School Board OKs Audio Webcasts of Meetings

Audio recordings of future Huntington School Board meetings will be made available on the district website, according to a measure approved unanimously last week by the board.

"After investigating some of the options that we had available to us, in essence, we found the one that would work best would be audio, not video webcasts," said Huntington School Superintendent Jim Polansky at a regular meeting Aug. 29 at Jack Abrams Intermediate School.

Polansky said the school district will keep an online library of the audio casts for future reference for anyone not be able to make it to a meeting.

The audio option was chosen over video because of potential bandwidth problems with the video recordings which could potentially crash the district website, according to Polansky.

With the old plan, recordings of school board meetings were available on cassette tape. The new webcast program will allow residents to review school board meeting proceedings online without having to submit Freedom of Information Act requests to the school district, according to Polansky.

The cost to the school district for the revised audio plan will be less than $350 for a digital recording device and memory card, according to Polansky.

Also at the meeting, Board Trustee Rich McGrath rejected a special education services contract with the West Islip School District which was approved 6-1 by the board.

The contract calls for a year agreement for non-public school transportation for two Huntington students to St. John's Baptist School in West Islip at no cost to the school district. Huntington Coach has agreed to provide the transportation, valued at a regular cost of $43,000, to the Huntington School District for free.

Approving the plan would set a "bad precedent," according to McGrath.

"I just worry that everybody lawyers up," said McGrath ... and three years down the road they say, "you did his before, why aren't you doing it for my kid?"

Trustee Adam Spector said because the program is free, the board would be compelled to vote in favor of it again if it came up in the future. He said he would vote against the plan at the regular cost.

"Because it's free, it's ok," said Spector.

"The precedent being set is that we are not willing to pay $43,000 to transport these kids," said Polansky, regarding the plan.

Also approved by the school board:

• The transfer of $552,741 from the district's worker's compensation reserve fund to the general fund for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2011 for worker's compensation expenses during the 2010/11 school year.
• The replacement of 12 broken library chairs at J. Taylor Finley Middle School at a cost of $1,576.92.
• An agreement with ShotSpotter related to the placement of gunfire monitoring equipment at three district locations.
• A letter of agreement through July 2012 with Verizon Corporate Services Group related to the broadcast of sports games and other events on FiOS1, FiOS TV's video on demand service and Verizon Wireless's V CAST service.