Policy Violations, Book Bans, & Fake Social Media Accounts

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

• Question: I have one board member who violated policy but acknowledged it and is making amends, and another who violated policy but refuses to own it or make amends. Do I still need to treat them the same since they both violated policies?   -- Board Member in Oregon

• TESBM: Absolutely not! These are two completely different scenarios. The real question is, "what's the purpose of enforcing policy?" It's to ensure policy is followed going forward. So whatever the lightest enforcement action is that accomplishes the purpose, use that.

• For the former board member who is taking personal responsibility, I'd recommend a one-time enforcement action communicating the board's displeasure -- what we call an "admonition."

• For the latter board member who is not taking personal responsibility, I'd recommend an ongoing enforcement action implementing the board's consequence -- what we call a "censure." Our version of censure has two components:

  • Status: It's a change of status, so they're no longer referred to as "board member"; until the censure is lifted, they are referred to verbally and in writing as "censured board member."

  • Privileges: It is a complete revocation of all privileges. Board member rights to attend and participate in meetings are rights that should not be tampered with by the school board. But anything that isn't a statutorily protected right -- like communicating with staff, being on stage at graduations, being recognized during events, being allowed to travel at school system expense, etc -- is revoked until the censure is lifted.

• Question: There are people in my community who want to ban books and people who don't want to ban books. Which one is right? What should the board do?      -- Board Member in Florida

• TESBM: As certified coaches, our ethical obligation is to support school boards in becoming more focused on improving student outcomes. This starts with listening for their community's vision and values through intentional outreach and engagement activities, and then acting on that information. It's not appropriate for coaches to replace the community's vision and values with their own. So an effective school board coach won't answer your question. Instead, they'll work with you to do the challenging task of answering it yourself through authentic community listening for the vision and values and then setting school system priorities based on the community's vision and values -- we call these Goals and Guardrails. Once the board has captured the community's vision and values, our coaching is to generally follow where that leads. To be clear, this will lead to different answers for different communities.

• This isn't effortless; if it were, school boards wouldn't be needed. But there are steps to ease it. The intention is to include your entire community -- to listen to a representative sample -- which often means going to the community rather than expecting them to come to you. And it means condensing hundreds of ideas for possible Goals and Guardrails into just 1 to 3 of each. In practice, I haven't yet seen a set of Goals and Guardrails that have mentioned banning books.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO?

• In the last newsletter, we shared about board members accused of violating board policy by creating fake Facebook accounts to speak against school system efforts. You all were evenly split between suggesting disciplinary action (admonition or censure) and leaving them alone. We strongly agree the behavior is ill-advised and in poor form. But we even more strongly agree that elected officials have a right to their opinions and shouldn't face repercussions for expressing them — even if they do so in an inadvisable manner. Usually, situations like this point to deeper challenges in the working relationships among board members. If board members don't like this particular behavior, they're better off finding ways to improve the working relationship rather than trying to punish them.

• In this district, board members are accused of improperly adding items to the board meeting agenda. 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

• Rick Maloney, an insightful thinker on school board governance, recently launched a substack that we suspect will be well worth the read.

• Many schools nationwide are struggling in reading and math. But here are a few that are beating the odds.

BOARD MEETING ANALYSIS

• A subscriber asked us to watch a February school board meeting in California. Here are the highlights from the workshop:

  • Total Minutes: 345

  • Minutes Focused on Student Outcomes: 65

  • Key Topics: financial & operational health, personnel items, college and career readiness

  • What Coach Celebrates: Focusing 18% of the board's time on student outcomes is an improvement for this school board; most boards are between 0% and 5%. For both students and adults, we recommend celebrating growth.

  • What Coach Recommends: Not only do we have an instrument for tracking how minutes were spent (18% on student outcomes; ideally 50% and above), we also have an instrument for tracking the quality of the student outcomes conversation. This one was only 46% quality (ideally 80% and above); very low. Board members need training on how to have effective conversations about student outcomes.

UPCOMING OPPORTUNITY

• What Is An Effective Superintendent Evaluation Process?

  • We are hosting a 30-minute webinar to go over the 12 months worth of steps involved in effectively evaluating a superintendent.

  • 11am central on Friday, March 14th, 2025

  • RSVP Here

• Did you miss last month's 30-minute webinar? Email Greg for a make-up session.

BONUS MATERIAL

For paid subscribers, here are links to additional resources:

• Additional details about the analyzed meeting -- including a video link, monitoring report, and more.

  • Board Meeting Video

  • Monitoring Report

  • Monitoring Conversation Evaluation

• A guidance document on effective goal monitoring.

Student outcomes don't change until adult behaviors change

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