The New Westminster school district has backed away from policy changes that would have put new limits on public participation at board meetings.
Trustees voted in favour of a revised board operations policy at their operations committee meeting April 11. The vote now moves to the full school board meeting April 25 for final adoption.
School District 40 superintendent Karim Hachlaf brought the revised Policy 7 to trustees for consideration after getting feedback on an initial draft at the Jan. 31 board meeting.
At that meeting, proposed changes — including eliminating one question period at the end of board meetings and putting limits on “political” discussion — came under fire from parents in attendance, who said they would unfairly limit participation by the public.
Neither proposal made the final cut.
Under the new policy, there will continue to be two periods for public input during the meeting: a comment and question period near the beginning of the agenda that allows all members of the public to speak for up to three minutes on any issue; and a question period at the end of the meeting to allow members of the public to seek clarity on matters that arose during the board meeting.
Both question periods are capped at 15 minutes, but that time limit may be extended if the board votes to do so.
The time limit for an individual speaker is now capped at three minutes; the district's original policy had a maximum time of five minutes per speaker for items on the agenda of the meeting and two minutes for items not on the agenda.
The previous draft of the policy had also included the wording: “The question period is not to be used as a political forum.”
At the January meeting, parents raised concerns about what that would mean, pointing out that many issues discussed by the board — such as COVID-19 policy, police liaison officers in schools, or sexual harassment at the high school — could be seen as “political” in nature.
That clause is no longer part of Policy 7.
Hachlaf said the policy changes were designed to follow the board’s request to “follow a set of procedures but create flexibility and, above all else, really encourage meaningful public participation.”
The new policy, which can be viewed in the agenda package for the SD40 April 11 operations committee meeting, covers all aspects of board operations: how meetings are conducted, when in-camera meetings are allowed, conduct at board meetings, public participation, trustee remuneration and more.
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