DeLand, FL - The county's future school board meetings will have additional public comment times with each section limited to 15 minutes only.
And that was decided by the Volusia County School Board, with the only "no" vote coming from board member Linda Cuthbert.
The new amendment, as it was presented in the agenda, will add additional sections of public comments to each meeting. While this meeting (April 9th) had two sections, future meetings will have four, with each participant still getting three minutes to speak
But, each public participation section will be limited to 15 minutes. That means that only five members of the public can speak per public comment section.
In Cuthbert's eyes, that's censorship.
"If someone from my neighborhood who travels the 50 minutes to an hour to get here and happens to be the sixth person and gets cut off because the 15 minute time expired, that's unfair," said Cuthbert. "I think it's undemocratic and it's censorship."
Board Chairman Carl Persis says that's not the case, in fact, it gives people more time to speak, but only about what's on the agenda.
According to Persis, one of the problems at school board meetings is that too many people talk about "weather and sports," meaning unrelated items, and that takes up time from other audience members who want to talk about what's on the agenda.
"We'll have time for people to speak about weather and sports and anything else they want to speak about," said Persis. "Understand that the people who are here are really here for what's on the agenda."
That's laid out in the different sections of the new amendment, which says that public comment time during the consent agenda will deal with items on the consent agenda only, within the allotted 15 minutes.
The same was said for public comments on education, public comments during the "action item" segment of the agenda, and public comments that will take place before the board's final comments.
Following Pesis' comments, board member Ruben Colón spoke in favor of the amendment.
In Colón's comments, he used Volusia United Educators President Elizabeth Albert, who spoke earlier in the public comments of the meeting, as an example of how the new system would work.
"Let's say (she) wanted to speak about something that happened at the last meeting, she has three minutes right now," said Colón. "But, she doesn't have that time later on to talk about textbooks, now she gets another three minutes at the conversation of textbooks."
Despite the comments from the other board members, Cuthbert was still not satisfied with the writing of the amendment, saying the 15 minutes was still not enough.
At the vote, all board members, excluding Cuthbert, voted to approve the amendment, setting it in motion.
