The BOE on TV: Monday Meeting to Air on Cable Next Week

The Fort Lee Board of Education meeting from Monday, Jan. 9, will air on Time Warner Cable after all, according to school board officials. But that doesn’t necessarily mean viewers will be able to hear—or even see—very much.

Board president Arthur Levine made the decision Friday to broadcast the meeting next Tuesday, Jan. 17, at 5 p.m., reversing a decision earlier in the week not to run it as scheduled on Tuesday the 10th because of poor audio quality and other technical problems.

Levine said he didn’t see the DVD, and his decision would have been to run it this week as scheduled no matter the quality, but that after consulting with business administrator Cheryl Balletto, the decision was made not to.

Balletto said she sent a copy of the DVD of the meeting to Time Warner on Tuesday morning but was told the quality was “terrible.”

“They then reviewed the video obviously before putting it on since this is our first time doing it,” Balletto said. “You could barely hear what anyone was saying.”

Another problem, Balletto said, was that there was no camera movement, so the presentation by a group of students on a project they did on the Holocaust, for example, wasn’t even captured.

Program director Jeff Shelley of Time Warner Cable told Patch that while he could have run the meeting Tuesday as scheduled but left the decision up to school officials, the quality of the video recording was indeed extremely poor.

“The camera was set up on one side of the room so if you turn the volume way up you can pretty much hear the people on the left side of the room, but everybody was kind of like a mumble,” Shelley said. “Obviously they were using the microphone on the camera. They weren’t hooked into any sort of sound system. And there were things going on, and the camera didn’t move to capture them. It just stayed on this wide shot forever.”

Shelley said he called Balletto and asked, “What is the purpose of airing this?”

“If you want to prove to folks that you had a meeting, then mission accomplished, but if you want to get any other information across, then you probably don’t want to air this,” Shelley said.

Balletto said fixing the problem for next time is a “two-part issue” but one that will be remedied.

“One is we need to have microphones in the room on Jan. 23 so when we go to televise the meeting, people can hear what everyone is saying,” Balletto said. “Number two, we have to film more from the center of the room so that the camera is on the full board, and then the camera needs to be moved. If a student’s doing a presentation, then when someone goes to watch the board meeting, you see what the presentation is.”

“It’s going to run Tuesday at 5 p.m. as bad as the quality is,” Levine said Friday after consulting with Balletto again.

He also said officials will provide a copy to anyone who requests one.

Balletto said meetings will air Tuesdays at 5 p.m. on Time Warner Cable from now on, starting next Tuesday. Each meeting will air every Tuesday until the next meeting, so the Jan. 23 meeting, for example, will run on Jan. 24 and Jan. 31.