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VCOG testified in favor of the public comment bills referred to in this story when they were heard in Senate subcommittee last week, as well as when a similar bill was heard this week in a House subcommittee.
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A Virginia Senate panel backed a batch of bills on Thursday aimed at tackling the rising cost of university tuition. Legislation heading to the Senate Finance Committee for further consideration includes a bill that would require the governing board of a public higher education institution to hold a public comment period prior to voting on an increase in tuition or fees. There was some division among the members of the Senate Education and Health Committee about whether to require the full board to attend the public comment meeting. Sen. Chap Petersen, D-Fairfax City, has a bill that wouldn’t require the full board to attend, while a similar bill from Sen. Glen Sturtevant, R-Richmond, entails full attendance. The committee voted 11-4 to not require full attendance for the public comment meeting.
The Roanoke Times
The Richmond School Board has started its work on next year’s budget — and part of that debate is happening behind closed doors. The board on Thursday night held its first budget work session after Superintendent Jason Kamras outlined a spending plan earlier this week that calls for $13 million in cuts to the city school system’s central office. After an open session that stretched an hour and 11 minutes, the board spent 56 minutes in closed session discussing personnel cuts in the offices of the superintendent, chief of staff, engagement and talent. The extent of those cuts isn’t known because the district has not yet released a full list. “It would have been impossible to discuss the personnel cuts without it being known who we were talking about,” Karnas said, adding that discussion of larger offices will include public disclosure of aggregate numbers of employees affected by the cuts. “We will do whatever we can to make it as transparent as possible.”
Richmond Times-Dispatch
The Norfolk School Board has a long to-do list. But when the board went into closed session Wednesday night, it was a rogue Twitter account with seven followers that was the topic of discussion for about 20 minutes. It’s the district’s Twitter account, or at least it was at one point. Former staff created @NPSBoardChair in 2015, but nothing was tweeted from the account until this month, when its tweets appeared to poke at tensions between board members that have simmered — and at times boiled over — since the term began last July. The account retweeted The Virginian-Pilot and two Pilot reporters, about a secret discussion to turn an elementary school into a charter and about a reporter being blocked on Twitter by the School Board’s vice chairman, Carlos Clanton. Wednesday,the board voted to go into closed session to talk with their lawyer about “the unauthorized use of a school board Twitter account.” When the board exceeded the time set aside for the discussion, they put the conversation on pause, held their public meeting as scheduled and voted to extend their meeting to resume the discussion after.
The Virginian-Pilot
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