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Date: 1/3/2024
SPRINGFIELD — The School Committee voted to make a change to its remote participation policy that will, for the time being, make the option more accessible to its members.
Members were initially asked to completely nullify its existing participation policy, but developed a solution that it felt better suited its needs.
Melinda Phelps, chief legal counsel for Springfield Public Schools, explained to the committee that the policy approved by the body in 2022 only allows one person to participate remotely at any given meeting. If the committee’s policy was nullified, she added, the default policy would be the guidance included in Gov. Maura Healey’s supplemental budget bill, which maintained the “more permissive remote participation that occurred during COVID,” allowing all members to participate in meetings remotely.
Members overall balked at the idea of unrestricted use of remote options and instead agreed to a smaller-scale change that still maintained the bulk of the policy but removed the specific sentence limiting remote participation to one member. This action was taken with the intent of adding flexibility while allowing the committee amends the policy rather than drafting an entirely new one.
The policy is still more stringent than the state’s guidance. The committee’s policy requires a quorum participate in-person, meaning up to three members of the committee can be remote. The state’s guidance has no in-person quorum requirement, according to Phelps, who cited the bill signed into law on June 28, 2023.
Member Joesiah Gonzalez, who chairs the Legislative and Contracts Subcommittee, told the School Committee he was recently informed that the policy was in conflict with the state’s guidelines and he brought the matter to the subcommittee. After discussion yielded a “difference of opinion,” the subcommittee voted to bring the possibility of nullifying the committee’s policy in favor of the governor’s guidance to the full committee for a vote. Gonzalez noted that he supported the change.
“This does not preclude the body — and I said this at the subcommittee meeting — from picking this up in the months to come in the new year to add guardrails as folks see fit,” he said.
School Committee member Chris Collins, also a member of the subcommittee, said he was “vehemently against” making the committee’s policy null and void, saying he felt it “disenfranchised the voters.
Collins said the policy was created in such a way as to be flexible when “extenuating circumstances” arise that prevent a member from being present, also citing the time and effort put into crafting it.
“We also believe strongly that the public elected us to be here and interact with each other and represent them,” he said.
Committee member Denise Hurst, the third member of the subcommittee, and Collins both acknowledged that during the subcommittee meeting, Collins advocated for amending the School Committee’s policy instead of getting rid of it altogether. That amendment would allow up to three members to participate remotely.
“I don’t have a problem with that, which is what I stated at that meeting, because I do believe that we need to ensure that more than one person can participate remotely,” Hurst said, adding that while she understood and agreed it was important to have members physically present at meetings, she wished to ensure members could have access to meeting if they were unable to be in the meeting chambers.
Collins concurred that at the subcommittee meeting he admitted limiting remote participation to one member at time was too stringent and could be changed, but he reiterated that he was against throwing the policy out completely.
“I’d rather see us defeat this and come back with an amendment to the policy that would make it more functional for the committee,” he said, later adding, “Throwing it out completely is a bad thing. I think it’s kind of a message to the public that, ‘Well, you elected us and we’ll take the money, but, yeah, we’ll come when we want to come’ and I don’t think that’s the message we want to portray.”
Vice Chair Latonia Monroe-Naylor concurred with Collins’ recollection of the process of forming the policy in question and that the optics of remote participation without restrictions would be unfavorable.
“Especially with us saying to folks, ‘You can come down and be in person and you can present in person,’ if people showed up and we had one person sitting here at the podium and everybody else on Zoom, that would just look like a debacle,” she said. “So to throw away something we worked so hard on and to just null and void it makes me feel like wasted time working on something as diligently as we did.”
She supported the idea of amending the policy, noting the circumstances requiring remote participation should meet certain criteria to avoid members declining to appear in person out of convenience.
During his remarks, Mayor Domenic Sarno, who chairs the School Committee, said Monroe-Naylor “hit the nail on the head” with her comments, and celebrated the committee’s efforts to be in-person while other bodies have maintained remote participation.
“We’ve got to get back to regular business,” he said.
While not mentioned specifically by the mayor, while the City Council returned to in-person meetings in July 2022, its policy allows councilors to participate remotely as well as community members participating in public speak outs. The License Commission is another example of a public body that conducts meetings remotely, though members are appointed as opposed to elected.
Hurst agreed with Collins and Monroe-Naylor’s reasoning but noted a long break for the holidays that prevented the committee from taking swift action. With the committee’s organizational meeting scheduled for the beginning of January, she feared a situation in which members were somehow unable to take part in that process. The committee already has a member that will not be able to participate in-person for an indefinite amount of time, she noted. Also in January, she and Monroe-Naylor will be in Washington, D.C., on committee business.
Hurst again sought guidance from Phelps, asking if the committee could vote on a policy that night. Because the agenda only mentioned a vote to nullify the current policy and did not include discussion or vote for an alternative, she did not believe it was possible. Collins wondered aloud if the board could nullify the section in the policy that restricts remote participation to one person. He said that would represent a bridge, which would allow the committee to operate with expanded remote participation until it could update the policy.
Phelps called that course of action “a great workaround” because it would be an amendment of the vote published in the agenda specifically.