Board Capacity Building
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 …
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 …
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 …
Involving Students in District Governance at Leyden High School District 212
Self-appointing nonprofit boards that fill their own seats (for example, chambers of commerce, economic development corporations, private colleges, and social service providers) have over my quarter-century in the nonprofit/public leadership arena by design become steadily more diverse and representative. The …
First the Cake, Only Then the Icing
A sorely disappointed superintendent and I were talking a few days ago. She, her school board, and her senior administrators had gone through an intensive weekend retreat a couple of months earlier. She explained that it’d been put together to …
Superintendents Oliver Robinson and Aaron Spence On Building a Cohesive Board Governing Team
The January 27 article on this blog – “May the (Centrifugal) Force Not Be With You!” – talks about one of the most insidious enemies of a really cohesive board governing team: the centrifugal force caused by board members’ loyalty …
May the (Centrifugal) Force Not Be With You!
A few months ago at a team building retreat I was facilitating, involving the board, superintendent and her top administrators of a large suburban district, I sat in on a breakout group that was really struggling. Its charge was to …
Don’t Unwittingly Invite Micro-management!
A superintendent called me earlier this week, asking if I’d be interested in presenting a governance training workshop for her school board. She explained that several board members were coming dangerously close to “micro-managing,” and she wanted them to understand …
Performance Oversight Isn’t the Superintendent’s Responsibility Alone
“Falling fund a district slipup.” This is the headline of a front page article by Marlene Sokol in the August 8 Tampa Bay Times – about the dramatic decline in the Hillsborough County Public Schools’ reserve fund: from $298 million …
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