LAUSD School Board Member Scott Schmerelson Steps Up

“Board District 3 will look at that proposal for resolution and we will iron it out…We will give serious consideration to everything you said because it is all true”

- Scott Schmerelson

While the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) Board has promised for years to address complaints about difficulties that parents and other members of the community face when trying to participate in school board meetings, it took a member of the public using the education code to place an item on their agenda for it to finally be addressed. At Tuesday’s Committee of the Whole meeting, the Board heard from parents who supported the “Board Meeting Accessibility to the Public” resolution before discussing the item. As the person who brought forward the proposed resolution, I was given the opportunity to speak first:

In this deeply divided District, there seems to be one thing that parents seem to agree on. Access to Board meetings isn’t working. This has been a long-standing problem. Going back, I found an article in the L.A. School Report in which the former School Board President Steve Zimmer said: “we’re going to fix this.” A couple of months ago, Mr. Melvoin, you promised the same thing. But it never seems to get brought up.

Since I’ve been attending these meeting for about five years I looked at the problems I saw and I wrote a resolution that I hope one of you will take up and present to the Board for a vote.

This resolution rectifies the problems with five steps. One of them is the time of the meetings. I looked up other local school districts and I could not find one that conducts their meeting during the school day. All of them conducted meetings either in the late afternoon or the early evening. This resolution would change it so that meetings are not…