Wichita public school district transparency

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Transparency issues surrounding the Wichita public school district are in the news. There are steps that are easy to make, but the district resists.

It’s difficult to view a meeting of the Wichita school board.

If you — perhaps a taxpayer to USD 259 — would like to watch a meeting of the board of USD 259, the Wichita public school district, your options are few. You can attend the meetings in person. Or, if you subscribe to certain cable television systems, you can view delayed repeats of the meetings. But that’s it.

Live and archived video of governmental meetings is commonplace, except for the Wichita public schools. Citizens must either attend USD 259 meetings or view delayed broadcasts on cable TV, if they subscribe.

There’s a simple way to fix this. It’s called YouTube.

When the Sedgwick County Commission was faced with an aging web infrastructure for its archived broadcasts, it did the sensible thing. It created a YouTube channel and uploaded video of its meetings. Now citizens can view commission meetings at any time on desktop PCs, tablets, and smartphones. This was an improvement over the old system, which was difficult to use and required special browser plug-ins.

Sometimes citizens have taken it upon themselves to post Wichita school board video on YouTube so that citizens and taxpayers may view meetings. Click for an example.
The Wichita school district could do the same. In fact, the district already has a YouTube channel. Recently, it has started posting video excerpts of some meetings.

So the district has demonstrated it has the technical capability and resources to post video of meetings to YouTube. Now, in addition to the excerpts, it should post video of all meetings in their entirety.

Yes, it takes a long time to upload two or three hours of video to YouTube, but once started the process runs in the background without intervention. No one has to sit and watch the process.

I have asked the district why it does not make video of its meetings available online. The district responded that it “has a long-standing commitment to the USD 259 community of showing unabridged recordings of regular Board of Education meetings on Cox Cable Channel 20 and more recently AT&T U-verse Channel 99.”

Showing meetings delayed on cable TV is okay. It was innovative at one time — a long time ago. Okay. But why aren’t meetings shown live? What if you can’t watch the meeting before it disappears from the broadcast schedule after a week? What if you don’t subscribe to cable TV? (This is becoming more common as more people “cut the cord” and rely on services like YouTube for television.) What if you want to watch meetings on your computer, tablet, or smartphone?

I don’t think the fact that meetings are on cable TV means they can’t also be on YouTube. But that seems like what the school district believes.

Sometimes increasing transparency is so easy. We must wonder why governmental agencies resist.

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