Since last August, residents of the Boyertown Area School District have been offered the chance to ask the administration questions online.
Few have elected to do so.At Tuesday’s school board meeting, Superintendent Richard Faidley requested that a resident asking questions during public comment also submit those questions through the online form.
“This isn’t new. It is meant to improve efficiency. We can capture the question this way,” Faidley said. “When questions are asked at the meetings, sometime because of the microphone or because of phrasing, the intent of the question is not always clear.”
The process for asking the district questions was outlined on a card that was made available at the meeting. According to the card, the online form can be used to ask a question about district or building operations, comment on the district and employees, make suggestions and share stories about experiences in the district.
The form can be found under the Quick Links section on the right side of the district’s homepage at www.boyertownasd.org. By clicking the “comments and inquiries” link, users will find an online form.
The district has been working to streamline the process of answering community questions. Previously, questions asked at the meeting would be researched and answered online. At the request of a resident, the administration briefly began answering those questions during the Old Business portion of the board meeting’s agenda.
Ruth Dierolf, a former board member, was asking questions at the Tuesday meeting when she was asked to submit those questions online.
“It’s because they don’t want the public to hear the answers,” Dierolf said.
Faidley countered her argument. The public comment rules have not changed at all, he said after the meeting. Residents are free to ask questions and discuss the answers they receive during public comment at the meeting. Questions that are asked, however, will need to be submitted online as well.
Faidley said Wednesday that the questions from Tuesday’s meeting had already submitted using the form and would be answered within a day or two.
If anyone is uncomfortable using the online system, they can call the district or school and ask a representative there. The representative will then enter the question into the online form, so that it becomes part of the database. Residents can also fill in a hard copy of the form by hand at the district office.
“This is a great tool to improve communication,” Faidley said. “It helps us to see if, for example, 70 people ask a question about construction, we need to communicate better about that issue.”
The district currently answers all questions received from the community under the School Board tab on the district’s website. Faidley said that practice will continue, for questions asked at the meetings only.
“If you wanted the entire public, the community to see the answer to that question, you could come to the meeting and ask your question,” he said. “Not everybody wants that. If you did not want the community to know what your questions are, you can ask it through the form.”
A suggestions committee will meet once a month to go over the information gathered from the database, including what the questions were about and how long it took for the district to respond. The database itself will not be made available to the public but the meetings will be, Faidley said.
