ASHEVILLE — The Buncombe County Board of Education began broadcasting its meetings last week. The board’s regular monthly meeting, on Sept. 5, was the first to be streamed live online by a contractor hired by the board and subsequently shown on television.
The meetings have appeared online for some time. For most of the past year, independent media activist Davyne Dial has been live streaming and archiving footage of the meetings, and she continued to do so at last week’s meeting.
Buncombe schools Superintendent Tony Baldwin announced the board’s new broadcasting initiative, which was approved last month, at the meeting. “This is the most entertaining show in town,” he said, eliciting laughter from the crowd.
The board had debated the move for months, weighing potential costs and benefits. Its meetings had previously been archived as audio recordings that were available online, but in a somewhat unwieldy format of snippets.
Now the full meetings can be viewed live or afterwords at this website, and they will also appear several times a month on Charter cable channel 16, which is reserved for programming by local schools and colleges.
See Baldwin’s announcement, culled from the official meeting video, below. [Note: The video will begin after an advertisement embedded by Ustream, the video platform, plays.]