Fort Worth ISD School Board No Longer Streaming Its Meetings; Moving Location
FORT WORTH (CBSDFW.COM) - Members of the public who want to see what the Fort Worth ISD school board does at its next meeting Tuesday, Feb. 22, will have to be there in person.
The board will no longer stream its meetings live. They will be posted online the next day.
It also changed the location of the meetings and added new guidelines for people who attend.
One of the school district's recently refurbished buildings is going to be the new home for the school board meetings.
It's the Teaching & Learning Center (TLC) at 1050 Bridgewood Drive.
The former location was 3908 McCart Avenue.
It's an open space with more room for more people and Board President Tobi Jackson told CBS 11, after watching crowded meetings with standing room only, she felt strongly about making the move.
The new location is also 12 miles from where the meetings were before, in a different part of the city.
The board also moved the public comment portion of the meetings regarding items not on the agenda, to the very end of the meeting.
Guidelines for decorum have doubled to about a dozen.
Frequent critics of the district think the changes are aimed at them.
"We get 60 seconds per month to speak to our school board, and they're going to push us off to 9, 10, 11, 12 o'clock at night? That is absolutely letting parents know they do not care to try to be transparent or work with us on our children's education," said FWISD parent Hollie Plemons.
Late Monday, Jackson said the changes were entirely about space considerations, and allowing board members to be more focused on items up for consideration.
Having public comments early just on agenda items, will allow board members to factor those into their decisions, she said.
Moving non-agenda comments later, would remove concerns about the time it was taking to get to other meeting business, and leave board members with something to think about for the next meeting, she said.
Jackson said district staff had been working on the changes and the move to the new facility since the board's last meeting in January.
She wasn't certain on the reason why the meeting would not be streamed live, but said staff wanted to get it right, and that the posted video the next day would be the full, unedited video of the meeting.