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Health & Fitness

Inside Public Educaton: School Board Basics

School boards are much more important than most people realize.

So far in this blog, we’ve dealt primarily with the everyday world of a teacher, with only secondary references to the bureaucracy controlling that world.  But it’s important to understand the governing bodies, from department administrators to the U.S. Congress, and their impact on public education.  Arguably the most important and least understood of those agencies is the local school board.  For the next several entries, we’ll be analyzing just what a school board is, the wrong kinds of people who wind up on them, and ways that communities can make sure that their school boards are acting in the best interests of those they claim to represent. 

Imagine a job where you were supposed to be an expert on educational law, school finance, federal and state mandates, public relations, political campaigns, hiring hundreds of employees, new construction, negotiating with unions, major building renovation, property tax levies and health insurance (to name a few of the more important needed areas of expertise).  Then imagine that you take on all that with the whopping salary of…nothing.  On top of everything else, this job is only for volunteers.  In a nutshell, that’s what we ask of our school board members here in Illinois. 

The way it works:  Every school district has an elected board composed of seven members, the better to avoid ties on important votes.  Each board member is elected to a four-year term, and elections take place every two years:  three board positions one election and the other four the next.  As far as I know, we don’t have any term limits (we certainly don’t in Hinsdale Township High School District #86), so a board member can be elected to four-year term after four-year term if he wants—but not too many go that route. 

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Once a new three- or four-sevenths of the school board is elected every other April, those seven elect their own officers:  president, vice-president and secretary.  After that, they will have monthly or bi-monthly meetings to do all that work listed in the second paragraph.  There can be sub-committees that include only three or four members to deal with various specialties (finance and facilities are two of the more common); and once every few years, several board members might be lucky enough to meet regularly for anywhere from three to six months with people like me to negotiate the next teachers’ contract. 

These seven people directly control a huge budget:  For my two-high-school district, tax revenues were about $90 million in 2010-11.  (If you like being overwhelmed by numbers, see the 2011 Annual Financial Report of Hinsdale District #86.  It’s only 140 pages; my $90 million revenue statistic can be found on page 112, next to the annual revenues for the past 10 years.)  These are also the seven individuals who make the decision that the school district isn’t getting enough money or that major building projects necessitate increased revenues, both of which can lead to a referendum during a general election which, if approved, can lead to increases of hundreds or even thousands of dollars annually on homeowners’ property tax bills. 

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In recent years, school boards have been able to levy bonds to increase revenues as well, and these increases do NOT have to be approved through a referendum, but simply through a majority vote by the board.  This Monday, Jan. 23, for example, District #86 was considering in order to do various building renovations, including air conditioning. 

The board hires and fires the superintendent as well as every other position in the school district—an hourly wage summer employee has to be approved by the board before he can start collecting his $8.25 an hour.  Textbooks, computers, paper and red pens cannot be purchased unless the school board approves the expenditure; and the board can call an administrator to task at a public meeting for any dollar misspent. 

Those public meetings give each board member a forum for holding forth on any issue he or she wishes.  Reporters from the local websites (like Patch)  and newspapers cover all the meetings and are always looking for some hot topic to feature.  So a controversial issue generates lots of quotes from board members, who then get to see their names regularly in the paper or online.  The superintendent will prepare a huge folder of important papers for the monthly board meetings that will contain all kinds of sensitive and important information that nobody else at the meeting gets to see.  Board members get to make speeches at graduation ceremonies and are always introduced at large gatherings at the schools (open house, graduations and homecoming football games). 

When they wish, they are given VIP tours of the schools by a slavish principal who will escort them personally around the building, where politically astute teachers will make a huge point of thanking them for all their hard work on the schools’ behalf.  And if they’re lucky enough, they’ll get to put on a hard hat and pose with a shovel as construction is begun and cut a ribbon in front of the shiny new facility when it is finished, much to the delight of local media photographers.

Board members can also choose to involve themselves more directly in the running of the schools, beyond their role as overseers.  Special education, inclusion, tax rates and book lists are all topics I have witnessed board members “involve” themselves with over the years; and there’s really no limit to the areas in which they can choose to tinker.  Class size, “stature” of the colleges attended by teaching candidates and specific coaches/sponsors/sports/clubs that had been brought to their attention for negative reasons are a few more examples of things board members have chosen to influence during my teaching career. 

Oh, and who should repair football helmets, how much outside organizations that use our buildings charge for the hot dogs they sell, and if a teaching candidate who got a C in her major should be eliminated from employment consideration have also been discussed at length at various times by various school boards I have known.  From a refusing to capitulate to a voraciously ravenous teachers’ union and precipitating a strike to selecting the perfect shade of off-white for the district’s stationery, there is no issue too big or too small for a school board’s attention. 

You’re probably starting to see the obstacles that hinder the best people from becoming school board members.  On the one hand, the dilemmas confronting schools are formidable enough to give any thinking person pause:  Can one person ever be expected to have the knowledge to understand all these diverse, complicated topics, not to mention coming to decisions on how they should be handled, decisions which can cost taxpayers millions?  Who has the time to spend learning about all these things, to study the dozens and dozens of pages of information that will be generated by the superintendent for each monthly meeting, to contemplate the complexities of the various alternatives proposed for addressing each situation, to present cogent arguments in a public forum that will convince other board members of the rightness of one’s position, and then somehow to maintain an oversight role to make sure that the intent of the decisions made isn’t subverted or altered by the insanely difficult to control school bureaucracy?  And after all that hard work and dedication, a new majority on the board in the next election can sweep away all your efforts with a single meeting and 4-3 vote. 

If I am a quiet, thoughtful, concerned, intelligent, ethical, busy community member, I’m going to have a hard time committing to an organization as complex, rambunctious and time-consuming as a school board.

So who does wind up on all the school boards?  Amazingly enough, we do get our fair share of reasonable, committed, supportive individuals who do their best to act as guardians of the public’s stake in educating its children.  Unfortunately, these hardy souls are typically outnumbered by those who have less pure motives.  I can only comment on the school boards with which I have worked over the past three decades in two different school districts, not an especially comprehensive sample, I agree; but from what I’ve heard and read, my experience is not unusual.  In the next several articles, we’ll go over the types of board members who are bad for school districts—the special interest activist, the super teacher from another district, and the financial reactionary.  As we will see, our schools should not be entrusted to people like these. 

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