Loveland quiet during school board input session

Just two emails and nobody in person for the Loveland School Board public input session last Thursday.

By Chuck Gibson

LOVELAND, OH (December 8, 2020) – The Loveland City School District Board of Education held a public input session last Thursday, December 3, hoping to listen to the voices of the community. It was disappointingly silent.

The planned two-hour session included opportunity for people to attend live and be heard or tune in virtually to be heard along with email prior to the session. Only one person registered in advance to attend live, but later cancelled stating a scheduling conflict. Board president Dr. Kathryn Lorenz indicated there were two emails sent prior to the session. One of those actually came before the last board meeting, but was not read into the record then. Both were read during the public input session Thursday evening.

“What happened was we had 20 or 30 people listening,” said Lorenz. “Some people raised their hands and asked if they could speak. So we did have a couple people speak. We had nobody show up in person.”

The members of the school board planned the input session as an opportunity for the public to be heard. They offered no preconceived notion of any guidelines or restrictions for public comment. Lorenz called it a “pretty open thing” in an effort to open the lines of communication to better involve the community in LCSD goals and planning. The two-hour meeting was adjourned after just one-hour when the public failed to engage.

“The board indicated the desire last night to keep trying to figure out a way to do this and get more voices involved,” Lorenz said. “Based on what happened, we may very well decide if we have some sort of public thing like this maybe we need to have a topic or some more guidelines, or seek some more input. We had the intention of listening to people.”

Lorenz indicated if there had been questions, they would try to answer them, or let people know they would get the answers.

“We want to hear so we can do something about what people are saying,” said Lorenz. “I don’t want to listen to people say ‘oh, you’re doing a great job’ or ‘you’re doing a lousy job.’ I want to hear what they want us to know, how they would like us to move forward, what they see as important for the district.”

Both the emails received called for members of the board not to renew the contracts of the superintendent and the treasurer. They made reference to accusations of wrongdoing on the part of both the superintendent and the treasurer. Lorenz responded with a denial there has been any wrongdoing by either and the board will continue evaluation of both the treasurer and superintendent on successes and failures they had and move on with recommendations for their employment contracts.

REGULAR SCHEDULED WORK SESSION TONIGHT

The LCSD Board of Education will hold its scheduled regular work session meeting tonight, Tuesday, December 8th at 6 p.m. in the LIS/LMS Cafeteria. For those who wish to attend in person, the location is at 757 S. Lebanon Road, Loveland, OH, 45140. This meeting will be held both in person and remotely. The link for the meeting will be available in advance of the meeting on the district’s website lovelandschools.org/BoardofEducation.aspx.