Santa Ana Unified trustees hold governance workshop to tighten meeting procedures and public-comment rules

The Santa Ana Unified School District Board of Education spent a workshop session reworking how it runs meetings, with trustees and Superintendent Perez agreeing to test new approaches for public comment, consent items and internal communications.

"Tonight's meeting is focused on board governance training," President said at the opening of the session, announcing outside facilitators were on hand to help the board translate bylaws into practical meeting agreements. Facilitator Terrilyn Fenders framed the session around five governance priorities — clarifying roles, evaluating the superintendent, policy work, accountability and bringing community voice into board decisions.

The discussion centered on three operational areas: how items get placed on the agenda, how public comment is managed and how the board handles the consent calendar. Trustees described the current practice: an individual board member can request an agenda item by emailing the board president and superintendent, and staff and the president then decide timing and readiness. Trustees asked counsel to clarify a related bylaw point about forcing placement if a president and superintendent decline the request.

Public-comment logistics drew extended debate. Facilitator Fenders read the district's practice: "individual speakers will be allowed, in general, 3 minutes to address the board on each agenda or non-agenda item, and the board will limit total time for public input on each item to 20 minutes." Several trustees favored keeping public comments at the start of the meeting to preserve access for people who cannot stay late; others pushed for operational limits in cases of very large speaker turnouts and for telling speakers, when appropriate, to stay for a later academic presentation that directly addresses their concern.

Trustees also aired concerns about the consent calendar. Trustee Brenda said she often pulls items because community members have asked who partner organizations are and how they interact with students; she said the district is spending "over $1,000,000 on Project Kinship." Facilitators recommended staff identify recurring themes in consent itemsfor example, repeated nonpublic-agency contracts for students with special needsand bundle those into standalone agenda items so the board can deliberate efficiently.

On board-staff communications, the superintendent and consultants reiterated policy 9200: individual trustees should route requests for information and correspondence through the superintendent's office so staff can provide consistent responses and avoid conflicting outreach to outside providers. Trustees said they would continue to forward constituent emails to the superintendent and ask for updates on responses when appropriate.

The facilitators proposed drafting a short, public-facing governance handbook to translate bylaws into daily practice; they offered a draft board self-evaluation for the board to review and suggested forming a two-person ad hoc committee to tailor the handbook and bring a recommendation back to the full board. The board agreed to explore the handbook, changes to public-comment timing when speaker counts are large, and bundling recurring consent items for better review.

The meeting ended with acknowledgements to the facilitators and staff and an announcement that the next regular Board of Education meeting will be Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2026, at 6 p.m.

No formal motions or votes were recorded during the workshop; the session served as governance training and to surface operational changes the board asked staff and an ad hoc committee to draft for future formal consideration.