The HSE School Board has been discussing their video retention policy for months now. The previous school board overwhelmingly voted for videos to only be retained for 45 days before being removed. One board member indicated that for transparency the videos should be left online indefinitely. Because it wouldn’t be until later that videos would start to be posted, the old board decided the incoming board could review the policy and decide on changes.
The new board is now in place and the video retention policy has been discussed a couple of times. If the policy is going to be changed, it is expected to happen next month.
Why should the policy change?
First, why not retain the video indefinitely? Other school districts and organizations leave their videos online. Storage is cheap, and storing them provides the ability to go back and find what was discussed. There have already been examples referenced by the new board to the interest in looking at old videos, something they can’t do because they don’t exist.
The primary argument for removing the videos has been that the written board minutes are the official record of the meetings. While this is the case, the official minutes in the current written form are lackluster at best. This is best illustrated with an example. At the November 14th meeting, there was an agenda item related to the HSEA (the teachers’ association). The official minutes documents this as follows:
|
6. HSEA Relationship with Board Janet Chandler gave a brief presentation to the board. Parent, Cathy Goldman addressed the board, calling into question board reaction to social media postings. |
That is the official tracking of this board item as recorded in the minutes and approved on November 30th. From these official minutes, you’d never know that this item caused the school board room to be packed. The room was filled primarily with teachers who were concerned with a public posting by an existing school board member. The parent comments reflected the same. Had there been a video of the event you’d have gotten the details that were like what is in the following poorly recorded video:
As you can see in the video, a lot was said that isn’t reflected in the minutes. More importantly, with a 45 day retention policy, an official video of this meeting would now be gone, expunged, lost in history. While a few board members might like to see it go, it could be argued that there were important points being made that would also be lost.
This is just one example. As someone who has attended a lot of school board meetings, I could list other examples of where discussions in the board meetings were not reflected in the minutes. Such a list could be an entire article on its own. I won’t do that at this time.
Will the policy change?
I believe there are currently three school board members that will vote for transparency and the posting of videos for the long term. I believe that there are two school board members that could vote against posting the minutes for the long term, just as they voted to keep the current policy no longer than 45 days. That leaves two board members that I would be hard-pressed to predict, which means a vote could go either way. THe first of these two, Brad Boyer, is an unknown to me on this topic. In the discussion from this last school board meeting, his contribution was about reviewing policies and not really about this specific policy. It was unclear if he had a point regarding the specific video policy, which left his potion questionable. The other unknown to me is Sylvia Shepler, who had sided with the old board on limiting the video to 45 days; however, the November 30th meeting she seemed to support the idea of leaving the video live “for at least four years.” From her past votes on topics, however, I won’t speculate on how Sylvia will vote. Of course, nobody’s vote is certain until it happens.
In Conclusion….
In short, right now it is unclear how the vote for retaining the videos will go. I would strongly suggest people write the board members and push for them to support transparency and make a policy that leaves the videos live forever. Being able to go back and review discussions on topics that have happened within school board meetings is a valuable resource. Let’s hope that a majority of the board members see the value in leaving this information available. After all, if there is nothing to hide, then what’s the harm in leaving them public other than it making a number of people more accountable….
And yes, here is my rough video of the video retention discussion from the January 30th board meeting: