The Boardhawk Podcast

Episode 6: Why did the Denver school curtal access to public comment?

• Alan Gottlieb

Share episode
Alan Gottlieb:

Hi, everybody. Welcome to the BoardHawk podcast. We are back here on this beautiful spring day. We're recording this on St. Patrick's Day, Monday, the 17th, and we're going to talk today about the changes the Denver Public Schools Board has made to their public comment policies and how that's affected the public's access. To the board. In addition, there's also they've created a series of community meetings, but the public comment policies have changed over the last year plus quite dramatically from what used to be a fairly open process where people signed up and as many signed up as wanted could speak for up to three minutes. Sometimes when there was a hot topic out there, like after the East High School shootings two years ago, there might be 50 people signed up to speak and it would go on for hours and hours, which is tough on everybody. They made an interim change under then president Sochi Gaitan in the fall of 2023 to limit public comment to two hours. And then more recently effective at the beginning of this year, they limited public comments to two different kinds of public comment. 30 minutes per topic on any item on the agenda that month that was going to be voted on, and that's an important detail, it wasn't any item on the agenda, but any item that was going to be voted on, and then there was a 30 minutes total allotted to, that was called unrestricted comment for people to speak on any topic they wanted to, and, but each speaker was limited to in both cases to two minutes where it used to be three minutes as well. Why is this important? Why are we having a whole podcast episode about this? What I've been thinking about lately is that especially in our current political moment, when we have a editorial comment coming warning growingly The authoritarian federal government trying to limit dissent limit free speech and limit a lot of things for a ostensibly progressive school board to be also limiting public access and to it and curtailing the amount of time people can speak. It's just a bad look and they really shouldn't be doing it. But Alexis and I think have some slightly nuanced differences on some of this stuff. And it's just an interesting topic to talk about. So that's what we're doing. Alexis, take it away.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan:

Yeah, thanks, Alan. Certainly lots to discuss here and you brought up a couple of points that I want to react to. First, staff and board members do have to stick around a long time for some of these really long public comments on hot topics as a former DPS staffer who had to stick around, these are long nights and oftentimes you're having to come in still early the next morning. To that, I have to, I hate to say it, but It comes with the job. It comes with the territory. When you are a public servant and you choose to take on these roles of community outreach and engagement, it does sometimes require long nights. We have the legislature during busy seasons when they're, at the Capitol till 2, 3 in the morning sometimes. It's something that I would expect of our public officials, especially our elected officials. And yes, unfortunately, there are staff members who do get stuck in those late nights. And I think there's ways to solve for that. If that policy still existed where you allowed for unlimited public comment where you could stagger people and stagger time. However, that is obviously no longer the case. We do have the limitations not only of the topic, but also the time itself. My concern with the topic limitation is that it may actually create inequitable access. If you have people who are signing up right at the beginning of public comment opening and, there's 50 people who do want to talk on one topic. Let's say it's school closure, for example, but only the people who signed up first have the ability to be part of that 30 minute topic. Then folks who may have signed up later or didn't have access, to sign up right away because they're working or don't have access to internet. I do worry what that means for for equitable access to public comment, and if you're signing up a little bit later in the day, does that mean you're getting bumped from the agenda when you would have otherwise been able to speak because you were in that window. So that's the part I have a question about. Where I will say I defend a little bit the decision of the board is. This policy the policy changes are GP 17 public comment under the board governance policies, but we also have GP 15, which requires the board of education to have proactive community engagement and over the last couple of weeks, several board members have held these community meetings. And I actually do appreciate it. And I chatted with director Dela Rosa, so in preparation for this meeting she actually helped turn my mind around a little bit on this, because I was pretty critical of the changes, but when you think about GP 17 in partnership with GP 15, which has this proactive community engagement, director de la Rosa said it allows for a two way and Community engagement that you wouldn't have had otherwise with regular public comment, and I actually hadn't considered that you were, if you're a board member up there and you're listening, two, three hours of public comment, and you want to say something you can't, you're limited to just listening. But if you actually want to engage in a more robust dialogue and be able to share your opinion or Correct something that maybe a community member says you can now do that in these community forums. So I unfortunately haven't been able to attend one. I do want to try to get out there in the next round that they do in order to provide some feedback on what that could look like and also just share back with the folks who listen to the podcast. But those are some of my initial thoughts around some of the changes they're making.

