Class Act: Survey helps governance team measure up 

You never know when a great idea might bubble to the surface of your mind the way a spring gurgles up from underground and gives rise to a creek. Terry Wenig can attest to that fact.

A few years ago, Wenig attended the California School Boards Association’s Masters in Governance series with other members of the governance team. As superintendent at Buckeye Union School District in the Northern Sierra foothills town of Shingle Springs, she and the others went to learn about the attributes that effective individual trustees and governing boards need, as well as the specific jobs a school board performs in its governance role. They were thinking about the critical role a board plays in governing competently on behalf of its students, pondering the needs of administrators and teachers, and discussing the importance of raising awareness among the public and media about the pressing issues of public education.

That’s when The Idea hit.

“If we’re going to have standards that we expect students and teachers to meet,” Wenig says she told her associates, “then we probably need to model going through some sort of process of looking at how we’re doing” as a school board.

Wenig and her colleagues decided to turn CSBA’s Professional Governance Standards for school boards—which encompass roles for individual board members, the board itself, and the board’s responsibilities—into a survey format for the superintendent and all board members to respond to on an anonymous basis. Afterward, the survey results and individual comments were to be tallied and compiled by an evaluator who would then review the results with those surveyed.

Eventually, Superintendent Vicki Barber of the El Dorado County Office of Education, with the help of her staff, performed the evaluation and reviewed the results with the Buckeye superintendent and her board.

“The goal was to have the governance team complete a self-assessment of how they were doing against the criteria of the governance standards,” Barber says. “The results were used as a catalyst for discussion and to set future goals for areas to address. The process turned out to be extremely effective and allowed for productive conversations in a low-risk environment.”

“We wanted to determine if we were functioning effectively as a unit,” Wenig says. “I learned a lot about perceptions and misperceptions from the process.”

In learning about and responding to the governance standards and the survey, new board members who might not yet clearly understand their role sharpened their knowledge quickly. Board members who might be skidding slightly out of their governance role and into areas that fit the job description of a superintendent or an administrator were redirected toward their own responsibilities.

Brenda Hanson-Smith, a 15-year Buckeye board member and current board president, has a firm grasp of the issues at hand.

“Our board is a group of ethical, moral people,” Hanson-Smith says. “And we know our hands need to be clean at all times. This process has enabled us to be reflective, and there is usually precious little time to be reflective as a board.”

The Buckeye board prides itself on its ability to reach a consensus on most matters.

“Our board really, truly works toward a consensus model,” Wenig says. “If that model breaks down in any way, I’ve had the board president say, ‘When we do our self-evaluation, we need to talk about this situation.’ ”

“We try not to get into that ‘win-lose’ approach,” Hanson-Smith adds. “It’s not about compromise; it’s about consensus.”

Buckeye performs the self-evaluation survey annually and values the insights it gains from the resulting discussions.

“We have a good, strong relationship as a team,” Wenig says. “This process just enhances it. If it’s used respectfully and carefully, the way that it’s intended, it gives us an opportunity for things to percolate and come out as a positive in other ways.”

The review process has allowed the school board to build a foundation for dealing with issues such as how, when and where to spend money, how to better communicate with each other, and how to keep its priorities straight, Hanson-Smith says.

“Our focus is always the children—what is best for the children. This is a board that doesn’t forget that our entire purpose for being elected is to see that about 5,000 students who move through our school district are ready to achieve and succeed in the 21st century.

“We ask ourselves, ‘What do we value and support in public education? How should we behave publicly?’ Some boards run amok,” she adds. “That would be totally unacceptable behavior on our board. We believe in professional courtesy.

“And we’ve learned to be patient; we’ve learned not to micromanage. The process certainly enables us to take responsibility. If you’re accountable, you’re responsible. They just kind of go hand-in-glove, don’t you think?”

—Marsha Boutelle

Toolkit
WHO El Dorado County Office of Education/Buckeye Union School District

WHAT: School board self-governance

WHEN: Annually since 2007-08 school year

WHERE: El Dorado County

WHY: Use CSBA’s Professional Governance Standards as a model to improve efficiency and communication

HOW: Turn the governance standards into survey questions that the superintendent and board members answer about themselves as individual trustees and as a board

MORE: CSBA Governance Services