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Online participation in BH-BL
Budget Forums
BH-BL Board of Education members invite
all residents and staff members to participate in the
process of developing next year's school budget.
Three
Budget Forums were scheduled specifically to
educate and collect input from the public at key points
in the budget development process:
Thursday, Feb. 9, 2012 on BH-BL Fiscal Realities
Tuesday, March 6 on the Preliminary School
Budget
Wednesday, March 21 on the Nearly Complete
School Budget.
All three Forums will be held at 7:30 PM
in the O'Rourke Middle School cafetorium, 173 Lakehill
Road, Burnt Hills.
Coming to the middle school and
participating in person is the best way to see and hear
the speakers and share your opinions. But if you are
unable to attend in person, you can still participate
online as long as you have a computer with speakers and
high speed internet access.
This is the third year that the Board
of Education has provided live online access to its
budget forums. Over 100 people participated online for
each of the two budget forums that were held in March
2011,
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Viewing the online portion of the
February 9 Forum
If you were unable to attend the forum on Feb. 9,
2012,
you can click below:
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How does the Online Meeting process
work?
Anyone who is unable to come to one of
the community forums in person is welcome to participate via
their computer using a process that is often called
a webinar.
The district uses
online meeting software called Adobe Connect Pro that allows people to see
and hear what is said at the forum and to type in
their questions and participate in the meeting from
their computer.
No special
software is required on the user's end. However,
users do need to have:
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1. |
A computer with speakers (so
that you can hear the presentation), |
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2. |
High speed internet access
such as Road Runner or DSL, and |
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3. |
Adobe Flash player to view the
video image of forum presenters. (Most computers
come with this now. Anyone who is able to view
video clips on YouTube or TV station websites should be OK.) |
Online participants can see and
hear the presenters speaking at the podium and can see the
presentation Powerpoint slides. Online viewers can
also type in comments and questions, which a
moderator at the forum can see and respond to. The
moderator can also make
individual comments/questions visible to all online
participants.
The Connect Pro software that the district is using
automatically records all the comments and
questions that online participants type in, so Board of
Education members will receive a copy of your input this
way, just as well as if you attended in person.
BH-BL is grateful to the Capital
Region BOCES and
the Northeast Regional Information Center (NERIC)
for their assistance in this and for
access to the Adobe Connect Pro software
(formerly called Breeze) that makes it all possible.
NOTE: If you have
dial-up (rather than high-speed) internet access, we're
sorry, but you will probably not be able to view the forum proceedings properly
from your computer.
See also:
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