A special meeting of the School Board will be convened at 6 o’clock on Thursday evening in the roomy Robert Frost Auditorium on the campus of Culver City High School for the express purpose of gaining community input on the subject of student permits.
More precisely, the driving question that spawned the meeting was:
Are too many permits being issued to out-of-town families leading to perceived overcrowding? Or at least tight bunching?
“If this meeting had been held during the school year,” said Scott Zeidman, School Board member and the organizer, “we would have drawn 300 people. But, being that it is a week after the end of the school year and is starting at 6 o’clock, I would say closer to 80 people.”
He predicts the evening will last “from 1 to 3 hours.”
Mr. Zeidman would have preferred a community meeting, with a wider open, more casual format that would have featured give-and-take between the audience, sitting stadium style in the Frost, and School District officials on stage answering the questions.
But, according to Brown Act regulations, no more than two School Board members could have been present without calling a formal meeting.
Since all five Board members wanted to attend, the gathering had to redefined as a “special School Board meeting,” which calls for a tightening rather than a relaxing of meeting rules.
Audience members will be limited to 3 minutes to speak, the same restriction that applies to ordinary School Board meetings.
District Supt. Dr. Myrna Rivera Cote and three assistant superintendents, Andrew Sotelo, David El Fattal and Patty Jaffe, are scheduled to be on stage to answer questions. Mr. Sotelo will open with a presentation on permits. As for School Board members, “I doubt we will have much to say,” Mr. Zeidman said. “We aren’t the experts. We want to hear how the community feels about permits.”
