HOWELL – The Howell K-8 School District Board of Education is preparing to live stream its regularly scheduled meetings to the public.
Live streaming is the transmission of video and audio over the internet as an event occurs.
In December, the board held a soft launch of live streaming without much fanfare to prove it could broadcast its meetings. An announcement by the school district and promotion of the new initiative is expected this month.
“There will be a link on our website people can click and it will bring them to a live feed” of a board meeting, Superintendent of Schools Joseph Isola said.
Isola explained what went into making the decision to live stream school board meetings.
“From a why perspective, we are silver certified Future Ready schools, all 12 buildings, therefore I call us a Future Ready school district. This is a 21st century approach toward doing business, making sure we can reach as many of our residents as possible. Not everyone can make it out to a meeting at night,” the superintendent said.
Isola said the more people who have the opportunity to access the board and the board’s business, the more accessible the board and the school district are to the public.
“We can keep our community as in tune as possible with what is happening at the board meetings and with the work of the school district,” he said.
Isola said the board members have a passionate focus on community interaction and community engagement and he said this is an opportunity to keep more people in the know.
“We do not think (live streaming) is going to be a heavy lift and we think it is going to be a great service to the community,” Isola said.
Claire Engle, the school district’s director of digital learning and innovation, said live streaming meetings is another avenue through which the board and the school distract may expand their outreach.
Barring technical problems, it is anticipated that every board meeting will be live streamed in 2019.
“You will be able to watch it live at the time at which it is occurring,” Engle said, adding there will be closed captioning associated with the live stream.
The live stream broadcasts will be archived and remain on the school district’s website in the same fashion that recorded meetings are currently archived.
“We used to send a recording of our meetings to the township and they would put it on their website and air it on (Optimum) channel 77, which we still do, but now with the initial launching of our new website it gives us a little more flexibility where we can have those videos and we place them on YouTube,” Engle said.