Welcome to The Effective School Board Member. You ask tough questions and twice per month we get nationally certified school board coaches to provide answers. We include resources to help school board members become more effective, like readings and school board meeting analysis.
QUESTIONS AND RESPONSES
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Question: Our reorganization meeting is coming up. Do you have guidance for school boards regarding how to select a new board chair? -- Board Member in North Carolina
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TESBM: There are four common approaches to selecting board leadership: 1) intuition/gut instinct (Who do I think would be the best?), 2) alliance/relational instinct (Who do I have the strongest connection with?), 3) political instinct (What can I do for you/what can you do for me?), or 4) considering the specific knowledge, skills, and mindsets needed to be effective in the role – to best set the Board up to improve student outcomes. If you don't have a written rubric of objectively verifiable knowledge, skill, and mindset characteristics that you've scored each chair candidate against, then your biases have led you to use methods #1, #2, or #3. That is the default human behavior. If you have the self-knowledge and wisdom to acknowledge it, you'll see you've likely relied on methods 1-3. This isn't good, bad, right, or wrong, it's just not what we would coach boards to use because it's less aligned with a focus on student outcomes. This same coaching applies to superintendent selection.
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Question: I'm having a conflict with my board chair. Can I seek legal advice from the school board's attorney? Or can the district pay for my separate legal counsel? -- Board Member in New Mexico
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TESBM: Without more details and without offering legal advice, the answers are likely no and no. I know of a few school boards that allow an individual member to individually incur legal expenses that the full board must pay. Such freedom could quickly go awry; I know of one school system that saved millions by ending that practice. The school board's legal counsel is obligated to represent the board, not individual members, so you probably don't want them serving as your legal counsel if you have a dispute with the chair or the rest of the board. The board would likely have to vote to cover any legal fees before they are incurred, and there's not much incentive for the board to do so. As a middle ground, consider asking the board chair to submit the issue as a legal query to district counsel. Conflicts can often be solved without opposing legal counsel. Depending on the conflict's severity, this situation might warrant a third-party facilitator.
UPCOMING OPPORTUNITY
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Should I Vote For The Annual Budget?
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We are hosting a 30min webinar to go over criteria school board members should consider when determining whether or not to vote for the annual budget. This quick overview will provide a sample process and sample questions board members should ask during the process.
- 11am central on Friday, February 14th, 2025
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WHAT WOULD YOU DO?
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Last newsletter, we asked about a superintendent spending $870 million without board authorization. Most respondents said they'd fire the superintendent. Unless there are unknown details, that wouldn't be where we coach boards to start. Typically the first step is to get more information. In this case, the superintendent said it was a good faith misapplication of policy, which may warrant third-party exploration. At minimum, the board may review and tighten its policies and establish a monitoring system. We recommend school boards monitor each of their policies at least once during a board member's term in office (most school boards don't do this because they have 100's of pages of policies that none of them have read). It also may be wise to increase the sample size on the next annual audit (though this is expensive).
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In this district, three board members recommended dividing the school district in half to create the original district and a new school district. Without insider details (the subscriber who shared this isn't a board member there), what would you do? Go here to share what you would do in this situation. In the next newsletter, we'll share your responses and our coaches' thoughts.
INTERESTING READS
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Rick Maloney, a Washington State school board member, suggests 49 questions to ask your school board. Well worth the deep dive!
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Being an effective leader involves using your judgment to make tough choices. But are you really willing to change your mind when new evidence suggests your judgment may be off?
BOARD MEETING ANALYSIS
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A subscriber asked us to watch a December school board workshop in Colorado. Here are the highlights from the workshop meeting:
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Total Minutes: 90
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Minutes Focused on Student Outcomes: 61
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Key Topics: career/college readiness, math, literacy, community engagement
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What Coach Celebrates: 67% of this meeting was focused on student outcomes!!! Always wonderful to see a school board focusing on whether students are learning. This board has been making steady progress.
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What Coach Recommends: Some of the questions were technical or tactical in ways that didn't advance a strategic conversation. In addition, the other December meeting wasn't student outcomes-focused, so in total, the board was at 41% student outcomes focused for the month (which, while not yet 50%, is still radically beyond the national norm of 0%-5%!).
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BONUS MATERIAL
For paid subscribers, here are additional resources:
- Additional details about the analyzed meeting -- including a video link, board member responses, and more.
- Board Meeting Video
- Time Use Evaluation
- Technical, Tactical, & Strategic Questions
- A guidance document, including a candidate score card, on how one might think about school board chair selection.
- A guidance document, including timeline recommendations, on how a school board should manage professional services it receives (like legal, search, and external auditing).
Question we can answer? Submit it to our coaches.
Want a school board meeting analyzed? Send us the video link.
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Responses