Garden Grove Unified School District has started to livestream their board meetings, allowing residents who cannot attend meetings in person to stay informed.
The board held its first live streamed board meeting on Feb. 18, with viewing access available on the district’s YouTube channel.
While California law does not require meetings to be streamed online, First Amendment Coalition Legal Fellow Annie Cappetta says that it is still the best practice to do so.
“There can be no government accountability without transparency,” said Cappetta in a Feb. 28 email. “The more access for public participation in meetings, the more responsive the board can be to what its constituents actually want, strengthening the local democracy.”
The launch of livestreamed meetings comes after Voice of OC, in collaboration with Chapman University students, conducted an investigation ranking local school districts on their accessibility.
Garden Grove Unified – one of the county’s largest districts – had received a B grade for their audio recordings.
[Read: How Easy is it to Tune Into Your School Board Meeting?]
It also comes after parents began raising concerns regarding the lack of accessibility during a board meeting nearly a year ago.
[Read: Will Garden Grove Unified Video Stream School Board Meetings?]
Following these complaints, a study session was held on Oct. 15, where district officials unanimously agreed to implement livestreamed board meetings for the public.
“As a board, we share a commitment to transparency and accountability, and livestreaming will allow more of our community members to tune into our meetings,” said Trustee Walter Muneton in a news release.
District Spokeswoman Abby Broyles said in a March 3 email that the Garden Grove Unified board members did not reach consensus to move forward with livestreaming meetings in 2018, because 75% of other Orange County school districts were not conducting video recordings.
But, Broyles said that changed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Following the increase of recordings happening across the county and the modernization of our district office, we assessed the issue again and now have the infrastructure to move forward,” she said.
According to Broyles, the cost to build a control room and to purchase equipment was approximately $48,000 and the district used existing staff to build the control room and to manage filming along with purchasing the equipment to provide a quality livestream.
Broyles noted that improvements for future livestreams will be included in community surveys the district conducts.
Garden Grove Unified School Board President Lan Quoc Nguyen said in an October news release that livestreaming meetings will benefit families unable to attend school board meetings in person.
“We want our community to be well-informed about the great things happening in our district and livestreaming will provide one more platform to get our message out,” Nguyen said.
School board trustees did not respond to requests for comments.
Garden Grove Unified isn’t the only local government agency to recently start livestreaming meetings.
At the end of last year, Orange County Transportation Agency started live streaming their meetings online after continuous reporting by the Voice of OC.
[Read: OC’s Transportation Agency Begins Video Streaming Public Meetings]
Meanwhile, city officials in La Palma and Rancho Santa Margarita continue to refuse to livestream their meetings.
