The difference between school boards and nonprofit boards
“I’ve served on a nonprofit board, so I understand what it’s like to be on a school board.” — Everyone (especially funders)
In our conversations we often hear some iteration of the quote above. Folks who have served on a charter school board or a nonprofit board believe that serving on an elected school board must be similar. In reality, the experience is so dissimilar that the same word — Board — probably shouldn’t be used to describe them both.
So, we’d like to clear up some of the main differences between nonprofit boards and elected school boards and explain why serving on an elected board is so much more challenging.
Difference #1: Aligned mission… or not
On a non-profit board or charter school board, board members are recruited by the CEO/ED or other board members to join in a shared common mission. Typically, new board members are hand picked to join the board because they are aligned with the mission and vision of the non-profit and want to join the team to support it and help it grow. If a nonprofit board ends up with a board member who is not aligned or not supporting the nonprofit, they can remove that board member.
On an elected board, each board member is elected individually by the community, and they might not share a common vision with the Superintendent or other board members at all. In fact, they might be running on a platform to completely change the existing goals and priorities of the District. The fact that an elected school board is not recruited as a unified board in support of a common mission, but is instead made up of 7 (or 5 or 9) independently elected board members with their own vision, goals and priorities results in a dramatic difference in how the board operates. Needless to say, unaligned board members cannot be removed except by the public who elected them.
Imagine you are on a non-profit board and one day two new board members join the board who do not believe in the mission of the non-profit. In every conversation they push back on the direction the non-profit has been heading. They constantly question the leader that you all hired and that you support. They have different goals for the non-profit than the goals you joined the board to support. This is what it can be like after each election when a school board gets new board members who were elected by the community.
Difference #2: Open meeting laws and televised meetings
On a non-profit board, meetings occur in private. (Although charter school boards must comply with open meeting laws, in practice their board meetings are almost never attended by the public and are never live-streamed or televised.) On a non-profit board, any board member can talk with any other board in private about any issue any time. This allows board members to engage in potentially contentious conversations out of the public eye. In a non-profit board meeting, board members can wrestle with complex, nuanced issues in private and work through them without every word being televised or appearing in the news the following day.
On an elected board, every meeting is public, and typically recorded, live-streamed and/or televised. That means that every word a board member says in a meeting must be carefully thought about as it will live in perpetuity and sometimes end up in the news. Board members cannot meet in private to learn about a new issue or wrestle with a contentious topic in private before engaging in a public discussion. In addition, the combination of televised meetings and the fact that board members are elected officials means that some board members will use board meetings for political purposes.
Open meeting laws were passed for good reason (so that publicly elected officials have to make decisions in public) but they have significant unintended consequences.
Imagine for a moment the team you are on at work. Imagine that every single time you have a meeting as a team it is live-streamed to your entire company and customers. Imagine that you cannot have a difficult conversation with your boss or a colleague in private — it must be had in the public eye. Imagine that you can’t get together with your team impromptu — you must schedule every meeting at least 24 hours in advance and give anyone else in the company or any one of your customers the opportunity to attend the meeting. Imagine that as part of every team meeting, you must allow time at the beginning of the meeting for anyone else in your company or anyone in the public to comment publicly on how they think you’re doing or how they think you should change your priorities.
Imagine trying to build a strong, efficient and effective team in that scenario. That is what it is like to be on an elected school board.
Difference #3 — Politics
On a non-profit board, you are not a politician. You do not have to run a public campaign to get elected, and you do not have to worry about whether the decisions you make will get you re-elected once your term is up. You do not have to raise money to be elected to a non-profit board, so you are not beholden to donors in any way. You do not have to get endorsements, so you don’t have to worry about whether your future decisions are aligned with those endorsements. You are not associated with a political party, so you don’t have to worry about whether your decision is aligned with your political party’s platform. When you say something at a board meeting, you don’t have to worry about whether it will end up in a campaign commercial or on a postcard during your next election.
On an elected school board, unfortunately everything is political, even if you wish it wasn’t. You are expected to vote the way your donors and endorsers want you to vote, or you risk losing their support in your next election. You are expected to choose a side — typically unions vs. charters or woke vs. conservative family values — and if you break from that side you risk losing your base. Everything you say as an elected official has larger ramifications than a lay person; your words can echo through social media and mainstream media and follow you forever.
Difference #4 — Budget size
The average nonprofit has a budget of less than $500,000 per year. In fact, 97% of nonprofits have budgets of less than $5 million annually, 92% operate with less than $1 million a year, and 88% spend less than $500,000 annually for their work. On a non-profit board, you are likely managing a reasonably sized budget of privately donated money.
Many urban school boards manage budgets of $500 million to more than $1 billion dollars. Plus, those dollars are taxpayer dollars, so the stakes are high to manage them responsibly. (Charter school boards also have to manage public taxpayer dollars.) Most elected school board members do not come into the role having managed a billion dollar budget, nor a budget with dozens of public revenue streams, restricted uses and odd accounting requirements. Because the budget is so large and so complex, it is easy for the district CFO to control budget conversations with opaque financial language and make school board members without a financial background feel like they shouldn’t be intruding on the budget conversation even though they’ve been elected by the public to hold the district accountable for spending money wisely.
Conclusion
These are just a few of the many differences between nonprofit boards and elected school boards. Don’t feel bad, before we were elected we thought being on an elected school board would be similar to being on a non-profit board as well. Once elected, we realized just how different and difficult it is, which is why we created School Board Partners.
The good news is that elected school board leadership, although difficult and complex, isn’t rocket science — and it isn’t hopeless. By electing diverse and representative school board members, utilizing a governance framework, and investing in the training, mentorship and support of school board members, school boards can be effective and student-focused.
To learn more, read our report Empty Seats at Powerful Tables: The State of School Boards in America and check out our School Board governance model and toolkit: Empowered Governance.
Carrie Douglass and Ethan Ashley are the co-Founders and co-CEOs of School Board Partners, a national nonprofit with the mission to train, support and re-elect diverse school board members to lead with courage, competence and impact.
