The Jefferson City Public Schools Board of Education recently agreed to buy a web-based service designed to make the school district more open and accessible to the public and easier to govern for board members.
The JCPS board unanimously agreed Sept. 11 to spend $13,000 annually for BoardDocs, an online meeting software that stores documents related to meeting agenda items.
Emerald Data Solutions Inc., of Arlington, Virginia, is the vendor for BoardDocs.
JCPS Superintendent Larry Linthacum said BoardDocs will make the district's documents more readily available - to increase transparency, to decrease paperwork for board secretary Stephanie Sappenfield, and to streamline governance.
"For you all, I think it would be very nice to have just one place" for documents to be available, rather than scrolling through email inboxes to find specific items during a meeting, JCPS Director of Human Resources Shelby Scarbrough told the board.
Scarbrough's previous school district, Knob Noster, also uses BoardDocs.
"It is extremely easy to use and navigate," she said. "What was nice about it is that we could upload our documents every month that you could keep it, as a board, an ongoing (record) of things that we can upload in the form you want, but then you could go back. Our teachers could see exactly what was on the agenda, all the supporting documents that support any kind of discussion, and then all the minutes in the same place."
She said the system would allow the public access while also offering expanded access for board members to see items from closed-session meetings.
"It's going to help us improve our governance and help us run our meetings more smoothly," Board President Steve Bruce said.
Bruce said the purchase of BoardDocs "is a logical extension" of "a pretty consistent focus over the last three to four years from the board perspective of really changing the way that our board does business," in terms of bringing additional clarity and openness.
The school board also took a step toward more openness last year through livestreaming meetings - an idea originally put forward by former board member Michael Couty.
"I think that's paid dividends," Bruce said.
The 15 board meetings that have been livestreamed since September 2017 have totaled more than 2,000 views on YouTube - an average of more than 135 per meeting, which far exceeds the seating capacity of the board meeting room. View counts on individual meetings have ranged from 5o to nearly 300.
Recordings of the livestreamed meetings are available on the district's YouTube page at youtube.com/user/JCPSVIDEOS.
Bruce said "there's been a philosophy shift" in terms of JCPS expanding public access. He recalled four or five years ago, when he was first a candidate for school board, that people had to make open records requests to obtain documents from meetings.
Since then, the district has printed paper copies of board packets and made scanned electronic versions of those packets available.
Once BoardDocs is up and running, Bruce said, members of the public will be able to go to specific parts of the board's agenda for a meeting and access the supporting documents for a particular agenda item - fiscal impacts, impacts on programs, why something's being requested, why something may not be suggested.
Still, openness is not as simple as providing people access to documents.
"It takes decades to be able to develop folks' confidence and trust," Bruce said. "You can tell people you're open, or you can show them by your actions."
Something the board has discussed in the past is engaging the community more when the district starts talking about its annual budget in spring, he said.
"I think for a lot of folks, they don't understand how the money is allocated to the school district from the state or the feds, or even locally," Bruce said. "There's an answer to all of those things," he added, and conveying answers will take "some continual outreach" and getting the public's attention - which can be a challenge in itself.
The contract the board approved with BoardDocs lasts for one year and will automatically renew annually unless either party provides one month's advance written notice that they don't want to continue. Emerald Data Solutions can increase its annual fee for the following year "from time to time," with two months' advance written notice.
Bruce said competitor eBOARDsolutions offers a similar service through Simbli. Linthacum and Sappenfield examined both options but decided on BoardDocs after speaking with Scarbrough about her experiences.
The Gasconade County R-2 School District is another client of BoardDocs in Mid-Missouri. Across the state, school districts in Springfield and the St. Louis and Kansas City metro areas are among those that use the service - 68 school districts all together, not counting JCPS.