Chappaqua board sees demo of Diligent Community platform; members press on data security, migration and costs

At a Oct. 14 work session, a Diligent software representative identified only as Drew demonstrated Diligent Community, a cloud-hosted agenda, minutes and policy-management platform, to the Chappaqua Central School District Board of Education and district staff. James Page of the New York State School Boards Association joined remotely.

The demonstration showed the platform's public-facing site and a separate board/member view that can host agendas, minutes, a searchable policy book, document libraries, attendance tracking and a “request to speak” function. "This will act as a one-stop shop, or I like to say a single source of truth for anything board or district related on the public facing side," Drew said during the demonstration.

Board members pressed the vendor on several procurement and operational questions that would affect district workflow and public records compliance. The questions focused on (1) how private personnel documents are separated from public materials, (2) the migration path from BoardDocs to Diligent Community, (3) pricing and BOCES procurement, and (4) uptime and security.

Drew demonstrated two separate views: a public site that shows only published and adopted policies and a private member view that allows board members to see locked personnel attachments and to make private annotations. He said private attachments remain on the district's site and are not visible on the public page; the vendor said its support team does not access private content unless the customer opens a support ticket and signs paperwork allowing access. "Outside of that, it is totally private to your individual site," Drew said.

On policy management, Drew showed an integrated policy book that stores adopted policy versions publicly while keeping draft and revision histories visible to board users. The product includes side-by-side redline comparisons for revisions and a searchable agenda archive; Drew said customers commonly import three to five years of historical documents to enable OCR keyword search across agendas, minutes and policies.

Board members asked about the migration history for BoardDocs, and about future transfers if Diligent were acquired. James Page said that when Diligent (which acquired BoardDocs) bought the earlier BoardDocs product, customers were notified and could move to other platforms; Drew said he would follow up on whether client consent would be required for any future transfer and would provide written clarification after the meeting. "I would just need to check with our team on kind of how that transition worked just to be sure that I give you guys an accurate answer," Drew said.

On pricing and procurement, a district representative said the district received a BOCES quote for modular pricing; Drew and a district staff member described the platform as modular (community + policy modules are common) and said the product is aidable through BOCES. The vendor gave a rough ballpark range discussed in the session: the base "community" module for a district this size was discussed around $5,400, with the policy module adding roughly $2,500—,000, for a combined approximate total of about $8,500 before aid; the vendor said price increases are typically 4% annually for NISBA members and that BOCES charges an administrative fee. These figures were presented as examples to illustrate likely cost and aidability; the vendor said it would provide a formal quote through BOCES.

Drew described implementation and training: full site setup, user-permission setup, import of archive material and role-based training. He said implementation typically takes about 2.5 to 3 months from contract to public launch and that the company provides 24/7 support during the subscription.

On uptime and security, Drew and a district participant said they would provide outage and security-history details after the meeting. Drew said he did not have full historical outage data on the call but would follow up by email; another district participant said in his 14 years of experience with Diligent/Emerald Data Solutions he had not seen outages longer than 15 to 20 minutes and explained the vendor uses multiple servers to reduce total outages.

Board members also raised open-meeting concerns about sharing draft agendas with multiple board members. The vendor pointed to a preview workflow and warned that state open-meeting laws vary by jurisdiction; the system shows a warning if a draft is shared with a number of users that could raise quorum concerns.

Why it matters: The district is evaluating a replacement or upgrade to its current agenda and policy systems. The platform's separation of public and private materials, document import/migration process, procurement path through BOCES, pricing, and guarantees about data handling and transfers are central to the board's decision and to public-records compliance.

Next steps: The vendor said he would follow up by email with (1) clarification about how client data was handled when Diligent acquired BoardDocs and what would happen in a future acquisition, (2) outage and security-history data, (3) examples of migrated districts and customer references, and (4) a formal BOCES quote and module breakdown for the Chappaqua district. James Page said he would be available at Booth 228 at the upcoming conference and offered to meet with board members for additional questions.