The Denver school board last week began limiting public comment — temporarily — to two hours, and the public isn’t happy about it.

Twelve-year-old Roman Ortiz stepped up to the mic and read prepared comments from his cell phone.

“I am here today because I do not agree with cutting testimony hours,” the Kunsmiller Creative Arts Academy seventh grader said. “Limiting public testimony takes away the voice of the community in Denver.”

His mother, Natalie Perez, agreed.

“It just seems like it’s another thing they’re doing to take away the way we try to communicate with them,” Perez, a community organizer with Stand for Children Colorado, told The Denver Gazette Tuesday.

Karen Mortimer, District Accountability Committee chair, also shared her concerns about limiting public comment, saying the governance policies adopted by the board last fall — which encourages community engagement — is at odds with the public comment change.

The new restrictions, Mortimer said during public comment, might be “palatable if there were clear and effective avenues for community engagement and feedback in place beyond public comment, but there are not.”

Mortimer said she was not speaking on behalf of the District Accountability Committee.

Denver Public Schools Board of Education directors have complained bitterly that public comment meetings, which occur once a month, drag into the wee hours.

In addition to the two-hour limit, the public may only discuss one topic for up to 30 minutes, three minutes for individuals.

The new policy is not out-of-step with those in surrounding school districts.

JeffCo Public Schools’ public comment, for example, is limited to one-hour blocks and nonresidents may only speak with preapproval. Cherry Creek School District also limits public comment to residents or those with a connection to the district. The policy also permits the board to limit the length of public comment time.

“Public comment restrictions are not new to the state, but they are new to the district,” said Board Vice President Auon’tai M. Anderson.

The board adopted the public comment policy temporarily until something more formal can be crafted after the Nov. 7 election with the input of any new board members, Director Carrie Olson said.

Over the years, the board has implemented different strategies to address the length of public comment.

Previously, public comment was included with the board’s regular meeting, a standard practice among most public bodies. The board, however, changed this last September and began holding public comment on a separate day, typically on the week of the board’s regular meeting.

That move shaved about an hour — on average — off public comment meetings, which can and have gone into the wee hours.

Since moving to a separate public comment meeting, the board typically spends about three-and-a-half hours at the dais, according to the video length of meetings available on BoardDocs. Before the change, the average combined public comment and regular meeting length was four and a half hours.

The board’s most recent public comment meeting on Sept. 18 was an outlier, lasting less than an hour. Meetings have known to drag on five, six, even seven hours, as it did on Nov. 14 — the first public meeting after the board discussed shuttering 10 schools. 

It’s unclear how much board business drives public comment.

But the length of the meetings for public comment started eking back up last October, when the board started to discuss school closures.

Since then, the board has weathered a storm of public criticism following a series of controversies and developments — from revoking the innovation zone status of the Beacon iZone to the shootings at East High School and an illegal executive session to lift a 2020 ban on school resource officers to the firing of a popular principal and bus route cuts with the new Healthy Start times.

Board members do not engage with public speakers, a common practice among elected officials.

But they also do not typically direct Superintendent Alex Marrero to provide context or additional information to specific concerns brought to the board during public comment.

Director Michelle Quattlebaum may have signaled a new approach.

At the close of public comment last week, Quattlebaum asked Marrero to direct someone from transportation to attend an upcoming work session to provide insight on the challenges the department has faced with the district’s new Healthy Start times.

“The goal here is to let the community know we hear you as a board,” Quattlebaum said. “This is about solution finding, not blaming.”

Olson, who is working on drafting a formal policy, acknowledged that the board has done a poor job of providing the community feedback. And she disclosed that had Quattlebaum not made her request to Marrero publicly, that she likely would have followed up with an email seeking the same information — something Olson described as a common practice for board members.

“If we get better at communicating what we’ve heard and this is what we’re responding to, I don’t think two hours is going to be unreasonable,” Olson said. “If we get better at communicating.”