Tag: school board-superintendent relations
Governing Is Truly a Team Sport
A little over six years ago I was guilty of an error of judgment that taught me a couple of valuable lessons. I’d been retained by a mid-size Midwestern school district to assist in planning, facilitating, and following up on …
Board Standing Committees Supercharge Virginia Beach City Schools Governance
In the recent video interview I recorded with them, Board Chair Carolyn Rye and Superintendent Aaron Spence of the Virginia Beach City Schools make a compelling case for employing well-designed board standing committees to assist the school board in carrying …
President Jennifer Adair and Superintendent Talisa Dixon: the Columbus City Schools’ Dynamic Leadership Duo
The Columbus City School District is fortunate to have a dynamic, cohesive leadership team at the helm in the person of Board President Jennifer Adair and Superintendent Talisa Dixon. Among the several reasons why this partnership at the …
Solving the Board Development Puzzle: the What and the Why
The half-day Zoom governance workshop I presented a couple of weeks ago for 25-some superintendents of a diverse array of districts included a segment on board development. Early in my career I would have been a trifle worried that the …
Recruiting a Really Board-Savvy Superintendent
Experience has taught me – and I’m sure many if not most of this blog’s readers – that the more board-savvy its superintendent, the more effective a school board is likely to be as a governing body and the more …
Welcome to the Frontier!
I opened the video webinar I recently presented for the board and superintendent of a Northern Virginia school division by observing that K-12 governance is frontier territory. Far from being a mature, fully developed field, K-12 governance is characterized by …
Top-Flight Performance Won’t Always Keep the Relationship With Your School Board Healthy
When I walked in Rich’s office for our weekly project review meeting, I found him slumped at his desk looking distraught. When I asked him what’d happened, he just said “take a look,” handing me a form. It was the …
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 a six weeks earlier. She explained that it’d been put together to …
Transforming a Committee Chair Into a Stalwart Ally
The crowning achievement of the school board’s performance monitoring committee during its first year of operation was a complete overhaul of the quarterly financial report to the board, which was unveiled at the fourth meeting of the new fiscal year. …
Joining the International CEO Profession
The following article is excerpted from Chapter Four of Doug Eadie’s forthcoming book, Building a High-Impact Board-Superintendent Partnership: 13 Critical Questions You Need to Answer (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).
In my travels around the country, I see growing recognition that …
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