Is this seat taken?

It gets interesting every once in awhile to enter a meeting held in public and find every seat taken. Fortunately for me, a small table is reserved for members of the press at the primary meetings I cover. (Not always so lucky in the parking lot.) At last week's Tecumseh school board meeting, the agenda included two items of great interest to the community: a vote on bids for a proposed $2.1 million athletic complex, and discussion on moving from semester to trimester scheduling. Not only were the chairs taken, people lined the back and side walls. I could see people leaning in at both the back door and the one up front near the board members. I don't know how many were in the hall. A fair number of this audience was kids. One of the defenders of block scheduling was high school senior Tim Montrief, who said he was "an ambassador" for the kids at THS (and did a great job, by the way). Several teens crept into the board room and sat on the floor during a Power Point presentation by a school improvement team on the subject. Obviously, these were areas of concern and interest for many in the community and I have wondered, along with some community members, why the meetings aren't scheduled for a larger venue when a larger-than-usual crowd is likely to have such interest. It's not that diffiult to anticipate at least some of those occasions based on topics to be covered. Seeing seats filled still surprises me at times because when I look up from my "reserved" table not only at school board meetings, but City Council meetings as well, I often see just a smattering of people. Occasionally at City meetings, we members of the press are the only audience, and sometimes we're joined by a few department heads whose issues might be up for discussion. We in the press do our best to capture what is discussed at any given meeting, whether it's the official business itself, or trying to capture the essence of the public comment periods made prior to and after those sessions, so that those who are not in attendance can get a sense of what transpired there. But I've said it before and it bears repeating. The best way to stay in tune with what goes on at these meetings is to join the democratic process at this local level by attending more meetings in person. That way when issues come up for votes, sometimes reaching hot-button status, those in attendance will have a better sense for the background discussions that lead up to that vote. That's just the way it works in America.