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July 20, 2004

Bringing value home from conferences

As BoardBuzz has noted before, school board members and administrators sometimes take heat for attending training or conferences, including NSBA's own. Today we thought it worth sharing how one such instance turned out well for one community. As we said before, we need to acknowledge the obvious here: that we believe strongly in our services and have an interest in public confidence in them.

The Rockingham News reports that Stephen Sloan and Ann Caron of the Raymond, N.H. school board won over skeptics in a two-hour presentation detailing their experiences at NSBA's 2004 Annual Conference in Orlando. Some residents and board members had criticized the $3,080 cost of the trip at a time when the board's budget was overspent, and the two gave up their $750 stipend in March to cover the airfare and hotel.

In their presentation, Sloan and Caron related innovations from other districts that they had learned about, including approaches to collaboration and budget cutbacks, participation in the free and reduced lunch program, drug prevention strategies, and architectural and technological innovations. Every board member received an information packet on the conference and used it while creating school board goals.

Some say the trip may end up saving the district money, and former budget committee chairman Peter Buckingham, an early critic, said after the presentation that the trip seemed like a worthwhile experience. Ann Holt, another member of the board who "furiously took notes" throughout the presentation, summed it up thus: "The whole point was to brainstorm with other school boards facing the same problems we are, so we can pick and choose what we like and to look at the world outside of Raymond."

Exactly. In another story, the Hazleton Area School Board in Pennsylvania has launched an aggressive initiative to improve reading scores, as a result of a successful Allegan County, Michigan program that board member Elaine Curry learned about at NSBA's Annual Conference. She shared her findings with the board's secondary and elementary education committee, which acted on the information. Hazleton's new initiative, dubbed "Ready, Set, Read," will focus administrators and teachers intensely on reading, with a new reading textbook series, expanded reading lists, and updated school library collections. Superintendent Frank Victor says the new approach will help his district meet No Child Left Behind mandates.

These stories highlight a couple of realities for school board members. First, with school budgets strapped, constituents understandably will want to know that there is real value to conferences and training. The dollar amounts may be relatively trivial, but they have symbolic importance. Second, quality programs offer this value in abundance to school leaders—value that constituents can see and appreciate once it's explained. Local governance works best when local leaders stay connected and share news, innovations, and advocacy efforts with their counterparts across the country.

For information on NSBA's 2005 Annual Conference in San Diego, click here.

Posted July 20, 2004 12:00 AM