VantagePoint: Delegates point the way to a stronger CSBA
By:
CSBA President Martha Fluor
Published: March 1, 2011
As always, CSBA’s Delegate Assembly worked long and hard at its meeting in San Francisco last December. The 270-plus delegates elected officers and members of the Board of Directors. They updated our Policy Platform and conferred with each other, their regional directors, the association’s officers and staff about the challenges confronting California’s public schools.
But these delegates went farther, and for that they deserve our special thanks. Coming off a year that had challenged CSBA in unprecedented ways, they took an in-depth look at the way the association itself operates, and how it can change with the times. In breakout groups facilitated by regional directors and staff, the delegates discussed the future of CSBA and the roles and responsibilities of the Delegate Assembly itself and, by implication, every member of every school board in the state.
I mean you!
After all, the delegates are exactly that: delegates. They’re people who were delegated by school board members in CSBA’s 21 regions to act on their behalf to position CSBA to address the challenges confronting California’s public schools: three years of disastrous state budget cuts, made worse by the end of federal stimulus dollars; government mandates, regulations and so-called reforms that hamstring local control over schools and budgets; and overcoming these and other obstacles in order to prepare every student for success in college or career.
Staff members boiled down notes from the delegates’ discussions into a manageable form for further consideration. First and foremost, a summary says, “Delegates would like to be more engaged in the work of CSBA, both to support the association’s goals at the local level and to fulfill their responsibilities as delegates during and between meetings.”
CSBA’s officers and Board of Directors share that desire. We discussed the delegates’ input at great length when we met in January. The upshot is that staff will continue to drill down, consulting delegates and parsing the results to help CSBA’s leadership plan, structure and facilitate our relations with the Delegate Assembly—your delegates, who represent you—as the entire organization continues its work. And we’ll continue to reach out for your guidance and counsel as we pursue our common goal: to ensure that CSBA remains the unparalleled statewide advocate for public education that it has developed into through the unstinting work of public servants like yourselves.
But we can’t do it without you. As I told the delegates in December, “We need to come together as the largest group of elected officials and insist that our students become the number one priority in this state.” CSBA will continue to look for ways to maximize your advocacy efforts at the local, state and federal levels.
We’re currently looking for members interested in serving on three policy task forces: parent choice, linked learning and teacher/administrator evaluation. Please join us! Let me know how we can help serve you better. You can contact me at mfluor@csba.org. You can contact your regional director and all of the officers under the About CSBA tab on www.csba.org.