Ziegler’s persistence brings more transparency

When Sarasota County School Board member Bridget Ziegler campaigned for election three years ago, one of her key platforms was transparency — more of it, especially when it came to the way the school board operated.

Give Ziegler credit: She has lived up to her promise — in spite of rigid resistance from three of her colleagues. 

It wasn’t big news when it occurred, but it marked a dramatic change in school board protocol and transparency. As of June 20, a majority of school board members finally agreed to a change that Ziegler has lobbied for since her election in 2014: to move the school board’s monthly afternoon workshops from a small conference room, where there was little room for the public to attend and observe, to the district’s much larger, regular board chambers. What’s more, the afternoon workshops are now being televised on the cable-access channel, streamed live online and archived online. When she was elected in 2014, the afternoon workshops were audio recorded and could be heard if you requested a CD or thumb drive. 

This sounds like a minor accomplishment. But anyone familiar with the Sarasota School Board knows three of its members — Shirley Brown, Jane Goodwin and Caroline Zucker — often have bristled and resisted Ziegler’s positions and efforts to change the board’s habits.

They liked the long-time workshop set-up — in a third-floor conference room in a building a short walk away from the school board’s chambers — a place where there were few attendees, and where board members sometimes behaved differently toward each other than they would in the regularly televised meetings. 

But Ziegler persisted, bringing up the subject nearly a dozen times over the past three years. Twice in 2014 she proposed that all school board meetings be held in the board’s regular chambers and they be televised. No support.

In early 2015, she suggested the audio versions of the afternoon workshops be posted online. No action.

By September 2016, ice was melting. The three-vote bloc agreed to move the afternoon workshops to a conference next to the regular board chambers. Still no audio recordings online.

On May 16, Ziegler added to an afternoon workshop agenda a request to move all board meetings and workshops to the board chambers and they be televised. The board postponed discussion; Superintendent Todd Bowden was not there, unable to address the cost of Ziegler’s requests. (Turns out: $2,700 a year.)

Finally, on June 20, when the topic came up again, board member Brown said she would support Ziegler’s requests — but with a condition: if Ziegler and board member Eric Robinson would attend two Florida School Boards Association training sessions.

For Ziegler, that was a small price to pay. Now the public has full access to all school board meetings — a practice that should have existed long ago.