Local television station charges $50 a meeting instead of the
$250 GUSD currently pays
Gilroy – The Gilroy Unified School District could save more than $3,400 a year if their regular board meetings were taped by a local television station rather than a San Jose-based business.
Currently all school board meetings, special meetings and study sessions are taped by MultiPoint Media for a flat fee of $250 per meeting. That’s why Suzanne St. John-Crane was surprised when the district didn’t jump at the chance to save cash.
The district has 20 regular board meetings a year in addition to special board meetings and study sessions.
About two years ago, St. John-Crane, the executive director of Community Media Access Partnership, a local company based at Gavilan College, sent a much cheaper proposal to the district. CMAP would charge $50 for a four-hour meeting, plus an optional $30 for basic editing.
Meetings up to eight hours would cost GUSD $90, plus $30 for editing. Also, because the district board room is one of more than 20 Gilroy sites wired to go live, if GUSD uses CMAP’s services, meetings could be broadcast live.
Superintendent Edwin Diaz said the district received the proposal at a time when they were enacting budget reductions and the cost of filming board meetings was one of the areas they had assessed. CMAP was asked to tape a study session on a trial basis, but district officials reviewed it and decided that it wasn’t of the same quality as that of MultiPoint Media, Diaz said.
St. John-Crane said she warned the district in advance that because they did not have a public access system, the quality would be poor.
“The meeting we covered was not a school board meeting so we had no choice but to use a single mike to capture audio,” she said.
St. John-Crane said the sampling was not representative of their work and that they had offered to show the district examples of their coverage from San Benito County meetings. CMAP films about 10 to 15 meetings in Hollister and San Juan Bautista a month.
St. John-Crane said she never received a call back after the trial meeting, which was too bad since she could have further explained the situation.
“We would love to provide that service to the school district at a reduced cost, knowing that money is tight for the district,” she said. “That’s the beauty of having a community television station, that we can provide these services at a great rate.”
Diaz said the district is keeping their options open and has asked CMAP to film some meetings, such as last Saturday’s math summit at the district office.
“We recently discussed the possibility of using CMAP more and that’s why we asked them to do the math summit,” he said.
