The American school board is on trial. The most common accusations are that school boards are irrelevant, unresponsive, provincial, and therefore obsolete. School boards will not meet this challenge if they continue to tolerate certain common obstacles to effective policy-making. New horizons can be reached if boards and their administrators can master and implement the arts and skills of responsible and responsive policy-making. Up-to-date and responsive written policies provide tangible evidence that school boards can indeed govern. Written policies are the chief means by which the school board governs the schools; administrative rules are one of the means by which the superintendent implements the boards policies. A project to codify and update school board policies is much like cleaning the attic. Once the attic is clean, the board and administrator can finally see what is there. However, codifying policies is a time-consuming service that should not be performed by the board itself. The board should operate at the decision-making level, not at the service level of policy manual preparation. (Author/JG)