With all the social, financial and academic challenges facing schools today, the potential for strain between the board of education and the superintendent is heightened, meaning a good board president/superintendent partnership can do more to determine the effective governance of schools than perhaps any other single factor. Trust is the…

Should a superintendent become involved in the recruitment of new school board members? Because of the importance of who serves on the school board and their individual and collective motives, does the superintendent leave the recruitment and selection of new board members to chance or does he or she become involved in recruiting? This is a…

Board meetings are the time and place where school boards act. In fact, only when coming together as a body in a legal meeting do school board members become a board. Effective board meetings are the first prerequisite for an effective board. Furthermore, what parents and voters see at board meetings determines largely what they think about their…

Describes the growing trend of conflicts between school boards and superintendents, some of the various causes behind these conflicts, and practical steps board members and superintendents can take to avoid and to solve them. (IW)

Discusses questions a superintendent should review with the school board and school attorney to define the attorney's role and ensure maximum understanding. Superintendents should consider whether they are comfortable asking for timely assistance, which school leaders are authorized to contact the school attorney, and how legal advice is…

Retired superintendents have the potential to be the best and the worst board members. Although some board members value a former superintendent's background and perspective, many think that retiring superintendents should go right out the door and not look back. Former teachers and superintendents serving on boards often have difficulty shifting…

Georgia superintendent describes the process and benefits of his district becoming a charter-school district. (PKP)

Provides advice to a superintendency candidate based on personal experience on what to do and what to look for before accepting the position. (PKP)

One critical element to maintaining a close, productive and enduring partnership with the governing board is a well-designed and executed process for board evaluation of the superintendent's performance. For the board's evaluation to be a powerful partnership-building tool, it must be based on two sets of performance targets. The two basic steps…

In this article, the author discusses how superintendents function in an environment of nearly continuous turbulence challenged by concerns and pressures that compete for their attention and resolution. The turbulence is inescapable. Today it constitutes the natural--but not the exceptional--environment of school board politics, local…

In her 27 years as an administrator in Merrimack, New Hampshire, Marge Chiafery can legitimately claim to have seen the best of times and the worst. The high moments were the earlier years when Merrimack's job-sharing initiative, teacher evaluation system and middle school project promoting parent-child communication were emulated statewide. The…

In this article, the author, superintendent of the Nixa R-II School District, Nixa, Missouri, describes what it is like to work with a board of education that has been named the Outstanding School Board of the Year in its state twice since 2000? He feels that the keys to the strong superintendent-board relationship are effective communication and…

The author's advice for for a school board superintendent is to assume incompetence instead of malevolence. Board members who behave inappropriately are a minority, and those with malicious intent are extremely rare. Most misbehaving board members act out of frustration. They may not understand the appropriate role of a board member.…

Describes three lessons school districts have learned about the use of small groups to provide feedback from parents and other community members on major decisions involving education policy and practice: Encourage truly broad-based, large-scale participation; provide structure for small-group discussions; and ask participants to take action, not…

Assistant executive director of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association argues that local school districts, not the state legislature, should develop policies to allow home-schooled students to participate in extracurricular activities. (PKP)