Ryan Johnston didn’t mince words when he called out the Bow school district for issuing no-trespass orders against parents.

He made sure the school board knew exactly where he stood.

“You guys are telling people to be quiet about how they feel about the direction you’re going in at events wherever we’re allowed to speak up,” Johnson said on Sept. 30, less than two weeks after parents wore pink armbands at a girls’ soccer game to protest transgender athletes in women’s sports. “You should all be fired.”

However, Johnson’s comments don’t appear in the written minutes of that contentious school board meeting. In fact, none of the public comments are part of the public record of that meeting, beyond a link to the YouTube recording, which wasn't working but has since been restored. 

Typically, the minutes from Bow school board meetings don’t capture public comments in full detail, said Marcy Kelley, superintendent of the Bow and Dunbarton school districts. She said minutes are meant to summarize the “sentiment” of what was discussed, rather than recording comments word-for-word.

“They’re not verbatim, and they’re not required to be verbatim,” Kelley said.

Unless people were at the meeting or watched the video, the sentiment of the Sept. 30 meeting, where Kelley and school board members faced intense criticism for 30 minutes would be missed.

Steven Hebert said the board members should step down for infringing on First Amendment rights by taking punitive actions on parents who wore pink armbands on the sidelines.

“I don't think you deserve to be up there. I think that you are putting your personal views in front of everyone here,” Hebert said last fall. “I hope you've enjoyed your time on the board I am personally going to do everything I can to make sure that we have unbiased people who can read something as simple as a First Amendment.”

For some reason, the link to that meeting hasn't worked for at least the past few months. When the Monitor asked Kelley about it on March 18, the district restored access within minutes.

Unlike the town of Bow, where residents successfully petitioned in 2023 at town meeting to have select board and planning board meetings live-streamed and recorded, the school board isn’t held to the same standard.

To change that, residents submitted a petition at this year’s annual school district meeting in March, asking for all school board meetings to be live-streamed and recorded. However, the petition didn’t pass.

Every school board member, except for Melynie Klunk, voted against the petitioned warrant article, arguing that the board already had a policy in place, which had just been updated following the petition’s submission.

But the language of the policy left some residents, like Felipe Miranda, deeply dissatisfied.

“It’s so open and very badly written,” Miranda told the school board. “I was really appalled by what you guys came up with.”

One of the main concerns was the absence of a retention period for the recordings and the ambiguity around the possibility of editing them.

“We’re all for recording them and keeping them available. There’s no issue with that,” said Bryce Larrabee, the school board chair. “I can’t imagine situations where we’d need to edit anything, but we’d still like to have that option if absolutely necessary.”

When asked about editing, Larrabee explained that the board might make rare exceptions — like in cases of serious medical emergencies or if a student’s or staff member’s name was accidentally mentioned negatively. But he assured that these situations hardly ever arise.

Klunk declined to comment.

At the annual meeting, the school board members also pledged to revise the policy at the next board meeting to specify that  recordings will be retained for five years. Currently, the policy lacks a clearly defined retention period.

Residents raised this issue at the annual meeting after the board discussed with Kelley the appropriate length of time for retaining recordings earlier this year while updating the policy.

Kelley has questioned the appropriate amount of time the videos should live online, especially contentious ones.

“We have had meetings, one recently where it was very contentious and for me professionally I don’t want that meeting to live out there forever,” said Kelley at the February school board meeting.

Kelley had said at the Feb. 10 meeting that she would prefer the recordings be removed after one month, once the minutes from the previous meeting are approved.

“I think in fairness to people on the board for the really hard work that you’re doing, I don’t think you want someone to manipulate what it is that you’ve said or represented in a meeting,” Kelley said. “That it would live out there for eternity, I think is a challenging idea for me.”

In New Hampshire, school boards are not required by law to live-stream or record their meetings, and many districts don’t have a policy in place.

Hopkinton, for example, doesn’t have a policy either. However, it live-streams and records its meetings and leaves them archived online.

For Bow residents, the push for the school district to adopt a policy similar to the one in town was driven by the perceived need for more transparency.

Martin Jenkins, while he appreciates the board’s policy, believed that the petition would have solidified the rules, setting them in stone.

“They adopted it after the petition, and you might change it at the next board meeting,” said Jenkins. “We don’t want that. We want to say what the policy is.”

Sruthi Gopalakrishnan can be reached at sgopalakrishnan@cmonitor.co m.