Two weeks after a contentious debate over whether to restrict how long school board members can speak at public meetings, the Lehighton Area School District board approved the new rules last Monday 7-2.

The board voted to give final approval to Policy 006, the district’s meetings policy, which now limits each school director to 3 minutes per topic and gives the board president the authority to stop any discussion once that time expires or if the conversation strays from the matter at hand. The policy passed without floor debate. Jeremy Glaush and Joy Beers voted no. The remaining seven members, including David Bradley, who had been among the policy’s most outspoken critics at a June 8 workshop, voted yes.

The presiding officer is now charged with preserving order “at all times” and deciding questions of order. Board members are limited to three minutes of discussion per agenda topic, with one exception — “requests for clarification directed to the presiding officer in advance of a vote are not subject to this time limit.” No director, the policy adds, “shall be allowed to indulge in personal reflections that do not have a direct nexus to district operations.”

The vote came two weeks after those provisions prompted an extended and at times heated workshop debate that centered on whether the rules gave the board president power the Pennsylvania School Code does not authorize and whether they would be applied evenhandedly.

Bradley had led the opposition June 8, arguing the rules invited selective enforcement.

“This policy is exceeding what’s in Pennsylvania school code,” Bradley said at the workshop. “The president is now being given extra powers not standardly codified within school code, allowing for selective enforcement of the conversation that takes place within the school district. This is already addressed in Robert’s Rules. There is a process for it, and the debate and deliberation is what the board is about.”

Glaush, who remained in the no column Monday, warned at the June 8 workshop that curtailing debate sets a troubling precedent regardless of how a board meeting is going in a given moment.

“Removing the filibuster is a very bad thing, because this is, for lack of a better term, a bully pulpit,” Glaush said. “You get to say your piece, and it’s picked up by the media, it’s picked up by the video. I just think it’s bad precedent.”

He also questioned whether the board had been consistent in its application of the existing public comment limits, which he said had varied depending on who was speaking.

“We selectively limit members of the audience to three minutes, depending on who they’re railing against,” Glaush said. “We need to be a little bit better with that.”

Supporters of the new rules pointed to the duration of recent meetings as justification.

“We have seen over and over again where we say respect the gavel, and that’s not respected, and sometimes policies have to be put in place,” director Denise Hartley said at the June 8 session.

The district’s solicitor told the board at that same meeting that a uniformly applied time limit is on solid legal ground.

“If we uniformly apply a three-minute rule to all individuals and enforce it uniformly, we are consistent with the school code and the federal constitution and the state constitution,” Solicitor Jeff Sultanik said. “The Constitution does not give an individual an unfettered right to interrupt the board meeting, nor an unfettered right to have no limitations on the amount of time that they have to speak.”

Sultanik also cited a federal-court case involving the Pennsbury School District, which he said forced that district to revise an earlier public comment policy and settled for approximately $240,000 to $250,000, paid by the district’s insurer, as a cautionary example of what happens when limitations are not applied consistently.

Policy 006 was first adopted Jan. 25, 2008 and had last been revised Aug. 26, 2024. Along with the new presiding officer provisions, the policy preserves the public’s existing three-minute comment limit, which the board president may extend, and requires the board to post agendas at least 24 hours before any open meeting on the district’s website, at the meeting location and at the district’s administrative offices. Board members may submit items for the agenda in writing before noon five days prior to regularly scheduled meetings.