The Newhall School District governing board approved last week increasing the amount of time people will have to speak during the public comment session at meetings.
Community members will now have three minutes to speak, one minute longer than previously allowed.
Sue Solomon, president of the governing board, said in a phone interview that people should get a “reasonable and fair amount of time to share their message to us.”
“I chair a lot of public meetings, and in the course of regular business, I feel that two minutes is actually a short time,” Solomon said.
In seconding the motion to amend Board Policy 9323, board member Isaiah Talley said, “Sometimes, it seems like people can’t quite finish their thoughts.”
Talley added to the amendment that the total amount of time for any one topic to be talked about during the public comment session be increased one minute to 21 minutes, citing the new number being divisible by three and therefore making it easier to divide up the minutes.
The board retains the right to increase the total amount of time for the public to weigh in on a specific topic.
Solomon, who chairs the Santa Clarita Valley School Board Trustees Association along with chairing the Newhall school board and serving on other public committees, said it isn’t very often that the board has to do that, but when many people come for one thing, they deserve to be heard.
“I think anybody that wants to speak at a meeting, whatever it is they’re going to say, is critical, and many times it helps inform our decisions,” Solomon said.
She said one of the more memorable times that a large crowd of community members wanted to speak was in the early 2000s when the district was discussing the opening of Pico Canyon Elementary.
Some students at Stevenson Ranch Elementary were temporarily being housed in portables at an off-site location due to overcrowding, and questions were being raised as to where students would be moving once both schools were operable.
“Those are the kinds of topics that impact people lives, that I think that we need to take a look at how much time can we devote to this and what’s reasonable and fair,” Solomon said, “because you do want to accommodate as much of the public as possible as well.”
