Next school year, some Cleveland school board meetings could move online.
In the last meeting before summer break, Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) board members approved a new policy giving them the option to meet virtually instead of in-person.
The board would hold virtual meetings through video conferencing programs and live stream them to the district’s YouTube page. The board currently streams all its in-person meetings online.
The new policy doesn’t mean every meeting will be virtual. It’s intended to give board members flexibility, especially for the board’s committees that all have their own meetings, Board Chair Sara Elaqad said. The board will give notice of virtual meetings at least 72 hours before them.
Board business meetings, where members vote on resolutions and people give public comment, will rarely be held virtually, she said. The policy leaves it up to the board chair to decide when to hold a meeting online and when to hold it in person.
“In the rare event that we need to hold a regular meeting virtually, we might, but the intention is to avoid business meetings being virtual as much as possible,” Elaqad said.
The virtual meeting policy does not allow members to use video conferencing programs to attend in-person meetings. Meetings will either be virtual or in-person.
If the board did hold a business meeting virtually, Elaqad said, people would be able to sign up for public comment online and join the meetings to speak. The board had a similar process when they met virtually during the pandemic, she said.
There are a couple exceptions in the policy. The board can’t meet virtually if members are set to vote on spending more than $1 million on something that isn’t a recurring expense. They also have to make decisions related to levying tax increases and hiring a CEO during in-person meetings.
Board members currently aren’t paid, but if they were to be in the future, they wouldn’t be able to meet virtually. The virtual meeting policy would also be voided if school board members were elected to their positions instead of being appointed by the mayor, as they are now.
CMSD board will change the structure of meetings by grouping routine resolutions together
CMSD Board of Education meetings may also be shorter next school year.
The board is planning to use a new structure for its meetings called a consent agenda. This would allow the board to group routine agenda items together and vote on them at once rather than reading them each individually.
Routine agenda items are things the board votes on regularly such as meeting minutes and staffing changes. The board could also include annual resolutions renewing contracts for services such as tech support to a consent agenda.
For now, the board is aiming to start using a consent agenda in August, Elaqad said in an interview, but the district is still working out the process. Officials want to set deadlines for uploading resolutions online so board members have enough time ahead of meetings to read through them. They also want to solidify the rules for how board members could move specific items off the consent agenda.
CMSD will give more information on the new consent agenda structure throughout the summer and going into next school year, Elaqad said at a meeting earlier this month.
“We are not implementing it quickly,” she said. “We will have a communications plan.”