Workshop: How to Strategically Construct & Conduct a Board Meeting to Instill Confidence, Maintain Decorum & Ensure Optimal Productivity  (aka Don’t Make the Board Room Your Battle Zone)

Constructing Board meeting agendas can be challenging: ensuring balance, transparency, and student-centeredness, while allowing for staff information, public input, Board discussion, deliberation and decision-making. It is important that Board members conduct their important business in public, yet it is not actually the public’s meeting. Trustees must adhere to the Brown Act guidelines  and also have an obligation to be responsive to their commmunity and constituents.    Boards are faced with major decisions relative to fiscal solvency, curriculum, compliance, campus safety, policy, human resources, maintaining and building facilities, student discipline and legal matters. It is challenging to ensure respectful interaction and decorum in the Board room particularly during matters of controversy.  Yet it is imperative that the Board’s business be accomplished in public and that the tenor and tone of the meetings do justice to the true gravity of the weighty decisions being made.  This workshop will draw upon a veteran Superintendent’s experience to provide replicable proven practices relative to designing the agenda, managing public comment, structuring staff presentations, board deliberation and action, and tips and tactics to deal with challenges that arise to ensure board meetings are productive, operating in a manner that reflects the seriousness of and duties, while always highlighting and accentuating the positive.