It's Already December
The importance of long-term thinking in school district governance
I could write multiple posts about the board’s May 28 work session. The planned deficit spending of approximately one-quarter of the district’s savings in one year. Nearly $2 billion of needed capital improvements over the next decade or two. Consultants asking for $6 million to overhaul the district. However, I want to do more than just write a play-by-play of who said what or when things are happening. My goal with these posts is to wrap the board’s current discussion and decisions into a larger explanation of how school boards function and the importance of seemingly small details.
(If you’re just getting started here you may want to read my posts about Sunshine Law and transparency, basics of school board meetings, and the consent agenda.)
The policies and fiscal decisions made by school boards are every bit as important as those made by our other elected officials, yet, collectively, we’re less likely to understand how school boards operate. The challenge for me then is to identify what aspects of a current meeting represent something larger than just that evening’s agenda. The topics I mentioned earlier are important in their own right, and ideally I’ll return to them in a future post, but for now I’d like to focus on the importance of long-term thinking and coordination in school district governance.
Decisions in a school district are typically made far in advance. Contracts for a new school year are frequently signed by March. Planning for summer school begins by late winter. Major contracts like transportation and food service often span several years to allow the district to negotiate the best price and to provide stable, efficient delivery of services. Each of these decisions, plans, and contracts operates on its own timeline and requires its own funding and personnel. The district’s overall success, therefore, depends not just on the performance of these individual choices but in the combination of their implementation.
This requires school district leaders to be almost clairvoyant, thinking and planning months ahead of time to anticipate how all of the decisions overlap and blend together. To function well, school board and district leadership should always be planning and thinking at least six months ahead. Some ways to demonstrate this foresight include:
writing drafts of board meeting and work session agendas three- to six-months at a time to ensure all departments have an opportunity to present their programs and initiatives allowing the board to have oversight and confidence in the implementation of the strategic plan
identifying the expiration of major contracts with enough time to follow the district’s procurement process to start the next contract cycle and provide a smooth transition from one vendor to the next
succession planning for the retirement or departure of key administrators, including the hiring and onboarding of their replacements
School board meetings tell a story over time. As observers, we should be able to review meeting agendas and supplemental documents to see a coherent account of the planning that has taken place. The topics included on the agenda tell us what leadership deems important and where they devote their time tells us what they prioritize. Presentations should reference those from prior meetings and prepare us for those that will follow in future months. These connections reveal the governance team’s awareness that decisions can’t be made in isolation and their understanding that topics rarely fit into well-defined categories. Ultimately, everything ties back to the district’s strategic plan and the superintendent’s annual goals so that the district makes measurable progress in the areas the school board has designated as priorities.
Over the past several months, the board meetings and work sessions have been dominated by consultants and technical experts, many of whom were identified in the Return on Investment presentation at February 13 meeting.
Here are some highlights for each month of 2024:
January - Listen and Learn update (Education Northwest)
February - construction (Navigate, Trane, Ameresco)
March - procurement (Wright Associates)
April - strategic planning (Insight Education)
May - performance management (EduSolve), operations (4MATIV - transportation, Navigate - construction), facilities assessment (Cordogan Clark, no presentation available yet) and system rebuild (Wright Associates, no presentation available yet)
School districts must learn and adapt to new circumstances. Change is necessary for a healthy organization and should be expected during a leadership transition. And that may mean sometimes utilizing the expertise of outside consultants. However, the governance team has a responsibility to students, families, and taxpayers which cannot be delegated or outsourced to others. The governance team must always hold the ultimate decision-making authority: the superintendent brings recommendations based on her own expertise to the school board and each member casts a vote.
Long-term, strategic thinking requires so much more than hiring consultants. District leaders must recognize the interconnectedness of ideas and initiatives.
Take, for example, the recent presentations by 4MATIV (transportation), Navigate (construction management), and Cordogan Clark (facilities master planning). Each of these companies are working on separate aspects of a much larger underlying issue — SLPS has far too many school buildings for the number of students who are currently enrolled. While there was an occasional hint to need to “make hard decisions,” none of these presentations clearly articulated the underlying problem. Instead, 4MATIV is working on bus system efficiency, Navigate is allocating scarce facilities dollars to make slight improvements to too many buildings, and Cordogan Clark is calculating the astronomical cost to repair and possibly replace the existing buildings. Each of these companies are working on a different timeline, basing recommendations on different data sets, and producing different deliverables. I know that there is always far more happening behind-the-scenes than what makes it out to the public in a board meeting. I also know that the health of our school district will not improve by treating these problems in isolation. Significant time must be spent weaving together the ideas, information, and data of these projects (and others!) into one cohesive plan that encompasses the entire district. The governance team must prioritize the development of that unified plan and the public must be kept informed at every stage of the process.
Earlier I told you that school district leaders must always be thinking at least six months ahead. So, let’s consider the following scenario.
It’s December 2024. It’s the end of the first semester of a school year when many things are new. There are multiple new transportation vendors whose contracts total $40 million, a substantial difference from the single vendor and $26 million the year before. The new food vendor is operating on a one-year contract. We’re halfway through the first school year in more than a decade without a balanced budget. Nearly all of the members of the Superintendent’s cabinet are new, many of them hired in May and have no upper-level school district administrative experience. Cordogan Clark is only months away from releasing their facilities master plan which may identify which schools to close or where to build new ones.
Filing for school board candidates is about to open for the April 2025 election. Three school board seats (currently held by Toni, Matt, and Natalie) are up for election. For the past three years Toni and Matt have held the offices of President and Vice-President. Natalie is the second longest serving board member. The mayor and half of the board of aldermen are also up for re-election.
This whole post is about the importance of long-term thinking. This scenario prompts me to ask: Is the district doing enough long-term thinking right now to create a strategic plan that not only protects the district against the stress fractures of change but also provides a clear vision of where we are headed?
By December 2024 we will know the answer.