Rep. Davisson has introduced HB 1126 mandating training of school board members. It requires the Department of Education to develop or compile a school board training course in conjunction with the Department of Local Government Finance and the Indiana Education Employment Relations Board (IEERB). The course is required to cover legal and financial issues that affect schools, personnel issues including teacher licensing and collective bargaining, student discipline issues, “how to access academic and financial information related to school corporations that is maintained by the department,” and sources of funding available to school corporations.
I will not dispute that new school board members could use training on these issues. When I joined our local school board, my background made me a bit of a freak – legislative junkie & legal adviser to municipal government. But even with that background I had some pretty significant blind spots – I had no idea that IEERB was even a thing. As a practical matter, my primary concern is what this training will look like and what sorts of biases will be built in. My experience with state government is that usually the front line people who would compile this sort of training aren’t going to get ideological. If anything, they’ll err on the side of quoting Indiana Code cites and the like without providing the kind of simplified narrative that – while helpful to understanding – also lends itself to more editorializing. But, education policy has been so hotly contested over the last 10 – 20 years that I’m reflexively skeptical of just about any education proposal. This one might be o.k.
As a legal matter, I think this legislation does have a significant omission: it does not say what happens to the school board members if they don’t complete the training. It doesn’t say whether they’re off the board, whether they’re unable to vote, whether measures that pass with their vote are void, or what the consequence of not taking the training might be. This was an occasional source of frustration when I was drafting legislation – sometimes it was tough to get policymakers to commit to an enforcement mechanism.
As someone who has worked with school boards for a while, this has good and bad points. Frankly, I have worked with a number of school board members who are there with a hyper-specific agenda (usually hiring and firing a sports coach) and don’t give 2 craps about anything else.
If the local school administration isn’t already doing some of this, then they are not doing a good job engaging their members.
I was told of a situation where a school board member’s single issue was changing the school football uniforms. Once that was done, so was he.
Yep.
I dealt with a board member (who oddly enough wore a “My Man Mitch” t-shirt to every meeting) who was pro-school consolidation and streamlining EXCEPT he joined the board to forestall the closure of a small, inefficient elementary building until his kids got through grade 5. As soon as his second kid was done, he pushed the rest of the board to close the school.
There was a similar situation in my consolidated district. The old high schools still served as elementary schools. The district announced it would build one consolidated elementary school. He ran for the school board on the position that the old high schools remain open as elementary schools. He was defeated in the school board election, however.
I’ve seen a number of Indiana and Illinois school board members who, unfortunately, won on some agenda. Once they won they walked around like some mythical tyrant until they had a long discussion with an attorney in the state capital, after which they returned chastened and much more humble–a true Damascus experience. They hadn’t realized that a school board member cannot do something positive alone, but he/she can really foul things up, for the school district and for one’s self. There was a time when school board members ran to pay forward and return what they owed to the area, and the number of single-agenda and partisan folks were in the minority. I suspect that’s changed somewhat (more in some areas), and many members need to be educated and chastened.
I assume the school board has total control (as long as they get a majority of votes) of school policy, and how the school spends the corporations money. I had a school board member tell me they only look at contracts that were over a million. dollars, Twenty five thousand a year and they can’t take time to understand what goes on in the school district, I find it humerus that three of our school board members had never read the bi-laws an had no idea where to find them.
As for 1126 who will pay for training? How many board members are going beg off because they are to busy. If this bill passes I bet it will be watered do so badly we won’t be able recognize it.