Closed School Board Meeting, HB 784
BILL STATUS: House Governmental Affairs Committee Favorably Reported for Bill (as of 1/28/2020)
INTRODUCTION
We oppose HB 784, a bill that would close school board meetings about school safety plans to the public. Georgia public schools require safety plans to ensure that schools are prepared to respond to acts of violence or terrorism, natural disasters, and hazardous materials or radiological accidents. School safety plans must, at a minimum, include the following: (1) training school administrators, teachers, and support staff on school violence prevention, security, threat assessment, mental health awareness, and emergency planning; (2) evaluating and refining school security measures; (3) updating and exercising school emergency preparedness plans; (4) strengthening partnerships with public safety officials; and (5) creating enhanced crisis communications plans and social media strategies.
CURRENT LAW
Generally, meetings of all Georgia state agencies, which include local boards of education, “shall be open to the public.” This means that the public must be given access to the meetings; visual and sound recording must be permitted; meeting notices, notices of changes in regular meeting times, and meeting agendas must be shared in advance; and meeting minutes must afterward be shared and made open to public inspection.
Further, under current Georgia law, school safety plans must be prepared with input from students, parents and legal guardians, teachers and other school and school district employees, community leaders, and local law enforcement, juvenile court, fire service, public safety, and emergency management agencies. School safety plans must be reviewed every year and updated as needed.
HB 784 specifically excludes local school board meetings that “discuss, vote upon, review, or assess school safety plans” from all of these requirements, thus allowing those discussions to proceed without giving the public notice or access. HB 784 also exempts school boards from afterward providing any details of these meetings to the public.
LACK OF ACCOUNTABILITY AND TRANSPARENCY
Allowing school boards to propose, change, and vote on school safety plans without allowing for public access and input decreases accountability to the community and transparency. It deprives parents, students, and other community members of the opportunity to raise any concerns about safety plans. It also impedes their ability to stay informed about the decision-making process, particularly because the minutes of the meeting would be exempt from public records requests. Lastly, the bill provides no guidelines or restrictions as to which types of decisions may be made in these closed-door meetings
RACIAL PROFILING OF STUDENTS
This proposed legislation creates a pathway for local boards of education to pass plans that include provisions that target or racially profile students of color or immigrant students, increase police or military presence in schools, or further exacerbate the school to prison and deportation pipeline. School boards may attempt to implement policies that would track and share information about students, create student profiles of students deemed as suspicious, and other measures as attempted in the 2019 SB 15 which was vetoed by Governor Kemp. Without room for public comment or even awareness, the school boards will have too much latitude to act without limit, and there exists no requirement for the school boards to consider the unintended consequences on students of color.