QUESTIONS AND RESPONSES

• Question: How do we respond to community demands to fire a teacher or principal?  -- Board Member in North Carolina
• TESBM: Regardless of the topic your community’s discussing, start by listening so the speaker experiences being heard. We teach a specific method for this, but anything that leaves the speaker with the experience of having been heard works.
• To your point, being heard and getting your way are different things. The board usually delegates hiring/firing of teachers and principals to the superintendent. Depending on the size of the school system, the superintendent likely delegates those tasks to someone else in the organization. So after listening effectively, if community members are focused on a task that the school board has delegated to the superintendent, then the school board member should guide the community member to the right place in the organization -- typically the principal, head of HR, or the superintendent’s designee -- and create a clear path for follow-up if their issue isn’t resolved.
• Board members should not intervene in matters that the school board has delegated to the superintendent. (as a caveat, safety or criminal allegations should be routed immediately to the superintendent and law enforcement when warranted). Taking this approach allows school board members to preserve the superintendent's ability to get things done while protecting community values.

• Question: What’s the risk if we don’t monitor our goals every month?-- Board Member in Pennsylvania

• TESBM: When boards don’t maintain a predictable cadence of Goal monitoring, systems drift back into reacting to adult inputs and chasing programs. This drains resources, frustrates staff, and fails students. Monthly monitoring exists to compare vision (Goals) with current results, learn what’s working/not working, and inspire adult behavior change; without it, continuous improvement doesn’t happen.

• You also lose alignment and transparency: the board stops signaling priorities, weakens its ability to evaluate and support the superintendent formatively, and can’t reliably align resources -- time, talent, and treasure -- to Goals. Effective practice is to adopt a monitoring calendar, receive reports each month, and invest at least 50% of board meeting time in monitoring progress toward its Goals. Skipping this cadence erodes the very board behaviors most correlated with improving student outcomes.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO?

• In this district, the board is pressuring a board member to resign because of allegations regarding abuse of power. [ Yes, it's a fire district not a school district, but it's still relevant. ]

• And in this district, the board is facing scrutiny over the hiring of the superintendent's spouse.

• What would you do in each of these two situations? What's the overlap in these two situations? Go here to share what you would do in these situations. In the next newsletter, we'll share your responses and our coaches' thoughts.

INTERESTING READS

• You often hear that you should "put the big rocks in first" regarding prioritization. Turns out, this isn't just sound advice, it's also common sense physics.  [ I know this was in the last newsletter, but it can't be emphasized enough! ]
• This opinion piece makes the argument that school boards becoming more stable and promising to focus on student outcomes is necessary but insufficient -- that the real measure of improvement is student outcomes, not only adult behavior change. We strongly agree with that idea.
• Here's an example of a school board conducting a community listening campaign in advance of setting its new five-year Goals and Guardrails.

BOARD MEETING ANALYSIS

• A subscriber asked us to watch a board meeting in Arizona. Here are the highlights from the regular board meetings:

  • Total Public Minutes: 151

  • Public Minutes Focused on Student Outcomes: 36 (24%)

  • Minutes Not Focused on Student Outcomes:  Voting-11, Other-64, Board Self Eval-40

  • Key Topics: bond projects, state assessment results, board self evaluation, operations & finance update

  • What Coach Celebrates: The monitoring session was solid with conversation meaningfully focused on strategic inquiry rather than technical/tactical questions. The board self evaluation was a wonderful conversation with board members not only holding themselves accountable for board progress, but also organizational progress. It was an impressive display of leadership and of leading by example.

  • What Coach Recommends: This school board is almost half way to its intention of investing 50% of its time on student outcomes. This is to be commended! Conducting an agenda evaluation and upgrading its Governance policies regarding board meeting preparation could be sufficient to help them make the next push.

UPCOMING OPPORTUNITIES

• Effective Policy Monitoring & Review

  • We are continuing the Policy Leadership series with a 30-minute webinar on two frequently overlooked aspects of owning a policy: monitoring it for compliance and reviewing it for relevance.

    • 11am central on Friday, September 12th, 2025

    • RSVP Here

  • Did you miss last month's 30-minute webinar? Email Greg for a make-up session on any of our growing list of topics, including governance policy, delegation policy, effective budgeting, superintendent evaluation, professional services management, strategic planning, or consent agendas.

BONUS MATERIAL

For paid subscribers, here are links to additional resources (to gain access to the links below, please consider subscribing):

• Additional details about the analyzed meeting -- including a video link, time use evaluation, and more.

  • Board Meeting Video

  • Meeting Materials

  • Goals & Guardrails

  • Completed Time Use Evaluation

• A guidance document on effective policy leadership and how boards often engage in ineffective policy leadership

Thank you for reading The Effective School Board Member. You ask tough questions and twice per month we get nationally certified school board coaches to provide answers. We help school board members tell their stories and provide additional resources to help them be more effective.

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