Superintendent Luvelle Brown: Leading From the Heart as Well as the Head
Our colleague Dr. Luvelle Brown is an extraordinary educational leader who values the learning culture in the Ithaca City Public Schools at least as highly as up-to-date educational facilities, technology and methodology. His commitment to what he calls the “culture …
Board Committees That Work
A couple of years ago during the first of four coaching sessions, the superintendent of a mid-size suburban school district identified board “micromanaging” as one of his 10 most worrisome challenges as the district’s relatively new chief executive officer.
When …
The Virginia Beach Public Schools and Naval Air Base Oceana: Partners in Innovation
I learned early in my career – during a five-year stint as chief of staff to the president of a three-campus urban community college – that what formal long-range planning does best is codifying and describing strategies already in place …
Turning Your Board Into a Cohesive Governing Team: Part 2
As I noted in last week’s post at this blog, turning school boards into really cohesive governing teams is no piece of cake, primarily because the great majority of school board members are elected. In practice this means that many …
Turning Your School Board Into a Cohesive Governing Team: Part 1
Teamwork in the abstract is neither here nor there for school boards. The only serious reason for developing your board’s teamwork is to help it function as a more effective governing body that gets its governing work done more effectively …
Getting Your Board-Superintendent Retreat Right
Retreats have become a popular vehicle for involving school board members, their superintendents, and senior administrators in accomplishing high-impact governing work that could not be accomplished – at least not as well – in regular board business meetings. Updating a …
Bake Your Board Cake First, Then Worry About the Icing
A sorely disappointed superintendent and I were talking a couple of months ago. She, her school board, and her senior administrators had gone through an intensive weekend retreat six weeks earlier. She explained that it’d been put together to address …
Capitalizing on Spear Carriers to Preserve Your CEO Line of Credit
The school board’s Planning & Development Committee held four intensive work sessions over the course of six months in coming up with a list of schools to be closed because of falling enrollment, working closely with the superintendent and her …
Cleveland Heights-University Heights Superintendent Talisa Dixon on Dealing with Dramatic Board Turnover
“What can I do at this point?” The beleaguered superintendent in the workshop I was presenting last year on building solid board-superintendent partnerships had just shared a horror story with his colleagues in the room – one that I’d heard …
The Miami Lighthouse Partners With the Miami Dade County Schools in the Pre-K Arena
Virginia Jacko and I tell her incredible true story in our book The Blind Visionary (www.GovernanceEdge.com): losing her eyesight while serving as a senior financial executive at Purdue University; starting all over as a vocational rehabilitation student at …
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