School Committee: August 6, 2020

Transcript machine-generated with Whisper speech recognition (the source video has no caption track). No speaker labels; proper names and dollar figures occasionally misheard. Click any timecode to jump to that moment in the source video.

0:07 All right, I’m going to get started. I will call the meeting to order at 708 p.m. I will first, I’ll just say it again as the meeting is called to order. I know that we’re bumping up against our 300 person limit. I apologize for that. This will be aired on MHTV starting tomorrow. And, you know, I understand that that’s an open meeting violation and I apologize because I very much thought that our 300 person limit would not come into play. Given that we’ve unanticipated that we would go over 300 people, I think there’s an opportunity here to take a 15 minute recess. And we’re going to talk with an administrative assistant in the town that may be able to increase the Zoom meeting to 500 people. It was done for a recent event and we think we might be able to accomplish that to allow people who are unable to get on the meeting, we can at least increase it by another 200 people. So my recommendation would be a motion for a 15 minute recess and see if we can make that happen. Great. So David. Second. All right. I’ll roll call. Sarah Gold. Yes. Megan Taylor. Yes. Emily Baron. Yes. Sarah Fox. Yes. And then David Harris. Yes.

1:46 All right. So the motion carries 5 to 0. We will take about a 15 minute break. We will not begin the meeting again until at least 735. Great. Great. Okay. So Kyle was not able to increase the amount of participants to our account. So I think it’s probably best that unfortunately we adjourn this meeting. Kyle said that we can tomorrow morning, she can increase my account to a thousand participants. So that should take care of it. John, I know Megan was talking to me during the recess. It sounds like our Monday deadline for voting. You know, these are, we have devoted time to this tonight and I think that this is some kind of a stall delay tactic. I don’t really like this, okay? You can’t just keep booking people for an hour and then decide that you’re going to reschedule just like doing the meeting last Friday afternoon. I’m not really sure what you’re meeting from Friday afternoon you’re referencing. But I, you know, we’re right now operating in violation of open meeting law. So our only option right now, and I apologize profusely, is that we adjourn the meeting and reschedule it. We don’t even need to do an emergency meeting. We can do our meeting within the 48 hour time period, which will allow us to post for Monday evening at 7 o’clock. Can everybody on the committee make that work?

3:25 Yes. I’m sorry. I apologize. I’m flustered. Could you say the time one more time? I’m sorry. So Monday, Monday the 10th at 7pm. We’ve run into a technical challenge where we did not anticipate over 300 people. We’ve made a good faith effort to increase those numbers. But we want everyone to hear the plan and we want everyone to have an opportunity to speak about the plan if they choose to. And taking any other course of action such as streaming on Facebook, the meeting is legally posted as being available on Zoom. There is no way for us to let people know that we are now streaming on Facebook. And so I think this course of action is reasonable. It’s 48 hours, not including the weekend. It allows people to, you know, hopefully come back and join us and schedule another time so that we can allow everyone who needs the opportunity or wants the opportunity to hear the plan can hear the plan as it’s presented by the superintendent and his staff. The plan is due on Monday, but John just received word from the commissioner that that date has been pushed back. So we can do our meeting and we can offer it to everyone as an open meeting should be so that everyone has a chance to participate and comment should they want. And the committee at that point can have the discussion.

4:58 John, a request has been made that the reopening document or the reopening document that you provided to the school committee this evening be made available. What are your thoughts on that? I’m fine with that. That’s probably both. Okay, so that can be posted. www.backtogethermhd.com. Thank you, everyone who came tonight. And again, I apologize. This is absolutely not the way that we wanted this meeting to end.