Board

Grant Winners - 1/10/09

Download the grant proposal here.

The Pike County Youth Coalition will launch School Board 2.0 as a youth-led initiative to bring transparency and accountability to the Delaware Valley School Board through modern technology. This effort will simultaneously seek to engage more voices, particularly young voices, in school board deliberations using the latest in Web 2.0 tools and social networking.

School Board 2.0 was presented at a recent conference in Philadelphia, PA and won full grant funding from Mobilize.org. You can read the grant proposal linked to below.

During regular school board meetings and important work sessions or committee meetings, School Board 2.0 will live stream the meeting and provide a live chat for viewers to participate in. Students will operate the platform from the meeting and provide a live blog and polls, tracking relevant topics. The platform will also host documents that are passed out at the meetings, which will be able to be scanned and viewed instantaneously. After meetings, the video footage and documents, in addition to the live blog text, will be archived on the site to allow community members and students to go back and review it.

The purpose of this project will be as much to serve a local need as it will be to establish and experiment with an example of citizen-centered action that will be a model to other communities across the country. School Board 2.0 will continue for 12 months or until the board adopts a substantial amount of the same practices itself. Upon this project’s completion, the Pike County Youth Coalition will publish a report for distribution that would detail the project’s successes and areas for improvement for future use and replication.