Effective School Board Meetings
Twice a month as Board members we conduct a public meeting. These public meetings are snapshots for parents, community members and employees to evaluate how we operate as a team and how we are overseeing our mission to provide quality education in our community. So are the actions of your Board during your meeting enhancing your trustworthiness?
Demonstrate Respect
Civility towards each other, staff and the audience is the standard by which we need to measure the conduct of our meetings. In this case our actions are far more important than our intent. While it maybe easy to all agree to a norm of being civil or respectful toward each other, it is far harder to exercise civility when advocating for a position you are passionate about. Focusing on the issue rather than the person is one of the steps toward finding common ground for civil discourse.
Improve Transparency
With the failure of governmental oversight at all levels, transparency is becoming the buzzword of the day. In our role of as directors we need to constantly challenge ourselves to improve the transparency of our meetings. Transparency can start with the creation of an agenda that clearly states what each agenda item is about. Spelling out the acronyms of the institutional jargon and adding context in the background description of the agenda item will enhance community understanding. Finally, making electronic copies available of as much of the agenda that your school district infrastructure can support will provide type of anywhere, anytime access that the public is coming to demand.
While the conducting of Board meetings can become normal and routine for us as Board members, recognize that many individuals maybe attending their first Board meeting. As a result, we can not assume the public is fully aware of the topics and the context of the items we are going to discuss.
Superintendent Evaulation
Next to selecting a new Superintendent. evaluating the superintendent is one of the school board’s most important jobs we face each year. A high quality superintendent evaluation process helps develop good board/superintendent relationships, provides clarity of roles, creates common understanding of the leadership being provided and provides a mechanism for public accountability. The more objective and collaborative the process, the greater likelihood all parties will benefit. So where do we start?
First, especially Boards with newly elected Board members, a review of the Superintendent contract is a good place to start. Most contracts will have a section detailing an evaluation process that establishes time lines for activities to be completed. Second, pick a Board meeting where in Closed Session you can review the time lines, review past practice and agree upon a set of future meetings.
Second, consistently gathering data throughout the year to support our positions regarding the Superintendent’s performance is important. In many cases, the most recent crisis or an isolated event from the last 12 months is what we use to form our opinion of the Superintendent’s performance. Hopefully, your evaluation process includes a pre-performance review written by your Superintendent to help you look at the entire past 12 months of performance. Personally, the best tool I have found is to keep the Superintendent’s weekly communications and then review them when preparing my input of the Superintendent’s performance.
Finally, the ability to craft a consensus opinion of performance that is fair yet provides constructive feedback is an art. In cases where one or two Board members have a serious concern about an area of performance that is not shared with a majority of board members, the ability to acknowledge the concerns of the minority is crucial. The development of these statements rely on the trust behavior of clarifying expectations using the principles of accountability, clarity and responsibility. Typically, performance concerns revolve around not meeting expectations, so we have to ask ourselves if we failed to establish those expectations at the start of the process or are these expectations of an individual not the entire Board.
What are the challenges your Board faces when it prepares your Superintendent evaluation?
Trust Behavior: Clarifying Expectations, Get Better
Start With The Facts
In the coming weeks most of us will be issuing preliminary layoff notices to certificated employees. In addition, we will be approving our second financial reports. As we take action on these items, what story are we communicating to our community? Given the new reality of a State approved budget that permanently reduces general purpose funding back levels lower than 2007/08, how are we going to prepare our community for the upcoming tough decisions that need to be made? What is our overarching theme? What are our main talking points?
In preparing answers to these questions every Board should first take the time to learn more about the district budget. Before you can craft a story about the district impact of the State budget you should have your facts/data straight. Here are some areas each board member needs to know:
- Annual incremental cost of step/column expenses
- Annual incremental cost increases for inflation for items like insurance, energy, supplies, technology, etc.
- Current balances of categorical programs
- Impact of categorical flexibility to backfill general purpose funding reductions
- Percentage of expenses spent on administration compared to surrounding/comparable districts
- Impact of Federal Stimulus package on District budget
- Understanding the impact of using one-time monies to fund ongoing expenditures
- Thorough understanding of the assumptions on enrollment, State funding increases and incremental annual expenses on multi-year projections
While it is important to focus on the immediate issues of this budget crisis, it is highly likely that we are looking at a multi-year problem. Therefore, my final thought is each board needs to look at the possible scenario of no State funding increases through 2012 and what that means to our district.
Trust behaviors: Talk Straight, Create Trasparency