Alan Gottlieb:

I agree with a lot of what you're saying. It's a both and I think there should be both public comment that I think should be pretty unlimited and these community meetings where there's a chance for dialogue and several the board members have already held these. I did hear from somebody who attended the one in Southwest Denver last week led by board members of the board. Director Xochitl, that there was no open Q and A. There were some small group sessions, but there was no open Q and A allowed in a part of town that's heavily Spanish speaking, they were supposed to be discussing executive limitations, 18 and 19 around school closures and things like that. And those documents weren't translated into Spanish. So the DPS. Let me just put it bluntly, has always sucked at community engagement and they continue to not know well enough how to publicize these events. So it's brand new, I understand that, so we should give them some slack. But they really need to make a concerted effort to make sure people know about these community events that the board members are holding and do whatever they can to get people out. They did provide translation, to be fair, at Xochitl's Director Gaetano's event last week, so there was translation. simultaneous interpretation, but the documents that they were actually talking about weren't translated. Another, I guess I feel like, and I talked to three different board members about this including President Kerry Olson last week, just to try and get their take on what's going on with this. President Olson, I'm just going to call him by their first names because I We call the formality. Carrie told me that she thinks maybe they went a little too far with the limits of 30 minutes per topic and 30 minutes and that they needed to back up a little bit. Their intent has never been to limit access to the board, but that these five or six hour meetings, it's really hard to stay focused. It's just agonizing that they're really trying to to keep the board engaged and to keep Give me the public a reasonable access, but not to make it absurd. I think a really important point here is, and I have not taken the time to go back yet and look at the rosters, but I know from having looked at them every week, even going back to the fall of 23, when they first put the two hour limit on the number of people. Signing up in general for public comment has dwindled from really, there would often be two or three pages worth of names to sometimes there have been a couple of times where there's been one or two people total signing up. So the limitations and even more so since January have had a chilling effect on the public feeling like. It's worth the effort to come out on top of that. The other thing they've done is, and I know we talked about this right before we went on the air. So you have a different take on it, but they've moved the comment up to the boardroom on the whatever floor it is in Emily Griffith. And that's a very small room where only a few people can fit in. That means that, large groups that used to be able to like, Organize and have a lot of people in t shirts, even if only a few of them were going to speak on an issue to show a public strength of a particular group on an issue that no longer is possible because that many people can't fit in there. So it also really limits kind of public demonstrations of support or opposition to a particular policy in a way that I think is unhealthy. Yeah,

Alexis Menocal Harrigan:

I do push back on that opinion, Alan, because I think I was actually the first. If the first, if not one of the first to be providing that public comment on the seventh floor, and I actually chatted briefly with a couple of the board members, including Carrie, and the reason I like it is, I would hope that when you can be face to face when you could be, really looking somebody in the eye, and you're only I don't know if that is, in fact, the case, but I certainly would and I think that, if you're sitting at the same table, it's almost feels like you're breaking bread with them. I think it, it does something to the civil discourse. And I think it does something to just speak to people's humanity and hopefully provide a little bit more civility. I don't know if that is in fact the case, but I certainly would. Putting myself in, thinking it through my lens, I am going to be speaking a little bit more kindly and respectfully and thinking carefully about what I say if I'm, two feet away from a board member than if I'm, very far away and there's a whole room behind me maybe chanting me on and egging me on. And I do feel that sometimes when you have these massive groups showing up in busloads, that, that's politics, let's just be honest, that's politics, that's a community organizing strategy, and it certainly can be effective, but I don't think it truly reflects always what the community at large feels when it. Not everybody is going to have the ability to get on a bus. Not everybody's going to be able to be able to speak their mind about something because they just don't have access to the board. And I would just say, limiting the two to the two minutes, I do think has had a chilling effect. I do think you see less people willing to engage, but I think also limiting the topic to just the topic at hand also limits that. So if, people do have an instance of. I want to come and speak because my child is being bullied at school. Those opportunities really don't exist anymore because that's not something, personnel matters aren't something that that the board is taking on. That is something probably to be taking up at that community meeting. But to your point earlier, I don't think the average parent, the average community member knows when and how to engage with a board, whether that's through a community meeting, whether that's through email, if that's, going and speaking at public comment, I do think DPS needs to find a better way to do community engagement, and I will say, again, having been a DPS employee, having done community engagement for DPS, we didn't do it well either. I don't think you can look back at history and say, Any one process was done perfectly to the credit of this administration. I will say one of the best processes I've seen in a really long time was around this latest school closure community engagement process and certainly that wasn't perfect either. I think it's still a little too early to say what is and is not working. I hope that they would revisit it. I hope they would consider changes to it. But my concern really is broader community engagement isn't effective and what would it take and what are the resources it would take to. Do better community engagement, just generally,

