Although it's been holding committee meetings at the new Minneapolis school district headquarters for several weeks now, the school board held its first full-fledged meeting in its new digs at 1250 W. Broadway Av. Tuesday night.

The new meeting room features a better sound system, and flat-screen TVs for the public that seem to add a few pounds to whoever is speaking to the board. One big difference from the homely meeting room the board used to occupy in northeast Minneapolis is that all of the technical gear is screened by a backdrop behind the board.

The new room is longer and narrower than the old board room, which means that when there's a packed house, as sometimes happens on controversial topics, some people could be sitting farther away.

One minor glitch is that the video cameras that stream the meetings sometimes show a different board member's nameplate than the one who's speaking.

Call me sentimental, but this reporter misses the self-portraits of district students that used to loom behind the seated board as a reminder of why they were there.. Student artwork now occupies the adjacent lobby space facing Broadway.