There’s a learning curve to finding a policy and determining what its requirements are.
Note from Megan: The following was written by VCOG’s 2025 Laurence E. Richardson Legal Fellow, Maddie Walker. Maddie is a rising second-year law student at the University of Richmond. This summer, in addition to looking into school board comment period policies, she has done research on vexatious requesters, notice of suit under FOIA’s enforcement procedures and nonprofit litigation policies. She has also written material for VCOG’s monthly newsletters and attended VCOG’s board meeting and a FOIA Council meeting.
The process for locating a school board district’s policy on public comment periods may sound simple, but, in some cases, it is anything but. I searched for the policy for 10 school board districts in Virginia and was surprised to discover how hidden and/or nondescript some are. Had I not been someone with time who knows their way around a computer, some of these policies may have stayed hidden from me.
The Virginia school board districts that I researched were Loudoun County, the City of Richmond, the City of Norfolk, Franklin County, Frederick County, the City of Harrisonburg, the City of Alexandria, Spotsylvania County, the City of Lynchburg, and Southampton County. A simple Google search of “_______ school board policies” returned the applicable school board district’s website.
Navigating through the page, most school boards had their policies hyperlinked to a different website called BoardDocs. BoardDocs itself is simple to navigate, containing a table of contents with drop-down menus that display each section of a policy. The issue, however, is often the naming of the sections. The bolded titles are generally named what appears to be a random jumble of letters and/or numbers with a short description underneath. They were rarely labeled something obvious like, “Public Comment Policy.”
The further into my research I got, the easier it was for me to decipher that some variation of the title “BDDHZ/KDZ” meant “public participation at school board meetings and public hearings.” Most of the districts I surveyed followed this odd naming convention and usually fell under “Section B,” leading me to believe that the districts share policy templates.
Meanwhile, some districts’ policies took a bit more time to find by parsing the website. The Southampton County School Board was the most difficult policy to find, and that was even coming from the end of my research when I was getting the hang of what to look for. This district was the only one that I researched that has their policies somewhere other than BoardDocs.
Each policy has a generic title like “Policy Manual Section A” with no description of what information that section contains. Clicking on the hyperlinks redirects the user to one of eleven separate PDFs rather than to BoardDocs. The length of each PDF ranges from eight to 177 pages. The table of contents does not contain hyperlinks to take the user to the specific section, so one must manually navigate through the whole document to get to the title they’re searching for.
Using ctrl-F to find a word or phrase isn’t as useful when the document is so big because the keywords are often repeated multiple times. I eventually determined that Policy Manual B, which is 56 pages, contained policy BDDH-R, the policy governing public participation at school board meetings. Had I not researched nine other districts before looking at Southampton County, it would have taken me much longer to locate this policy.
In terms of what the policies contained, most had a time limit on the amount of time that each speaker may reserve, from three to five minutes. Some had specific rules about where (or whether) audience members may hold signs and what material they can be made of.
Two districts had some concerning details in these policies about their public comment periods. Alexandria requires that a speaker submit their comment before speaking, and that comment will be posted for the public to see. However, there is an option for the person submitting the comment to email the superintendent directly and request that the comment remain confidential. Submitting a comment to a public entity during a public comment period and preventing it from being seen by the public raises some VFOIA concerns.
Additionally, some districts have ambiguous sign-up timeframes for their public comment period. Most outline a number of days or weeks in which an individual can sign up to speak that cuts off the day before or at the start of the meeting. Many do not identify when that timeframe opens, so one can presumably sign up the moment a meeting is scheduled. Some even allow participants to sign up while the meeting is underway. Lynchburg, for example, allows people to call the clerk of the School Board before 3:30 p.m. on the day of the board meeting or by signing a form in person 15 minutes before the meeting begins.
Lynchburg has a cap of 30 minutes for the entire comment period. When each person’s time is limited to three minutes, as per their policy, a maximum of 10 people may speak at each meeting. They do allow people to call and leave voice messages that will be played out loud at the meetings, but in-person speakers are prioritized, so if 10 people show up to speak, then no voicemails get played. Additionally, people representing organizations are allotted five minutes to speak, so the total number of speakers could be as few as six.
If you’re curious about your local school board’s public meeting policies, you may have to do some digging. My advice: navigate to BoardDocs, find the section on policies (often Section B) and if it doesn’t stand out, keep your eye out for one with a title like “BDDHZ/KDZ.”
Good luck!