Alan Gottlieb:

just to be clear. I was told to know in certain terms by Carrie and other board members that they are in fact going to take this back up at the meeting

Alexis Menocal Harrigan:

or

Alan Gottlieb:

work session that they were actually had it on the agenda for March, but they ran out of time. So I think they recognize that they've gone too far and they're going to step back a little bit. So I think that's good. A couple of recommendations, not that they listen to me, but that I would make is I feel like the one change they made that I could completely support is that they don't want people signing up for public comment who have absolutely no kind of relationship with DPS at all. So you don't want a group of MAGA people bust in from Douglas or El Paso County to like rail against DEI, blah, blah, wokeism, and all that stuff. That has nothing to do with anything that's actually happening in the district. So I completely support that. And I think they should hold to that. I also, although policing, it was a little challenging. Another thing that I think would be a reasonable limit would be if you've got orchestrated groups, community organizing groups, the DCTA, the principles union, what any group that's orchestrated and organized. There's no reason why you should let 50 to 100 people or whatever it is sign up and speak on the same topic when many of them are reading from a script, the same script or a very similar script. You can have a very Significant show of force simply by having 10 people speak on it and say, and we have 50 other people who would have signed up to speak. But, I just think that's enough because otherwise it just turns into a harangue. So to me that's another thing they could do to limit it. But I don't feel I don't approve of them limiting the amount of time that public comment can go on for overall or the number of people that can speak on a topic and Of the board members I spoke to Kimberly Sia was very clear that she's also not comfortable with that and is struggling with it and trying to figure out what to do about it, but I'm not at all convinced their votes on the board to go back to a completely open unlimited time public comment. I wish they would do that. I think they should do that, but I don't think they will.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan:

Yeah, I think you're right on that last point. I don't think they have the votes to go back to totally open public comment. You know what you're saying also reminds me. Fewer and fewer members of Congress are holding town halls, and I think you're seeing a lot of what you described, like sort of these MAGA folks coming out or people just coming on their one single topic and derailing entire town halls for folks who are there as constituents, want to engage with their elected official. And so I think there's a fine balance you don't want to be opening things up in such a way that it, Is harmful to the general public and actually is derailing from important topics, but I, and I also agree with you when you have, again, literally busloads of people speaking on one community groups interest, whether it's the DCTA or it's a charter school renewal, speaking on the two extremes, I actually don't think that's helpful. I think it, it creates more divisiveness when I think most topics. Okay. And most items that the board is discussing are much more nuanced than the political views or the ideological views of one or two really powerful organizing groups.

Alan Gottlieb:

