In the last several months, these meetings have often developed into events that include demands and threats from people present at the meeting, even warranting a police presence on occasion.
Kyle Palmer is the editor of the Shawnee Mission Post. He says that while school board meetings in Johnson County, Kansas, have not risen to that level, it's still certainly a quite different atmosphere.
"The tone of these meetings, I think is fair to say... more angry, accusatory at times, distrustful," says Palmer. "A lot of these meetings start with public comment periods and these times are often filled with a parade of people frequently opposed to the district's policies on things like masks."
Aaron Schwartz is a local high school English and rhetoric teacher who bemoans the current trend present at modern school board meetings. He says it causes people to lose sight of the actual debates at hand.
"When I try to teach my students the principles of argument, debate, what is fair," Schwartz elaborates. "To have this be their model in the community is, I think, absolutely embarrassing."
- Kyle Palmer, editor of the Shawnee Mission Post
- Aaron Schwartz, area high school teacher
