Mission, Texas- Community members interested in seeing or hearing what went on during regular meetings of the Mission CISD (Consolidated Independent School District) Board of Trustees, but who are not able to attend the meeting will still be able to view the meeting. The district has begun to share the basic audio and video recordings of the regular board meetings on the district website.
As required by Texas House Bill 283, an archive of the recordings will be made available through the website. The first available meeting as a part of the online archive is the meeting of December 9, 2015. The archive will grow as meetings are held and will eventually include a span of two years’ worth of meetings.
“The recordings won’t be anything fancy,” explained Craig Verley, director of public relations and marketing. “The district does not have the staffing or equipment to be able to do multi-camera shoots with post-production of the meeting recordings. These are basic videos taken by one camera set up in the meeting room. The audio recordings are also the basic audio taken as a part of our normal processes and do not include any post-production enhancements.”
Verley said the district was able to leverage its Google for Education access to fairly easily meet the requirements of HB383 without additional costs for server space or equipment beyond what the district already had in place.
“Through Google for Education, we get unlimited use of Google Drive, a cloud-based space for saving and sharing files,” Verley said. “We know there are other services out there that allow for more bells and whistles, but this allows us to share the meetings without any real added cost to the district beyond the employee time to upload and link the files for the website. We don’t have to worry about providing local (district) servers and server space for the recording archives.”
The recordings can be found under the “Board” dropdown menu on the main district website, www.mcisd.net.
District officials are also working on including links to the meeting agenda and minutes of the meetings once they are approved by the board. This will allow the public easy access from just one page of the website.
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