March 21, 2022
Recently, Governor Holcomb signed into law legislation that requires Indiana school boards to allow public comment “on a topic” before final action on that topic is taken. School boards can establish reasonable rules to govern the taking of that public comment. Additionally, a school board can take reasonable steps to maintain order at a meeting, including removal of a willfully disruptive person. This new law becomes effective on July 1, 2022.
While nearly all school boards in Indiana permit some form of public input at their meetings, the new statute requires an opportunity for the public to comment and may cause a shift in how your school board permits that public input. First, school boards should consider moving the public comment period to early in its agenda. If public comment is traditionally near the end of a board meeting, the school board failed to satisfy the requirement that public comment be taken on “a topic” before any final action.
Debate on each “topic,” can immediately precede each item of new business. Allowing separate comment periods for each action item, however, frequently bogs down board meetings and causes excessive debate on minutiae. Having one public comment period, near the beginning of the meeting, avoids these difficulties and creates better time management of the public comment.
The new law only requires public comment to be allowed on action topics. Consequently, the school board can limit public comment to only agenda items. Of course, any such limitation should be uniformly applied; patrons with positive comments and feedback unrelated to an agenda item should also be prohibited.
Without providing any specifics, the statute does recognize a school board’s ability to impose reasonable rules on public comments. Previous versions of the legislation guaranteed members of the public three minutes of commentary time; that minimum guaranteed time dropped from the statute’s final version. Previously, Indiana Public Access Counselor opined that offering the public only two minutes each to comment was not unreasonable.
The Public Access Counselor has also informally expressed in the past that a thirty-minute public comment period is reasonable. If the number of comments are expected to exceed a thirty-minute limit, the school board may conduct a blind draw to determine the speakers for that half-hour. Of course, standard public comment rules continue to apply: all public comments should be directed to the board as a whole, not disclose confidential student or staff information, and not be threatening, bullying or harassing in nature. The new law also specifically provides that if the speaker becomes excessively belligerent, he or she can be removed from the meeting.
For more information and counsel on education law, please contact the attorneys at Warrick & Boyn, LLP.