photo by: Screenshot

Michael Eravi speaking at the Lawrence school board meeting during public comment on Monday, January 10, 2025.

Frequent public commenter Michael Eravi stood before the Lawrence school board and spoke for 53 seconds before board President Kelly Jones paused his time on Monday night. Eravi had called the board’s enforcement of the public comment policy, which doesn’t allow for disruptive, foul or obscene language, “bull,” prompting the board to encourage him to follow the policy regardless.

That didn’t happen.

At the beginning of the meeting, Jones told the meeting attendees that if they could not comply with the public comment rules, they would be immediately removed from the meeting, and after Eravi continued to be disruptive, the school board members broke for a recess and then a second recess to discuss how public comment will be handled for the rest of the meeting. When the meeting started again, board member Shannon Kimble motion to move the night’s public comment to the end of the meeting

Eravi, however, said he would not leave the podium until he could finish his public comment time. Jones repeatedly asked Lawrence police Sgt. Eric Barkley, who was seated across the room, for assistance in getting Eravi to his seat, but Barkley said officers were not able to force someone to be seated and that Eravi could be arrested if he were to criminally trespass on school grounds. At this point, board member Anne Costello moved to return public comment to its original time and Eravi was allowed to finish his comments on the public comment policy.

But the incident raised issues about the running of meetings. Past school board president Shannon Kimball told officers at the meeting that Eravi was breaking decorum rules and was preventing the school board from moving forward with their meeting.

“The chair has the authority within the board meeting to enforce decorum rules, and she is trying to do so,” Kimball said. “We are trying to figure out a solution to this where we can continue our board meeting while also respecting people’s rights to have public participation.”

Barkley told the Journal-World that the Lawrence Police Department will have to discuss how these situations will be handled in the future and said that the person who is in charge of the building has the authority of asking someone to leave the building, and added that they will need to figure out if the school board members have that authority to do so.

Police spokeswoman Laura McCabe said in a message to the Journal-World that the department had “been made aware of what happened and we’re going to meet with the school board president and superintendent” to discuss the matter Tuesday morning.

Another commenter Justin Spiehs, who spoke online Monday, was stopped after he started calling board member Anne Costello vulgar names.

Jones said that after the comments on Monday, public comment may be becoming too disruptive, and there may need to be another way to provide comments to board members. Board member Bob Byers echoed concerns and said there may need to look into other options for providing public comment opportunities.

“Public comment is being used less as providing valuable information and more for derogatory comments disrupting the business,” Byers said.