East Cobb News

At the last public comment she’s likely to be seen speaking at in front of television cameras and before the Cobb Board of Education, Jennifer Susko had her microphone cut off.

The former Cobb County School District guidance counselor, a persistent critic of the board’s Republican majority and Superintendent Chris Ragsdale, renewed those complaints on Thursday, before the board was set to approve a measure to end broadcasts of public comments.

Susko was making her remarks during a public hearing on the Cobb school district’s proposed property tax millage rate, and chairman David Chastain interrupted her, saying the comments weren’t germane.

“It’s about wasting public resources,” Susko insisted, waving her hand, and Chastain motioned to silence her electronically.

She could be heard continuing to speak, and school board attorney Suzann Wilcox said that “I believe the chairman has ended this commentary.”

About an hour later, the board voted along party lines to prohibit any other commentary from the public from being shown on its cable and livestreaming channels, a policy dating back to 2007.

The four Republicans, at the behest of Ragsdale, voted for the policy change without comment. The board’s three Democrats had plenty to say in protest, before being on the short end of another significant board vote in recent years.

It was an unnecessary thing for the Cobb school board to do, but not unexpected.

Since 2019, when the board’s GOP majority shrunk from 6-1 to 4-3, it and Ragsdale’s leadership has come under closer, and more vocal, scrutiny from Democratic members and citizens critical of the district’s handling of a number of issues.

Democratic former board members Charisse Davis and Jaha Howard were elected in 2018, and less than a year later, the Republicans voted to ban members from making public comments. So contentious were clashes at open board meetings that they became cringeworthy affairs, all the way around.

Yet four of them took the drastic step to silence themselves. Chastain, who was the board chairman that year as well, said the person holding the gavel shouldn’t have to be a referee.

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that eventually, Thursday’s action was inevitable. Howard and Davis are gone, replaced by more conciliatory figures, but with many of the same hot-button topics still on the front burner.

Ragsdale, who didn’t consult board members before proposing a ban on airing public comments, said there are legal reasons for doing so, and because meetings could be more “efficient” if speakers addressed primarily the board and superintendent.

That could be interpreted as a desire to deprive critics of what they desire most—a platform, and the rhetorical oxygen that comes with it—to amplify to the wider public.

I think that’s exactly what Ragsdale, who urged his detractors to “take a break” after the 2024 elections, has wanted to do all along.

“If the public comment hadn’t been so impactful,” said Michael Garza of East Cobb, another of the regular critics, “the district wouldn’t be doing so much to impede it.”

There’s some truth to that, but perhaps not as much as Garza thinks. Critics have taken credit for the district’s decision last years to drop a proposed $50 million special events center after they revealed renderings the district never shared with the public.

That project was never properly justified, either in cost or in purpose, and when the details became known, made even less sense.

But Ragsdale’s most vocal opponents have overplayed their hand quite a bit at times. Some formed what they call the Cobb Community Care Coalition, with one member launching an unsuccessful Democratic school board campaign last year.

Their list of complaints is endless, and blistering, and overall I don’t think they’ve been all that effective. While all citizens have the right to address and petition their elected officials, when the same group of people rattles off the same complaints, meeting after meeting, it produces something of a Chicken Little effect.

While some of their criticisms have been valid, the sky isn’t falling like they imagine. The Cobb school district has shortcomings that some of these individuals have rightfully called out, but not always very constructively.

And sometimes they’ve been absolutely foolish, especially when ripping Ragsdale for removing sexually explicit books from school library shelves. These aren’t novels with literary merit, like “Catcher in the Rye” or “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Most of the books that have been taken down were written specifically to introduce children in school settings to subjects they don’t understand, without their parents knowing about it.

To those who wore the “Read Banned Books” shirts while wrongly claiming censorship during public comments: Pick better battles. This was not one of them.

To be fair, a similar dynamic exists during public comments before the Cobb Board of Commissioners, where another handful of citizens lambaste the Democratic majority on a regular basis, with some speakers rambling aimlessly and off-topic.

Sometimes their microphones too are cut off, and they are escorted out away by police. These scenarios are playing out at many local government and school board venues across the country.

I’m not saying that people shouldn’t speak their minds to their elected officials. They should, if they feel so inclined. But how many others haven’t been able to because the usual suspects arrive early and take up the allotted time slots?

The district could have revised the policy to limit how often individuals can speak. But that wasn’t suggested.

For some citizens, the Cobb school district can do nothing right. For others, Cobb County government can do nothing right.

In a county with more than 750,000 people, and more than 100,000 public school students, that’s maybe a dozen people or so all told.

How representative are they?

Yet the superintendent’s legal claims to ban airing of public comments sound like a cop-out. After 18 years, this is only now an issue? He cited no laws and Wilcox wasn’t asked to explain any potential issues either. Is this a subject only for executive session?

We reached out to the Georgia First Amendment Foundation to find out if school districts can be held liable for what public commenters say.

We haven’t heard back, but GFAF president Richard T. Griffiths told Axios Atlanta that “anyone who brings legal action against the school district over comments made by a member of the public would have to prove that the board and school system organized, promoted or scripted the remarks.”

Cobb government has tried to address this by forbidding speakers from using visual presentations during their comments, but their words are still aired, and we’ve heard of no legal problems.

The four Republican board members who voted for this ban had absolutely nothing to say. That includes newly elected John Cristadoro of Post 5 in East Cobb, who said he received 30 messages from constituents in favor of continuing to air public comments.

Be he opted to acquiesce in silence, continuing a discouraging tradition among his Republican peers.

We’ve contacted Cristadoro too, but haven’t heard back.

The Cobb County Courier has a solid round-up of comments from many reasonable citizens, some of whom have not commented before, telling the board why this action is a bad idea.

Are some public commenters truly interested in getting resolutions for the subjects at hand, or are they engaging in performative rage-bait for a larger cause? Sometimes I wonder, and I sense this on occasion when monitoring comments on my own site.

Some people have given themselves proud permission to come completely unhinged on a vast array of platforms, and it’s getting worse in real life, including public comment periods.

The best solution is for adults to police themselves—not what they’re saying, but how they do it. And to what end. But so much of social media in particular is Forever Third Grade, reflecting a society with lowering levels of public trust.

Public school boards in Georgia are required to allow public commenters to speak, and most have not been proactive in developing policies to address the overheated times in which we live. In Cobb, from now on, you’ll have to be in the room to know what was said by your fellow citizens.

And there will be no public record of any of this. On meeting minutes as it is, the district now states only the number of public commenters who spoke, and nothing of their comments.

For a school district that was once a pioneer in public access, Cobb is taking on the appearance of one that seeks to control not just the message, but any messenger who diverges from its preferred narratives.

Maybe that will foster the “effectiveness” that Ragsdale desires, but it torches any pretense of transparency.

Related:

• Cobb school board approves holding millage rate for FY 2026
• Cobb school district to hold ‘Hop On!’ bus ride review 
• Cobb superintendent defends restricting public comments
• East Cobb schools recognized with John Hancock Awards
• Cobb school board may end broadcasts of public comments
• Wheeler, Walton students receive National Merit Scholarships
• More leadership position changes made at East Cobb schools
• Georgia resumes mandatory cursive instruction in grade school

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