South Carolinians Should Always Have Access to School Board Meetings!
In 2025, live-streaming is a fact of life. Churches, political parties, sporting events, legislative bodies, and more are easily accessible online in realtime and for replay after the fact.
But school boards across South Carolina still lag behind. That’s a huge problem.
South Carolina citizens should have easy online access to watch their elected representatives at work, at every level of government. And school boards are no exception.
Our June 2024 study examined the policies of every single school district across the state and combed through their websites to determine exactly what school boards make their meetings accessible online.
Here’s what we found:
- Only 13 school districts (in navy) meet our gold standard – they actively livestream their meetings AND have a codified rule in their school board policy manual that meetings must be streamed.
- 44 school districts (in teal) livestream meetings…but have no requirements on the books to do so, meaning that at any point, they can decide to hold a particularly controversial meeting without video online (and we have heard from concerned citizens that this is a real and frequent problem!).
- 11 school districts (in dark orange) do not livestream their meetings, and do not have any policies requiring them to do so.
- And 5 school districts (in light orange) actively violate their own board policies requiring live-streaming, not providing any way for citizens to access board meetings online.
Download this report in table form, with links to each board policy and live-streaming pages
This week, Palmetto Promise Institute was glad to testify before the House Education & Public Works K-12 Subcommittee in support of S.77, legislation sponsored by Senators Hembree, Grooms, and Zell that would codify clear requirements for all South Carolina school boards to livestream any meetings subject to FOIA. That means all board meetings, whether full board or committees, will be required to stream and give the public access to know what their elected board members are doing.
You can watch my testimony here:
S.77 passed the Senate unanimously earlier this spring, and we are hopeful that it will get through the House in the last few days of the legislative session and be sent to Governor McMaster’s desk for his signature. In 2024, similar school board streaming legislation ran out of time before the General Assembly left Columbia for the summer. That was unfortunate, but S.77 this year is even stronger than before with the inclusion of committee meetings and any other meetings subject to FOIA.
At the end of the day, this should be a no-brainer. Our representative democracy cannot function without elected officials being held accountable by their constituents, and constituents cannot do that without meetings being held in the sunlight. In the remaining days of the legislative session, the General Assembly must prioritize this bill.
