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North Vancouver school trustees may soon hit Play on live streaming

School district to consider taping of board meetings
video

After years of refusals, the North Vancouver School District has decided to hit Rewind on a decision nixing official videotaping and streaming of public board meetings.

Trustees voted June 20 to have staff take another look at options and costs of live streaming their regular meetings and making that video available online.

“It’s just kind of a natural step,” said trustee Barry Forward, who introduced the motion on video streaming, saying it might get more people paying attention to school district issues. “We have a crowd here of about four right now,” he pointed out to fellow trustees near the end of a recent meeting.

Forward said other school districts, like Nanaimo and Comox, are already making videos of their meetings available online.

“They realized how effective it was in terms of engaging people,” he said.

Forward said the technology for capturing and streaming video has advanced so much in the past two or three years that video recording and streaming of meetings can be done very inexpensively.

“We’re latecomers to the scene,” he said.

North Vancouver parent Shane Nelson is one person who would be happy to see school board meetings officially video recorded.

Nelson first raised the issue three years ago, after school administrators threatened to kick him out of a public board meeting for videotaping it. Trustees later climbed down from that position, and agreed that video recording should be allowed, but stopped short of providing the service themselves after balking at an estimated $26,000 price tag.

(Local municipal governments both live-stream their meetings and make archived copies of the video available to the public on their websites.)

Trustee Jessica Stanley said she’s in favour of the school district taping and streaming its own board meetings, as a “community service.”

Allowing the public to see debate and comment on issues for themselves will increase transparency and “support accountability,” said Stanley.

“I feel like we should have done this earlier,” she said.

Board chair Christie Sacré said she also likes the idea of providing a video record, especially since “there are less expensive options” to do that now than when trustees first discussed it.

Nelson, whose own children attend an alternate school that is no longer part of the North Vancouver School District, said he’s logged countless hours videotaping board meetings on his own time in the past three years.

Nelson makes those video clips available through notifications on email, Facebook and Twitter. “There are a handful of people who really want the videos done,” he said – they range from teachers, to journalists to concerned parents.

Nelson said he’d be happy to give up his unofficial job as school board videographer and watch the live stream from his living room instead, at a convenient time.

“I’d be thrilled,” he said.

School trustees are expected to review the issue in September.