The Long Beach Unified School District has rescheduled its Board of Education meeting about the budget to start two hours earlier than originally planned, meaning anyone who wants to weigh in on the topic has to leave their message before 10 a.m. Wednesday.
The LBUSD said moving up the meeting to 3 p.m. from 5 p.m. was to “accommodate more public comment,” with the board slated to vote on the district’s budget for the upcoming school year as well as the Local Control and Accountability Plan, or LCAP
The LCAP is a school district’s three-year plan for how it will spend locally controlled money, effectively it’s the influenceable portion of a district’s budget. The proposed budget for the year can be viewed here and the LCAP can be viewed here.
With those major items up for debate, the board has opened both topics up for public hearings, which will allow more than the normally allotted half-hour of public comment; the budget meeting is typically the longest meeting of the year.
However, while the move will likely keep the meeting from pushing into the late hours of the evening, it also pushes it into the normal business hours and requires that public comment via voicemail must be received by 10 a.m. on Wednesday. The district has been receiving all of its public comments through voicemail during the pandemic.
The procedure for how to leave a voicemail to be played during the public hearing can be found here, and the board meeting can be streamed live here.