RUSD Board Votes To Keep Public Comment Status Quo Despite Repeated Pushback

Despite repeated pushback from two of its trustees, the Riverside Unified School District (RUSD) Board of Education voted 4-2 to maintain the board’s ability to host public comment before a topic’s presentation. 

The decision to uphold the status quo came after several board discussions on how to best conduct public meetings after Board President Noemi Alexander Hernandez moved public comment to near the beginning of the meeting at the start of her presidential tenure. 

“This is a process that we’ve all agreed to over the years, that when there is a new president, we can create new ways of running our meetings,” Hernandez Alexander, who is also running for reelection, said at the September 17 meeting. “When the next president comes in, I’m going to support that president’s decision to change the meetings, however they feel is necessary.” 

During the September 17 meeting, the board reviewed two proposed updated versions of a 2018 policy regarding meeting conduct. The first version slightly amended the language to emphasize that public comment would follow their bylaws, which directly refers to a section of the state’s sunshine law called the Ralph M. Brown Act. 

The bylaw allows for the board’s leadership to format the meeting as they best see fit as long as it follows the requirements laid out by the Brown Act. An attorney for the district, during a March 12 discussion on district policy, told the board the new format complied with the state law. 

The second version kept the amended language but also added a clause that mandated public participation to occur after a district staff member’s presentation on an item. This change, the proposed clause said, would allow commenters to hear the presentation before providing input as it was in 2025 during Brent Lee’s tenure as board president. 

“It was literally a moment in time where I looked out into the audience and I said, ‘We are abusing our public’s goodwill because they care about their community and their school, and they’re falling asleep on us because of the way we’re doing this,’” Hernandez Alexander said at the September 17 meeting, in regards to her decision to change the format. “Let’s try something new, not popular with some of us, but in no way, shape or form, or in reality, has anyone’s First Amendment right been abridged.” 

Early into the change, however, Trustees Dale Kinnear and Amanda Vickers voiced that they felt the new format was not beneficial to the community or to the conversation at-large, which culminated into a formal discussion in March about the board’s bylaws regarding public comment. 

“I think we are better served by having the public input after district presentation,” Kinnear said at the March 12 meeting. “It’s disjointed, for me, to have public input in the beginning and then hear district presentations and then hear board comments.” 

Hernandez Alexander and Trustee Jesse Tweed, although they understood their colleagues’ concerns, said they felt the new format was beneficial to the community. Ultimately, the board decided to create an ad hoc committee to review the district’s policy on public comment made up of Vickers and Hernandez Alexander. 

A revised meeting conduct policy, alongside a slew of other policy updates that needed to be updated to comply with state law, was then brought to the board at its August 27 meeting. Both Kinnear and Vickers again pushed to add language that mandated public comment after a presentation while Hernandez Alexander and Tweed expressed preference against that type of clause. 

The board decided the ad hoc committee would create the two versions and bring it to a vote on September 17. 

“Open public comment should be placed after district staff reports, because public participation is most meaningful when community members can respond to the same information the board will use during its deliberations,” Vickers said at the September 17 meeting as the board reviewed the two versions. “Allowing the public to speak only before staff presentations may satisfy a procedural requirement, but it does not always create a genuine opportunity for informed participation.”

Tweed, in response to Vickers, said that he understood her viewpoint but was still not convinced that mandating that format would improve public participation, Hernandez Alexander added she didn’t want to “tie the hands” of the next president with the mandated format. Lee pointed to his experience on the board, citing that the public comment process has been changed before.

“This isn’t the first change,” Lee said. “Even since 2016, we took comments up front. [In] 2018, sometimes we took comments up front, and we took them also when the item was approached.”

After the discussion, the board voted 4-2 to maintain the policy as-is. Kinnear and Vickers voted against.

A few members of the public before the vote, including local government watchdog Jason Hunter, also criticized Hernandez Alexander at the meeting for statements she made during the board’s previous policy discussion. At the August 27 meeting, she said public comment was meant for the community to give the board insight into their needs and not for criticism. 

“The behavior we saw was totally inappropriate, and that it needed to stop,” Hunter said. “Your soundbite this time demonstrated your complete disdain for your boss, the general public, and in my opinion, a deliberate attempt to mislead the public as to what is the purpose of public comment during government meetings.”

In a phone call with The Riverside Record, she clarified that she believed the public has a right to critique the board during public comment and was instead referencing comments that delve into personal attacks. Legally, the public has a right to make personal, and sometimes disrespectful, comments, she added, but felt that it doesn’t offer constructive feedback on the topic at hand.