School Board, Now Hiring!
Seeking an eager, open minded, volunteer-oriented policy-loving human (to work for free)
Part of my current job is hiring people. This last year I learned hiring people is a tricky thing. You need to balance the applicant’s skills, personality and goals with the expected role and team you are hiring them into. Bla bla bla, but why am I writing about this on a school board site? Because…
Earlier this week I attended an IASB workshop on “understanding your role and what you can accomplish is essential to achieving good governance and leadership at the board table”. As part of this process we had to draft a job description, as if we were hiring a school board member.
… But you might say “they are elected officials”
... so, whatever semantics, the “hiring process” is different, but the expectations are still there. And the ideal candidate should be prepared to meet the following set of qualifications.
Required Qualifications
You must be 18 years old, live inside the district and be a registered voter.
Salary and Benefits
$0 annually. (yep, that is a zero.)
Expect to work 1–8 hours per week, mostly in the evening, and receive no monetary compensation. But…
You will receive the amazing feeling of knowing you are contributing to the following generations’ education and success. You should feel the joy of partnering with administration, teachers and parents to raise thoughtful and character rich young people.
(You will also be called horrible names, but that isn’t really a benefit. But definitely journal all of these things, it’s something to giggle about when writing on your website.)
Necessary Skills
Love children. Love families. Love and practice life-long learning.
You should understand a school’s greatest asset is the collaboration of fantastic teachers and invested families.
You must be open minded, able to critically reason through complex issues of budget, policies and community dynamics.
You should be a good communicator willing to patiently explain how school finances work, why your role isn’t to influence the playground’s color and uncomfortably explain why the board might go into closed sessions.
Holistically think about children’s development in the classroom and through extra-curricular activities.
Focused on the future, partnering with the administrative team and superintendent to create a vision and priorities for the district.
Make consensus-based decisions with the other four people on the board. And sometimes the community will be confused and you’ll need to use your great communication skills to untangle things.
Be patient, there are many opinions in an underfunded district of 1,300 beautiful kids, 5,000 engaged patrons and hundreds of wonderful employees.
Understand the difference between governance and management.
Roles and Functions
Review and approve the board policy, this informs how the school is run and why. You sort of need to be a policy wonk. (It is a fascinating process.)
Approve Bills and oversee the long term budget.
Evaluate the superintendent, annually, according to the six standards.
Partner with the administrative team and superintendent to create goals and priorities for the district.
Hold the superintendent and administrative team accountable for progress along the annual goals.
Participate on one or more of our district’s committees. Here are a few of them: SIAC (School Improvement Advisory Committee), Communication Committee and Long range planning. Of course there are more, there are endless ways for you to partner with the teachers and administrators to responsibly run our schools.
Whoa, you made it down here! So how does this sound? Are you interested in applying?
We are hiring in the fall of 2018.
