Serving on the School Board, Your Part Time Job
Real time:
I’m betting when you first ran for the school board, you had NO IDEA how much time would be involved with your service. I say this as an individual who served on the school board and constantly was surprised at how much time I had to budget out of my day/week/month to dedicate to my school board service. It’s important to think about your service on the school board as a part-time job. You have preparation time, you have work time, and you have follow-up time that’s associated with your roles on the board.
Preparation Time
There is a lot of time that is going to go into your preparation to do the work of the school board. When you first join the school board you’ll have an orientation or onboarding period. Hopefully, this is ongoing, and not just a one and done because it will take time to get to learn the different processes of the board. To help with this, AASB has developed a “what every school board member needs to know” document to assist your district in developing an onboarding process for you. One other way to begin your orientation is to sign up for and attend the Ready Set Govern pre-conference session at the annual AASB training in Anchorage.
That said, once you’ve received your orientation/onboarding to the school board, the preparation doesn’t end there. There will be processes throughout the year which require preparation time on your behalf before you come to the school board meeting. These could include completing the board self-assessment, completing the superintendent evaluation, and reviewing superintendent candidate information if your district is in the middle of a search. It’s important that you budget the time in your week/month to get these tasks done in a timely manner so whomever is helping to facilitate these processes for you can compile results in a timely manner to get back to the whole school board.
It’s not just the big tasks which require preparation time. Every time you have a school board meeting you will have required preparation time. You need to review your packet. You need to think about if there are questions that you will have from reading the packet, and hopefully, you are communicating those questions to the Superintendent before the meeting so they can also prepare to answer your questions at the school board meeting.
This doesn’t even touch on the preparation which is required to become an even better school board member (through professional development), and advocating on behalf of your district. Both of these tasks will require your time in preparation. Maybe you’ll be required to travel to receive professional development. Maybe there is data that you’ll need to review and become familiar with in order to become an effective advocate. The point is, as a part time job, your service on the school board will require you to commit time to prepare yourself to be an effective school board member.
Work Time
When does the school board have authority? Say it with me folks, “only when you’re all together in a duly convened meeting of the school board.” When the whole board is together in a duly convened meeting, that’s when the work gets real. During a meeting is where the school board is going to have discussion/debate about issues coming before the board, voting on motions made during the meeting, and making the policy decisions that are going to guide the work of the Superintendent in implementing the decisions of the board. Some people run for the school board thinking the work they do during the meeting is where they’ll spend the lion’s share of their time as a school board member. While it is true that a lot of your time as a school board member will be spent in meetings (whether of the board, or its associated committees), it’s important to remember that the preparation and follow up to those meetings are equally important to the time spent in the meetings.
Follow-up
Once you’ve done your preparation for the meeting, and met in the meeting with your fellow school board members, you may think that your work is done; but it’s not. You have a responsibility to follow up on the work of the board. Make sure you’re reading the reports received from the Superintendent to see how the decisions of the board are being implemented in the district. Listen to the comments from community members (because you know you’re going to be approached in the grocery store or at the post office), as to how the decisions of the board are impacting their students. Maybe during your meeting, the board approved seeking professional development to help members become even more effective and growing as a school board. Perhaps an advocacy effort was undertaken during the school board meeting and you’ll be expected to advocate on behalf of the school district locally, and at a statewide level. The follow-up process often leads back to additional preparation, and starts the circular process all over again. Some superintendents spend time each week to give board members updates on what has happened during that week, PLEASE respect the superintendent’s time enough to ready their report.
Conclusion
Hopefully, you’re at a point in your school board service where you’ve already realized that this process of preparing, working, and following up is required to be an effective member of the school board. The next step is to make sure you’re treating this part time job as a school board member as any other job, and budgeting the time you need to complete each of these phases.
Pull out your desk calendar or Google calendar, and put down a few hours each week to prepare, work with the board, and follow up on processes. It’ll help you organize your thoughts around your service on the school board, and help you become more effective in the work that you do.