Girard: Will broadcast live
The Girard at Large Radio Show will broadcast tonight’s unprecedented, some would say historic, meeting between the Manchester Board of School Committee and New Hampshire’s Commissioner of Education Virginia Barry and Board of Education Chairman Tom Raffio, live and uninterrupted. The broadcast will air on 90.7 FM WLMW or may be streamed live from the Girard at Large Web site.
The meeting starts at 7:00 PM, however, our coverage will begin at 6:00 PM. Show Host Richard Girard will be joined by Sid Glassner, anchor of the Girard at Large weekly education segment “Is Our Children Learning?” and host of Inside Education, which airs on Thursday morning’s from 10:00 to 11:00 on 90.7 FM WLMW.
Glassner: Co-hosting the big event
Audience calls will be taken while on the air at 603-606-6762 during the run up to the meeting. Girard at Large will also monitor its Facebook and Twitter pages for audience comments and questions. We will share them on the air when possible and do what we can to draw the attention of Manchester’s school board members to them. We also will blog live, in real time, to allow audience members to comment on what they hear in a place where their comments can easily be found by anyone who wants to find them.
The meeting will start with public input, where members of the public will be allotted three minutes to present their comments and questions to the board before Commissioner Barry and Chairman Raffio are brought into the meeting, which is expected to be heavily attended. An earlier report from a local newspaper falsely reported that the public would not be allowed to address the board. Mayor Ted Gatsas, in his weekly interview with Girard at Large said the meeting will include public input, as all meetings do and that he had no idea where the other media report came from.
Gatsas has, for months, been publicly inviting Barry to address the board and answer their questions, especially in light of its threats to withhold funding from the city if it chose not to administer the Smarter Balanced Assessment and Gatsas’ assertions that what Barry told him with respect to obtaining a waiver to avoid the test was different in private than it was in public.
