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.
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