For years, Lehighton Area School District has used Board Docs, a platform offered through the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, to post agendas, store meeting minutes and manage district policies. That arrangement is ending, and the district is none too happy about how it found out.

PSBA notified school districts that Board Docs is being phased out in favor of a product from Diligent called Diligent Community. PSBA’s relationship with Diligent, however, will conclude on June 30 and the organization is now offering a new platform called Keystone Agenda as a replacement.

Superintendent Jason Moser did not mince words about the timeline.

“I am not happy at all with the timing,” Moser said during last Monday night’s board workshop. “We didn’t hold this back. We didn’t pause or delay this. I think that PSBA did public schools a disservice by forcing us into this position.”

He said the association had to have known well before districts were told.

“They had to have known about this in October,” Moser said. “They had to know that they were potentially ending that relationship, and it was never communicated with any school district. So it has led all school districts into this situation.”

A further complication: the policies that districts have built up inside Board Docs are copyrighted by PSBA, meaning they cannot simply be migrated to just any new platform.

“My understanding is that we can’t have our policies on Diligent because they are PSBA copyright,” Moser said. “We would have to pay for a separate subscription to actually put our policies there.”

Reviewing software

The district reviewed five different software platforms before narrowing its recommendation to Keystone Agenda. Board Secretary Janine Partenio walked the board through the evaluation Monday.

Some of the platforms, she said, offered more robust community engagement tools — including polling, surveys and community subscription features — but carried higher price tags.

“Keystone Agenda is most similar to, probably what we have now,” she said. “Some platforms had more of a community-involved option, but Keystone Agenda is more cost effective.”

Cost is a significant factor. The district currently pays $2,700 per year for Board Docs. The replacement options reviewed ranged from roughly $5,000 to $10,000 annually.

“When we sat in on the first presentation and heard that it was twice that amount, it was like, oh,” said Gretchen Laviolette, the district’s technology coordinator. “And then as we sat in on others we learned OK, they’re all pretty comparable. We were just spoiled by the low cost of Board Docs.”

Director Jeremy Glaush said he saw appeal in platforms that offered more public interactivity, even if the district ultimately chose the more affordable route.

“I think it would be a great idea if we had community participation in more than just a couple different items,” Glaush said. “That would be great because, as Dave (Bradley) says, everybody should be involved.”

He acknowledged the reality of public engagement at local school board meetings, however.

“It really only increases when there’s a coach on an agenda or a sport on an agenda,” Glaush said.

Reaching residents

Moser on Monday addressed the broader question of how the district reaches residents who have no direct connection to the schools.

“The hardest constituency for us to reach are those who aren’t tied directly to the district — they don’t have a student here, they don’t work here, they’re taxpayers but do not have direct ties to schools,” he said. “We have a difficult time actually reaching them.”

Several board members floated alternatives to a paid engagement platform, including inserting community surveys directly into tax bills, using the district’s existing mailing infrastructure and parcel ID numbers as a way to identify respondents and prevent duplicate submissions.

Board member Dave Bradley cautioned that any anonymous polling system is vulnerable to manipulation.

“We’ve done anonymous polling, and we’ve done email polling — everything,” Glaush said. “The detractors, those who want to make big deals of things, they just have many different people log in, many different times. So unless you’re identifying who’s actually responding, you’re not getting anything that’s worth it.”

Consensus for Keystone

The board appeared to reach a general consensus Monday that Keystone Agenda was the most practical and cost-effective choice.

“Sounds like the cost-effective option is maybe the most reasonable, and we perhaps search for alternative avenues for community outreach,” Board President Alex Matika said, summarizing the discussion.

A formal vote will take place at a regular voting meeting.

Other districts in the Times News area who use BoardDocs include Jim Thorpe, Pleasant Valley and Northern Lehigh. They have not yet discussed the issue.

In Northern Lehigh, Superintendent Dr. Matthew J. Link said, “We do use Board Docs, but only for our policy maintenance. We do not use it for building, maintaining, and sharing our board or committee meeting agendas.”