Many Essentially Blocked From SCC Board Meeting

I went down to the Solano Community College Governing Board meeting last night, and it was a logistical disaster.

The board was slated to consider cutting football and aquatics on the heels of announcing there would be no summer session due to budget cuts handed down from the state. As of this writing, I have no clue what they decided to do. I bugged out long before they made their decision.

Why? It was the worst logistical handling of a controversial meeting I have seen in my experience as a journalist. Not to worry, I’ll link you to whoever did a better job of covering the story this morning and I'll talk to the SCC president about why so many people were effectively blocked from the meeting.

Now granted, the first rule as a journalist covering a controversial meeting is show up early. Show up earlier than early. This I failed to do, because I lost track of time working. My fault. I showed up just a hair before my iPhone said it was the 6:30 p.m. start time and the meeting was already in progress.

However, I found about a hundred people stuck outside the board chambers with me, filling up the hallway, desperately wanting to hear what was going on. I rudely made my way to the doorway of the meeting room to see more and was floored: The SCC Governing Board had no microphones as far as I could see and hear. It was impossible to hear. And of course, people were packed standing room only.

Given the strict shushing that was going on in the hall for anyone who talked, I could tell people in the hallway wanted to participate, to listen, to be a part of what was going on and make their voice heard.

Then a woman interrupted the board meeting, announcing there was a large overflow crowd that couldn’t hear anything that was going on. She suggested there might be a better venue.

Other than for the board to loudly call for order, there was no other action I could figure out. I hung around for a while in the back of the hallway in silence with everyone else, listening to silence. For my purposes, it was pointless. I left.

When the Fairfield-Suisun Unified School District considered cutting kindergarten a couple weeks ago, they had two overflow rooms with video monitors and employees assigned to orchestrate the smooth flow of people to those rooms. It was a model of efficiency and a vastly different experience than last night.