings online!!
Comment by Barbara S. — August 23, 2012 @ 11:28 am
There’s a simple solution. Use the BOS meeting room which is equipped for videotaping. The two boards rarely meet the same time/date (or with each other). This is even more logical given the move of school administrative offices to Building C.
But there is a cost. Staff must be hired to record and publish these additional meetings. So having data about how many taxpayers actually use these records should have some weight, too. This would include knowing how many viewers access these records immediately as well as once archived to refresh memories. And indexing them would be awesome, so viewers could watch them in their entirity or just the portion(s) of particular interest. Again, that costs money to produce and has to be weighted with other priorities.
Comment by TL — September 11, 2012 @ 5:08 am
I’ve heard that the debate over video recording has come to an end and the school board has elected to utilize the government center’s board room recording capabilities. I’ve also heard they are hiring a contractor instead of utilizing their own staff or staff from the government center. More $$ spent = waste. How much money does it take for someone to hit the record button?
Comment by Dan V. — September 21, 2012 @ 10:52 am