Starting next month, the Lindbergh Board of Education will cease to livestream its meetings to YouTube.

What started during the COVID-19 pandemic to allow community members to stay connected and involved with the board has become less needed as the board is back to meeting in-person. Now that more community members are attending meetings in-person again with the end of the pandemic, the livestreams have become seemingly unnecessary.

According to Beth Johnston, chief communications officer at Lindbergh Schools, data was monitored from last year’s board meetings, and it unsurprisingly showed that live viewership has drastically decreased.

“So just to give you a couple of numbers, we had meetings last year during the 2022-23 school year on 20 different dates,” Johnston said. “Two of those meetings had zero viewers, 15 of those meetings had fewer than five live viewers and only two of those meetings had more than 10 viewers – one of which was the candidate forum.”

Johnston also noted that she and another board member often tune into the livestream just to make sure that it is streaming correctly, meaning that the 15 meetings last year that had “five or fewer” viewers, probably had closer to three or fewer citizen viewers.

Interestingly enough, the data also showed that while live viewership is way down, views of uploaded videos have remained high, exceeding 100, and sometimes even 200 or 300, views per video on average. With that in mind, the district has decided to continue recording the board meetings, but they will now be posted to YouTube the next day.

“It will still be available on Board Docs, it will be available on our district YouTube channel and all the other ways we share that out,” Johnston said. “We’re really seeing that that’s where people are watching the meetings, so we think that that fits with where we are today.”

The school district’s YouTube channel is www.youtube.com/@LindberghFlyers.