When a community board meeting in the Bronx was held to discuss a prospective new apartment building for homeless, formerly incarcerated New Yorkers, the public hearing was far from a civil debate. In videos that went viral, proponents were shouted down by loud boos and cursing. Community members called one speaker a “liar,” “scumbag,” and “piece of shit,” and threatened to punch him.
It’s just one instance of a local public meeting that quickly devolved into chaos. Intended to be a fair and democratic way to let community members weigh in on local issues, these meetings often favor the most outspoken residents. This trend can be seen across the country, including at housing and zoning meetings, and is particularly apparent at school board meetings, which have been venues for heated and hysterical arguments on everything from COVID-19 masking to critical race theory. Research shows that it’s often those with the most time and money who come to meetings and influence board votes, drowning out the voices of lower-income and minority communities, who often don’t, or aren’t able to, attend. But even though these types of meetings are flawed, experts say they’re a necessary outlet for democratic discussion and should be reformed—not scrapped.
Open public hearings are run differently across the country, but are generally official municipal meetings where residents are invited to speak about a community problem or upcoming initiative, from city budgets to school curricula to affordable housing projects. There are usually a few ground rules set by the district or state, like time constraints for speaking, sometimes limited to just 60 seconds per person.
The stakes are high. These boards vote to grant or deny housing permits, dictate what students do or don’t learn, and decide whether to require masks during a deadly pandemic. In a Dallas suburb, after 200 parents spoke, the school district prohibited the teaching of the 1619 Project, which details the consequences of slavery on U.S. society. In Arkansas, after a hearing during which a man proclaimed that LGBTQ people “deserve death,” the board approved a host of anti-transgender policies and bans on books with LGBTQ themes.
This most recent wave of hostile meetings emerged during the pandemic, as schools debated whether to reopen and if masks should be required. The viral videos that have since emerged are reminiscent of the satirical town halls in the sitcom Parks and Recreation, on which the ever-optimistic Leslie Knope defends her community for their passion: “What I hear when I’m being yelled at is people caring loudly at me.”
But this kind of contention isn’t new. “Parents violently storming into school board meetings [and] calls for parental rights—those are about 100 years old,” says Adam Laats, a professor of education and history at Binghamton University in New York who has studied 20th-century cultural battles over schools. Textbooks and teachers come under scrutiny whenever there’s “social stress,” he says, including accusations of communist teachings during the 1950s Cold War panic.
Starting in the 1960s, religious fundamentalist Norma Gabler had a huge impact on Texas’s school curriculum by spending time meticulously wading through proposed textbooks line by line and composing accusations to bring to board meetings in her small town of Longview, eventually even influencing the ascription of evolution as a theory, not a fact. “No one had done more homework than Norma Gabler,” Laats says.
Nowadays, too, participants tend to be people with more time and money to research the matters at hand, mobilize with other like-minded neighbors, and attend the meetings. And that often excludes lower-income people who may struggle to take time off, travel to meetings on weekday evenings, and find childcare. So, while hearings are open to all, people with resources can exert an outsize influence. “They get to dominate that discussion, because no one else did the reading.” Laats says.
These meetings also draw those who are upset with the current norms and status quo who have outsize voices. “If you really, really, really hate evolutionary theory, you get a bigger voice than the large majority of Americans who just don’t really care,” he says. And, notably, a majority in a meeting is not the same as a majority in a city or county.
Maxwell Palmer, an associate professor of political science at Boston University, studied housing meeting participants in 97 districts in the Boston area in 2017. His findings underscore that those with more resources are overrepresented in these meetings. In the study, attendees were overwhelmingly white, older, male, and homeowners, and had negative views about new housing—commonly known as NIMBYs, or “Not In My Backyard.” They didn’t represent the broader population of their areas, or the attitudes reflected in polling. “This really is concerning, because who’s being heard at the decision-making level is very different from the broader policy views,” Palmer says.
Notably, Palmer didn’t find a strong partisan bent either way. But Republican candidates have made fears around education a midterm issue, particularly around critical race theory and transgender issues. Governor Ron DeSantis signed the Don’t Say Gay bill in Florida, which prohibits mention of sexual orientation or gender identity in early learning; Pennsylvania governor hopeful Doug Mastriano curiously said he would ban “pole dancing” from schools. These themes have created a stir at the local level and have helped energize parents to organize around these right-wing talking points.
Still, Laats is confident that this era of tumultuous hearings will blow over, based on their cyclical nature in the past (which has usually been about three to five years, often timed around elections). “It burns itself out, and it hurts the people who do it,” he says. In the 1930s, Thomas Blanton, an ambitious congressman (who Laats calls a “proto-Ted Cruz”) managed to pass a law banning D.C. teachers from talking about communism, even in their daily lives outside of school. “That was 2022 in 1935,” he says. But concerns about the quality of schooling ultimately won out. Similarly, The College Board recently responded to book bans by asserting that students would not get AP credit if they didn’t read enough of the required books.
Jonathan Collins, an assistant professor of education, political science, and public affairs at Brown University, is most concerned that lower-income and minority citizens are shut out in these forms of participatory democracy, and he isn’t so sure whether this moment is “ephemeral . . . or the new order.” Once the laws start to change, he says, it’s hard to go back to the status quo, especially if school boards become partisan: Last year, Tennessee became the first state to allow school board members to list a party affiliation. Though he’s deeply concerned by the “strategic manipulation of this participatory space,” he still believes in the need for public hearings, because they can be a conduit for positive change. “We have to ask ourselves,” he says, “are we willing to throw out the baby with the bathwater?”
Palmer agrees. In housing, he says, it’s the only forum where some communities have any voice at all, to speak out against issues like displacement and gentrification. But they could definitely use some reform. Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, researchers had believed online meetings could be a way to expand access, as they eliminate the need for long evening travel and childcare. But in a 2021 follow-up to his original housing study, Palmer found that Zoom board meetings during the pandemic brought out the same unrepresentative groups of people. More likely, the problem is that other groups lack enthusiasm, conscious that their voices are barely heard.
But when asked, people do participate. In addition to holding hearings about housing proposals, the city of Newton, Massachusetts held equitable focus groups to specifically hear from the young, elderly, BIPOC people, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities. The response from the groups showed much more support for greater housing density than in the public meetings: 100% among the young and 43% among the elderly, versus 11% of meeting attendees. Some members of the BIPOC group said it was the first time they’d ever participated. “I have struggled to feel confident to engage in the process when people who are lifelong residents begin to get loud,” one said.
While not replicable across the board, the results in Newton show how important it is to intentionally seek out new voices when making decisions that affect an entire community. Better management at the hearings themselves is also key, Collins argues. Based on two of his own studies on meeting reform, he suggests the boards should specifically allocate time to respond to public comment in the meetings themselves. They also need to be more vigilant about setting a tone and cutting people off at their time limits or when arguments become discriminatory or not rooted in fact.
Setting strict parameters would hopefully prevent people from “[producing] a spectacle” that they know could go viral and sway their case. “Because now, there are too many people showing up at meetings who don’t want to do this the right way,” Collins says. “They want to flip tables.”
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