Sadly, it was something we won’t see again: One by one the public speakers stood to deliver their allotted two minutes of remarks to the Cobb County Board of Education. Their universal concern? That the school system was about to vote to cut all public comment from the video feed of board meetings.
According to Superintendent Chris Ragsdale, the change of policy was his idea.
“My recommended changes to the policy will allow our board meetings to be more efficient and more focused on the business of students, teachers and our schools,” Ragsdale told board members, “and will remove the liability associated with broadcast and public comments.”
Anytime a public official starts using efficiency as a justification for eliminating public input, I get suspicious. Democracy is messy, complicated and sometimes deliberately inefficient.
It’s difficult to see how stopping the broadcasting of public comments will make the board more efficient, except that, perhaps, the board now will be able to simply ignore the public speakers, since no one else will hear them.
Georgia law requires school boards to hold monthly meetings and to “provide a public comment period during such regular monthly meetings.” School boards are the only government entities in Georgia required to do that. In 2004, Cobb County schools began broadcasting the school board meetings on a local cable TV channel. The meeting videos are also posted on the school board’s website.
“The district has had to interrupt speakers and edit recordings, due to legal concerns, such as copyright infringement, intellectual property issues or tortious speech,” Ragsdale said.
Ragsdale got his way. The board voted 4-3 on July 17 to cut all public comment from the video feed.
To our Georgia First Amendment Foundation attorneys, the justifications for the vote don’t pass any basic legal test.
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
Under Georgia law it would be really hard to sue a school district for something a public speaker said. While commenters are potentially liable for what they say, government agencies are protected by sovereign immunity from such suits. The school board enjoys the same protection as Facebook for comments posted on its website. As to copyright violations, quoting from a book in a public meeting is a clear fair use under copyright law. And we couldn’t find a single school system in Georgia that has ever been sued for statements made during public comments.
Perhaps the superintendent was embarrassed by the appearance of school bus maintenance workers at an April school board meeting, who spoke up to warn of antiquated buses that shouldn’t be carrying children anymore, lack of up-to-date maintenance equipment and overworked employees.
“If any of these men makes one mistake, it can cost someone their life,” warned one of the mechanics who spoke during the public comment period.
Several news organizations immediately picked up the comments from the video feed of the meeting and reported on them. At the time, school district officials told reporters it was the first time they heard about the school bus problems. For journalists with limited resources to cover metro Atlanta’s more than 20 school districts, the video feed of comments was a tool to help them cover the issues in Cobb County.
As any parent will tell you, keeping up with the issues — like safety of school buses — is really hard. For many busy parents, like Melissa Hagen who has three children, the comment period of the meeting was the best way to understand what is happening in their children’s schools.
“When you stream public comments, you affirm that the voices of this community deserve to be heard, not just by the board, but by one another,” Hagen told the board members.
“Real time access allows people to hear concerns unfiltered, to witness the tone and passion behind the words, and to participate in the civic life of this district, even if they can’t physically be in this room.”
Couldn’t say it better. Proof of the value of public comments, publicly heard.
Richard T. Griffiths is retired after a 43-year journalism career. He is an advocate for open government and a former president of the Georgia First Amendment Foundation.
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