Dueling Salary Info at Pottstown School Board

Its hard to know where to start when you weren't there from the start.

Thursday was a rough day in PottstownNewsVille because there were two meetings I needed to attend at the same time.

So I did what any self-respecting self-loathing local journalist would do, I went to both.

Yesterday loyal Digital Notebook readers read about the relatively straightforward news of the appointment of a new township commissioner and new police officer in Lower Pottsgrove.

Things at the Pottstown School Board were a little less straightforward, due largely to Internet engineers.

I have been using an app on my iPhone to broadcast live video. It's called Periscope.

As is inevitable in our technologized world, engineers decided that something that worked just fine needed an update so it no longer would. (Engineers, undermining customer satisfaction one app at a time.)

End result for you dear reader? Three videos featuring impassioned speeches by members of the Federation of Pottstown teachers are now lost to the cyber-ether.

Periscope videos only live for 24 hours and the only way to preserve them for later viewing is to save them to the camera, and then upload them to YouTube; which is what I have been happily doing over the past few months.

Well, the update hid the "save to camera" option in a place where no one who is not an engineer would look for it. End result? They're gone now.

The good news is I used the mighty Internet to find out how to prevent that from happening again.

Ironically, because my iPhone was fritzing out from all the live video, the only way to record what School Board President Kim Stilwell said at the end of the meeting was to record it the old fashioned way.

As a result, it is the only video you will see in the Tweets below.

But thems the breaks of live coverage peeps.

Roll with it.

Technical problems aside, the news out of the school board boils down to the fact that after months of hearing about stagnant salaries, the administration, through Stilwell, shot back with some salary info of its own.