Tacoma School Board gets camera-shy about broadcasting meetings

KRIS SHERMAN; kris.sherman@thenewstribune.com
Last updated: June 30th, 2008 06:21 AM (PDT)

They won’t be coming to a television channel near you anytime soon.

And unless you make your own video of a meeting and put it up on YouTube, they aren’t going online, either.

Board members last week nixed the ideas of broadcasting their meetings or taping them for Internet play.

“I think it’s unnecessary,” board member Debbie Winskill said after President Jim Dugan brought the issue up during a retreat last week.

“There are a few people in the city who would come to the board meetings just so they could be on TV,” she added.

The board didn’t take a vote on the subject, but there was clear consensus that TV broadcasts and web-streaming video were not in the picture for now.

Members plan to revisit the idea, but they didn’t set a date.

They’re not alone.

Although many municipalities in Washington televise council, committee and commission meetings, few school boards do.

A News Tribune survey of several South Sound districts showed that only Federal Way and Enumclaw regularly televise their meetings. Vashon Island School District officials are looking into the possibility. To the north, the Seattle School Board appears regularly on live TV, and meetings are replayed a few times a month. Seattle’s meetings also wind up on the Web, but there’s a delay in getting them up.

BETTER TO BE THERE IN PERSON

Some schools officials cite staff time and the cost of equipment as hurdles. It’s money they’d have to divert from the classroom, they point out.

Dugan asked Tacoma School Board members to consider going live in their quest to increase transparency and openness in how they conduct the business of a public school system with 29,000 students, some 4,000 employees and a $313 million annual budget.

The school district has a television station, but the board’s meeting auditorium is not set up for televising or videotaping meetings. If the board chose to do so, the costs would need to be researched, spokeswoman Leanna Albrecht said.

As local governments add layers of technology, increasing numbers of public officials – and the people who come to speak to them – are showing up on television channels and personal computers.

The Tacoma City Council and the Pierce County Council long have televised meetings. The Port of Tacoma began to do so earlier this year at the urging of a grass-roots group.

Depending on your cable TV service, you can tune in to the Bonney Lake, DuPont, Fife, Federal Way, Orting, Sumner and University Place city councils. The Tacoma Public Utility Board, the Sound Transit board and the Tacoma-Pierce County Board of Health also are on the airwaves. The Puyallup City Council is considering going live.

Some agencies’ meetings are broadcast live. Others are taped and shown later.

Televised democracy can be as boring as watching asphalt cure. But the interaction between elected officials also can be charged. And the comments by the public are sometimes more than G-rated.

It’s the worry over what residents might say and how they might act in front of the cameras that caused Tacoma School Board members to shy away from on-camera time.

Last year, Robert “The Traveller” Hill showed up at a School Board meeting toting a large sign promoting masturbation.

That’s the kind of spectacle Tacoma School Board members wouldn’t want on prime time.

“I really don’t want to go there,” board member Kim Golding said of televising meetings. She worries TV cameras would give some people “a platform” that has nothing to do with the school district’s business of educating kids.

Board members Kurt Miller and Connie Rickman also worried about soapbox speakers.

Golding doesn’t want the convenience of watching a meeting from your living room to take the place of showing up and lending your voice to discussions.

“I want people to come to our meetings and tell us what they think,” she said.

“I want to see their eyes” as they speak, she added.

In Federal Way, residents haven’t been reticent to let the School Board know what they think about controversial issues in recent years. And School Board President Ed Barney says that if there’s any grandstanding being done, “it’s probably from board members who are very passionate about issues.”

The Federal Way School Board began televising its meetings six years ago when it moved its meetings to City Hall.

Barney, who’s been on the board for 61/2 years, said there were some inappropriate comments at one time, but the board’s rules for public comment are clear and people generally follow them.

If someone showed up with a sign like Hill’s, “they wouldn’t be allowed in the room with it,” Barney said.

AVOIDING ‘SEASON-TICKET HOLDERS’

But putting democracy on TV can sometimes be messy.

At Tacoma City Hall, Mayor Bill Baarsma frequently bangs his gavel on the dais to make speakers stick to topics on the agenda. Gadfly Will Baker has been arrested more than once for getting off-subject and onto his soapbox as he looked into the eye of the television camera. Some residents routinely recite their Web addresses into the microphone, appealing to the TV audience to check them out.

Baarsma calls such frequent speakers “season-ticket holders.”

“They have the opportunity to do their rant, and that’s fine, but when all is said and done, we move on to regular business,” he said.

“From time to time, I must confess that my teeth are kind of set on edge and I have to take a deep breath,” Baarsma added. Reining in speakers who go off-topic or off-color “is the price you pay in a democratic process when you open things up.”

And once the TV cameras are turned on, it can be difficult to pull the plug.

Then-Pierce County Council Chairman Harold Moss was criticized four years ago when he ordered the public comment portion of the meetings blacked out. He did so, he said, because some speakers made demeaning remarks. The County Council turned the spotlight back on public speakers about a year later.

Televising School Board meetings is a local decision that demands careful consideration of costs and other issues, said Marilee Scarbrough, a former Tacoma School Board members who is the legal and policy director for the Washington State School Directors Association.

The association believes in a variety of strategies to make school district governance accessible and transparent, she said. Television is one of them, she said.

Tacoma schools Superintendent Art Jarvis told board members he “could go either way” on the question of televising meetings. It was useful in Enumclaw, he said. “Some people watch the video regularly, and I haven’t seen a lot of grandstanding,” he said.

After the other four board members and Jarvis commented, Dugan said that while he wants board business to be open and transparent, he too, is worried “about the Robert Hills of the world.”

He’s not inclined to say yes to television right now, but he would like to get School Board video on the Web.

“We have a responsibility to get what we say and what we do to as large an audience as possible,” he said.

Kris Sherman: 253-597-8659

Originally published: June 30th, 2008 01:23 AM (PDT)