Feb. 17, 2010

The Kansas City, Mo., School District board met in a special meeting Saturday afternoon to hear the KCMSD leadership’s proposal on school closings. As the superintendent has repeated since the summer, including the community in this process was of high importance to him and his team.

Although that has been clear though the community forums leading up to Saturday, transparency and inclusiveness seemed to be a lower priority during Saturday’s announcement, as the venue — Husch Blackwell Sanders law office on the Country Club Plaza — was woefully incapable of accommodating all the community members who came to hear the proposal.

The board members were seated in a rather small conference room that included just about 40 open chairs for community members and media. The room was packed with people standing around the seating area, and a second room had to be opened with a video feed showing the meeting taking place across the hall.

Although Northeast News managing editor Emily Randall managed to squeeze into the room and secure herself a square-foot space to stand during the three-hour meeting, other members of the media had to argue their way in, and most other community members didn’t have any shot of seeing the meeting in person. They had the pleasure of watching the meeting via a live feed system through which any time the speaker held the microphone close to her mouth, the words became inaudible.

On top of the space and audio issues, the meeting, which was scheduled to begin at 1:30 p.m., was already underway at 1:20 p.m., leaving many people — even those who arrived on time or even early — out of the loop on what was said in the first few minutes.

Why this meeting wasn’t held in a larger space — why the increasingly concerned public wasn’t taken more into consideration — is a baffling mystery.