Surfing TV channels at just about any time of day or night, it’s hard to avoid seeing a live public meeting or a rerun of an earlier one.

In Pierce County, bodies ranging from the Fife and University Place city councils to the Tacoma Public Utility Board and Tacoma Port Commission put their meetings on the airwaves. Many meetings are also available for viewing online.

So why not the Tacoma School Board? Tacoma school officials cite two major reasons for not broadcasting board meetings. Neither stands up to scrutiny.

The first reason they give is that some members of the public might use their few minutes of camera time in dubious way – to grandstand, to publicize their Web sites, maybe even say or do things in questionable taste.

Besides the fact that being an American means being free to make a fool of yourself in public, meetings of the Tacoma School Board should be no more exempt from wide scrutiny than those of any other public body.

The district should do everything it can to make it easier for the public – especially busy parents of young children – to know what goes on at board meetings, even if only by watching them on TV. That kind of openness and transparency helps build connections between the district and the public – something the school board needs to do as enrollment slips and school closures become more likely.

The Seattle School District has gone through a lot of turmoil in recent years, and that’s often been reflected in boisterous board meetings. Yet that district televises and rebroadcasts meetings and even its superintendent candidate forums. The meetings are also available online.

Maybe it’s not surprising that the state’s largest school system televises its board meetings. But so does the Federal Way School District – the state’s seventh largest (Tacoma is third largest). In fact, Federal Way is an old hand at it, having gone live in 2002. It also rebroadcasts meetings several times during the week and makes video available online.

“We want to engage more people,” said Diane Turner, the district’s chief communications officer. “That outweighs our concerns about individuals.” Televising meetings “allows us to get information about our challenges and our kids out to as many people as possible.” Turner says the board rarely has problems with speakers abusing their two minutes of camera time.

The other reason Tacoma school officials give for not televising is that the board’s meeting room isn’t equipped for broadcasting.

The Federal Way School Board handles that by meeting in the City Council chambers. Surely someplace in the City of Tacoma could accommodate school board meetings so they could be televised – perhaps one of the expensive new auditoriums at Stadium or Mount Tahoma high schools.

If city councils in small places like Fife, DuPont and Orting can televise their meetings, so can the Tacoma School District. The board’s resistance begins to sound like it’s trying to hide something from the public it serves.