Revere School Committee Subcommittee Looks to Streamline Monthly Meetings

At last week’s Revere School Committee of the Whole subcommittee meeting, member Stacey Rizzo led a discussion to try and streamline the School Committee’s monthly meetings that Rizzo feels may be running a bit too long.

Members of the subcommittee brainstormed some ideas like cutting down the number of presentations, the number of agenda items in the Superintendent’s report, or the time allotted to the School Committee’s student representative.

However, in the end it seemed members agreed that perhaps a second meeting per month might solve some of the issues with time.

“The feeling is this is our business meeting and really by the time we get past the superintendent’s report, I don’t want to bring something up because I know people have sat there too long,” said Rizzo.

Member Aisha Milbury Ellis suggested maybe pushing school and student presentations, which are usually at the beginning of the meeting, to the end of the meeting. However, member’s like Susan Gravallese and Carol Tye thought keeping young students up to present at a monthly meeting may not be beneficial–especially for young students that may have an 8 pm bedtime.

“They (the students) have to watch the meeting (on Zoom) to find out when to come on because they don’t know when we’re gonna finish,” said Gravallese. “So if they go on first, at least they’re not held up. With elementary students we don’t really want them waiting until eight o’clock to present.”

Gravallese also suggested that the monthly superintendent’s report had perhaps two presentations by students or staff.

“That would give us more time to ask more questions to the students because they’re great,” she said. “We all want to engage but if six or seven of us ask the student questions during one presentation we still have three or four more to go. Sometimes by that third or fourth one we stop asking questions because it’s been going on for so long.”

Superintendent Dr. Dianne Kelley then suggested perhaps conducting the regular School Committee meeting on the third Tuesday of the month and then on the first Tuesday of the month host a Committee of the Whole meeting to include presentations from schools and departments.

Tye said years ago dating back when she was a teacher in the schools there sometimes would be two School Committee meetings per month depending on how business needed to be discussed. However, she liked the idea of figuring out a way to split up the meetings, keeping the student presentations at the top of the agenda so students can get to bed at reasonable time and working together to make the meetings a little bit better in terms of time management.

Dr. Kelley agreed that something needed to be done, especially when the new Revere High School project starts eating up a huge chunk of School Committee meetings.

“There’s going to be bills every month for the new high school and that’s going to start to eat up a big chunk of time,” said Kelley. “So maybe some of those proforma activities could be chunked into one meeting. Then a second meeting each month could be more about what’s happening in our schools, presentations from the kids and presentations from the student rep.”

Kelley said most of the agenda items going forward have been scheduled through the end of the school year so any changes in the format of the School Committee meetings and how members conduct business would have to begin during the 2022/2023 school year.