St. Lucie School Board should encourage more, not less, public participation at meetings

If you're a concerned parent with a child in the St. Lucie County school system, it may soon be more difficult for you to air any grievances you have at public meetings.

The St. Lucie County School Board is scheduled Tuesday to consider several measures that have the effect of limiting public comment at future board meetings.

The proposed recommendations include:

• Reducing the maximum amount of time allotted to each public speaker from five minutes to three.

• Further reducing the time to two minutes or even one minute per speaker, if there are a lot of speakers at a particular meeting.

• Requiring everyone who wishes to sign up for public comment to do so no later than 5 p.m. on the day of the meeting.

If you didn't know these changes were under consideration, don't feel too bad. On Tuesday's agenda, they are cleverly disguised under the generic heading of "approval of adoption of Neola policies."

If meetings have been 'collegial,' why are they doing this?

Neola, in case you might be unfamiliar with the name, is a national educational consulting firm that evidently has been entrusted to advise the board on this and other important policy matters.

If Neola's recommendations are adopted, people who want to convey their messages to board members within the allotted times at future meetings may need to hire the services of professional auctioneers.

"We wanted to make sure that we have proactive systems in place in the event we have a large number of speakers," Lydia Martin, the school district's chief communications officer, replied via email when I asked about the rationale behind the recommendations. "We looked at other districts and the adversarial climates that can occur should there be a controversial topic. At a board workshop, different variations were explored and discussed, and the recommendation is based on the outcome of those discussions."

This begs the question, have there been specific problems at past board meetings that have prompted these discussions about changes?

"Fortunately, we have not experienced this in the past," Martin said in her email.  "Our meetings tend to be very collegial."

Better not stutter at future school board meetings

So this is really a solution in search of a problem. Granted, as Martin pointed out to me, a three-minute maximum is more common at other governmental bodies around the Treasure Coast.

That's not an argument for the school board to lower its limits. Instead, those other elected bodies should follow the school board's lead and increase their maximum times to five minutes per speaker.

The three-minute limit would only be a starting point at St. Lucie County School Board meetings, anyway. According to Martin, if there were 11 to 20 speakers at a meeting, the per-speaker limit would be reduced to two minutes. If there were more than 20 speakers, the limit would be one minute.

On complex issues, it's tough to say everything someone might want to say in three minutes. In one minute, you're not getting much more than the person's name, address and a general idea of which way he or she is leaning on a particular issue.

This might be especially troublesome if people go to meetings thinking they have three minutes to lay out their cases, only to find out their allotted time is being reduced by two-thirds, through no fault of their own.

Rush hour traffic could kill your free-speech rights

There's another disparity at work here. If someone comes forward with a controversial proposal to present to the board ― it could be anything, but let's say mandatory after-school service for all students ― that person is probably going to get as much time as needed to present the original idea.

Then those who might oppose it, or even add salient points in support of it, would only have three minutes or less in response.

Here's an idea: If board members think three minutes is an adequate amount of time, why don't they set those limits for their own discussions? All board members get no more than three minutes each per item, no matter how many comments or questions they have.

Totally unreasonable? Well, then, let's talk some more about how that time limit impacts the people who elect board members to office.

Perhaps the most onerous restriction board members will discuss is the 5 p.m. cutoff for signing up for public comment.

Board meetings usually start at 5 p.m., so anyone who doesn't get a comment card filled out before the gavel drops would be out of luck.

Here's Martin's explanation for why that's needed:

"First and foremost, it provides added safety and security at meetings ensuring that the public is not moving about the board room toward the dais after the meeting begins," she emailed. "As a result of this concern, statewide boards have moved toward speaker request forms to be turned in prior to the start of the meeting.

"The other benefit is to communicate a specific time that does not vary from meeting to meeting so that the public knows from month to month what time forms must be turned in. The business meeting start time varies making it difficult to determine what time speaker forms are due each month."

Bless her heart. Having been a government communications director myself, I know Martin was only repeating the company line on that one. But come on.

Restricting public comment to improve security? Really?

Even in an age of heightened security, there's no realistic way to keep people glued to their seats for the entirety of a government meeting. People get up to stretch their legs. They go to the bathroom or get a drink of water. They talk with others who may be sitting elsewhere in the meeting room.

This isn't being done to keep board members safe from someone who might bumrush the dais. That possibility always exists, but that's why meetings have security people on hand to prevent it from happening.

What the proposed policy would do is make it near impossible for people who work regular 9-to-5 jobs to get to meetings in time to pre-register.

And what about people who don't plan on speaking when a meeting begins, but then hear something during the discussion that spurs them to comment?

I understand a shorter public comment period would mean shorter meetings, which many people would welcome. In this messy democracy of ours, though, we often have to sacrifice expediency for the sake of what most fairly serves the interests of all.

This reminds me of how the board decided to promote Jon Prince to the superintendent's job a couple of years ago without seeking any public input into the selection process. If board members approve these changes, they'll be sending the message they want to hear less from their constituents.

Tuesday's meeting begins at 5 p.m. at the board's headquarters, at 9461 Brandywine Lane in Port St. Lucie.

If you don't get there and make your feelings about these changes known, you may have much less to say about it in the future.

This column reflects the opinion of Blake Fontenay. Contact him via email at [email protected] or at 772-232-5424.

This article originally appeared on Treasure Coast Newspapers: Restricting comment at St. Lucie School Board meetings is undemocratic