03-07-2025
School board to switch to new online meeting platform
The Frederick County Board of Education is shifting away from the online platform BoardDocs to share meeting agendas and documents, as well as store archived meeting recordings.
Granicus Peak, the board's new online platform, also owns Swagit Productions, which is what the board already uses to record its meetings.
Both the Frederick County Council and the Frederick City Council use Granicus as a meeting platform.
Diligent Corp. of New York City is phasing out BoardDocs in favor of its other platform for hosting meetings, called Community.
However, Community does not integrate with the system the school board uses for video of its meetings. The board uses those videos as its minutes.
Eric Louérs-Phillips, a spokesperson for Frederick County Public Schools, said on Tuesday the school district was told that the public would be unable to access BoardDocs after Tuesday.
As of Wednesday morning, the BoardDocs site was still live.
It wasn't clear on Tuesday when Granicus Peak will go live, other than in time for the next board meeting, which is Aug. 6.
School board President Rae Gallagher wrote in an email on Tuesday that Community would not have integrated the school board's archived Swagit video recordings.
'We were told that there would be no video archive if we had stayed with Diligent Community,' she wrote. 'The videos are the official minutes of the meetings and so this was cause for concern for our Board.'
The Maryland Open Meetings Act, which governs how public bodies meet and keep records of meetings, requires that meeting minutes be retained for five years.
A Frederick County Public Schools press release published on Tuesday said the required transition from BoardDocs shows the school board's 'commitment to strengthening communication with the community and making it easier to access key public information.'
Gallagher wrote that the school board was initially told that switching to Community would cost an additional $2,000 on top of the $7,800 it paid for BoardDocs in 2024-25.
The school board budgeted for $9,800 for the switch.
She wrote that the initial contract offer for Community was $10,000 over budget for the subscription and would have cost $19,800.
Granicus was $500 over budget, she wrote, and will cost the school board $10,300 for the year.
A school board meeting was scheduled for July 9, but 'due to the transition, we made a decision to cancel that meeting and move agenda items to subsequent meetings,' Gallagher wrote.
'The additional time was needed to ensure that staff were properly trained, get the platform up and running, and ensure compliance with the Open Meetings Act,' she wrote.
Gallagher wrote that the school board was informed at the end of March that Monday was the last day for FCPS to upload to BoardDocs and that the subscription ended that day.
The school board met with several different platforms, and decided that 'Granicus was the best deal for the functionality we need,' Gallagher wrote.
'Granicus offers similar functionality, integrates with our Swagit video platform, and presented a lower cost proposal,' she wrote.
All school boards across the state will no longer use BoardDocs, Gallagher wrote. She did not know what platforms other school boards will use.