Completely agree. As the board comes around to discussing this again in April and let's hope make some changes back in a reasonable direction, all interested parties should contact their board members between now and then and say, you all have, I think one of the reasons we came up with the idea of doing this topic today was because we both heard from numerous people who, for the reasons you described earlier, just have gotten shut out Of being able to give public comment because it's so limited that when they tried to jump in and put their name on the list, it was already closed, but there was too many people. So they need to be a lot more open and they need to hear from the public before the next public comment session that this should be opened up. I think one of the things that maybe we didn't say at the beginning is that public comment has also been moved from. The voting board meeting to the work session earlier in the week with the purpose, intended purpose of allowing board members to have time to ponder what they've heard from public comment and actually possibly change their vote. And I actually was talking to somebody who's very plugged into DPS today, who said at every public comment at the beginning of the public comment, or even at the board meeting. The couple of days, a few days later in the following week, whenever it is, they should say, here are the things, the president of the board should get up there and say, we heard the following things during public comment, and here's how we have chosen to respond to some of them that we thought were really important. And actually show, even though there's no interaction allowed during public comment by policy, the board sits passively and listens. They could say, we heard you, we've discussed this, here's what we're thinking about, a direction we're thinking about going based on that in cases where they might actually have. For something that was persuasive,

Alexis Menocal Harrigan:

I really like that idea. In practice. I don't know exactly how that would work, but I think that's a great idea because it does feel like when you speak at public comment, it goes on deaf ears and you don't know if anything you're saying is really making a meaningful difference. And it's hard not to think that a lot of these decisions are being made behind closed doors, which honestly, I tend to believe that a lot of times they happen that way. As a thought experiment, I might actually sign up for public comment, With the intent of actually going and speaking on this because I do care, especially as a community member and as a parent but I might wait to sign up at the last minute and see what happens to see if I end up on the list or not. So I'll be sure to report back. But if any other folks who are listening and do sign up or If you're facing challenges and signing up, please reach out to Alan and I feel free to either send us direct messages. If you have our contact information, otherwise, reply on Facebook where we post these podcasts as well. We'd love to hear from you and see if this is something that's you know one off and we're hearing from a couple of friends, a couple of colleagues or if it's something that's a bigger issue that people are facing.

Alan Gottlieb:

One other slightly snarky comment I'd like to make is based on what I've seen watching public comment and I've watched hours and hours of it over time. Board members, staff, from the superintendent on down, don't look at your phones when people are speaking to you. Don't sit there texting or putting messages out on social media. The worst offender of that was Aonte Anderson, who's no longer on the board. But a lot of people do it. And At least look like sound, make it appear that you're listening. Because it's really disrespectful to be sitting there texting and clearly not listening when somebody who's probably not used to doing this and is nervous ended up there trying to address you is standing before you and talking. So maybe in that more intimate atmosphere on the seventh floor, that's a little harder to get away with. But when they were up on the podium, they were doing that all the time. And it was obnoxious.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan:

I think that's a huge faux pas being up there, especially as a board member and being distracted or. Not engaging with the people who are taking their time to do that. And I actually, you did bring up a good point that I don't think people talk about very often. When you go and watch these board meetings, you can see a lot of the senior staff actually sitting behind the board the board members on both sides when you're on the seventh floor. And I don't know. I think that's something interesting that I think is new under Madero. And I'd be curious and I have never asked anybody about this, but under Boasberg and under Susana, I, You did have some staff up there, but they weren't like in those reserved seats, they tended to be spread out with the rest of the community members in the theater seats for lack of a better term. But they're all there's a science that you always see the same chiefs in the same positions in those board meetings. And yeah, some of them are on their phones more than others. My political, unsolicited political advice to you all is maybe If you don't want to be on camera looking at your phones, if you're interested, don't be on camera, go sit with the other folks in the back. But if you are going to be on camera, just try to be a little bit more interested. I think

Alan Gottlieb:

we've gone over this topic pretty well. I don't have much else. I did want to give one interesting piece of trivia that you just, it's completely unrelated, but you mentioned Tom Boasberg. Yesterday or the day before, a U. S. District Court judge in Washington, D. C. at least attempted to stop the transport of deportations of supposed Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador and said that the flights had to turn around. It was U. S. District Senior Judge James Boasberg, who's Tom Boasberg's brother, who issued that order. Oh,

Alexis Menocal Harrigan:

wow. What a small world.

Alan Gottlieb:

Yeah.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan:

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing that. I had no idea.

Alan Gottlieb:

Anyway, that's just your trivia for the day.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan:

There we

Alan Gottlieb:

go. We will be back in a couple of weeks and we're exploring a number of topics that we are looking forward to. Sending those to you and we will see you soon. Take care everybody. Okay.