Laguna Beach school board approves buying new audio-visual system to resume live-streaming meetings

Can’t make it to the next Laguna Beach Unified School District board meeting? Don’t worry, the district is bringing back live-streaming — this time with closed captioning.

District board members voted unanimously Tuesday to buy a new audio-visual recording system from Swagit Productions LLC — a Texas-based company that provides hands-free video streaming and broadcasting for public agencies.

The company also works with the Santa Clara County Office of Education and the city of La Verne in Los Angeles County.

The new system will allow the district to resume streaming its board meetings with live-captioning. Live-streaming was halted in May when the district learned its previous videos were not compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act because they lacked closed captions.

Hardware for the new system — including cameras, monitors, custom programming and an encoder-decoder for captioning — will cost $76,184, according to the district.

Ongoing annual costs will include $8,340 to archive and stream meetings and $11,280 for real-time closed captioning for up to 25 meetings a year. The system will be fully integrated with BoardDocs — a software platform the district will use to host its meeting agendas at an annual cost of $10,000.

There is currently no set date for when live-streaming will resume, Deputy Supt. Leisa Winston wrote in an e-mail Thursday.

The board originally voted to live-stream its meetings in 2015, in an effort to increase transparency.

Support our coverage by becoming a digital subscriber.