The Spencer-Owen County Community Schools administrative building recently got an upgrade.
Two cameras at the front and back of the boardroom overlook participants in the room. An array of audio speakers is in the ceiling tiles.
“We wanted to have something that was, I don't want to say hands off, but functional and easy to use,” said Norman Warner, school IT director. “I don't know if we accomplished everything that we wanted with that, but it seems to be pretty robust.”
The reason for the upgrade? House Bill 1167, which passed in 2023, went into effect July 1, 2025. It requires that all public meetings of state and local agencies be livestreamed.
The president of the school board Derek Morgan said they started the process of complying with the law well in advance of the deadline. They livestreamed their first meeting on May 22, but there have been challenges.
“We typically have had one meeting in every building, every school building in the corporation, at least once a year,” he said. “And the technology is hardwired into the boardroom, and we can't necessarily just rip it all out and take it with us.”
Not only is the board reassessing how it conducts business throughout the year, but only one person is fully trained to run the livestream: Communication Director Kris Samick.
Then there was the cost of acquiring and installing the equipment.
“It frustrates me that the legislature sometimes passes unfunded mandates of things that we have to do,” said Morgan. “Now, the legislation did provide we could have lesser technology than we have to meet the requirement of the law, but also functionality isn’t great whenever you don't invest in the technology that you're using.”
Superintendent Andy Cline said the new system cost $50,000.
“The integrity will be there so that we're not going to have to just completely replace pieces in three years or four years,” he said. “It should be good for 10 years, 15 years, and a return on investment to our taxpayers in that sense.”
The author of the bill, Rep. Ben Smaltz said he became interested in requiring online meetings after the pandemic.
“Once I think we saw that, we thought, well, wouldn't it be great if public meetings were all live streamed permanently, so that the people that live in those communities can see what their government is doing, how they're spending their tax dollars,” he said.
The new law, however, doesn’t say much about what happens to organizations that don’t fall in line.
“If you just don't have the internet, those are some exceptions to the live streaming and archiving,” he said. “So, we were thoughtful of the communities that aren't yet fortunate enough to have exceptional internet.”
For rural areas with less access to a quality internet connection, the law requires that the meeting is recorded and uploaded later. It allows transmissions and recordings of public meetings to be destroyed after 90 days.
Zac Cook with River Systems, an Indiana-based AV company, said they have helped at least 50 municipalities with livestreaming.
“This does not need to be overwhelming, does not need to be expensive, and you can have a very good quality production with very little staff, very little hands on,” he said.
Cook said the company has all-in-one system starting as low as $1500, but some solutions could be even cheaper.
“We actually had one township that wanted a system that they could literally take to Arby's, because that's where they have their town council meetings,” he said. “Technically, you can do that.”
Now that July 1 has passed, Cook said _plenty of organizations haven’t completed the transition. But now that many others have, he predicts more are going to join in.
“I think we'll start to see a much more rapid deployment and adoption of this, and then once it's in place, you know, people are going to look at this as why didn't we do this before?”
