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May 4, 2007
The price of professional developmentIt's inevitable. Following NSBA's Annual Conference, some hometown press find the cost for attendance and spin it so that it looks as if school board members are frivolously frittering away taxpayer money. But if the press were to look deeper, or even ask the school board members who attend the conference, they would find that the cost for the conference is more than covered by the tremendous professional development opportunity provided.
BoardBuzz was delighted to see one newspaper do just that, and a well educated board and superintendent who acknowledged the costs, but emphasized the incredible positives of conference attendance. Casa Grande Valley (Arizona) Newspapers printed this story about its local school board's trip.
And we were really impressed with the interim superintendent and school board members responses in the article:
Dr. Gary Nine, interim superintendent of the Florence Unified School District thinks so. He, and three members of the school board, attended the annual National School Boards Association Conference, held April 14-17 in San Francisco."If your budget for the coming school year is $30 million and if you spend $6,000 or $7,000 every two or three years and it benefits the decision making of the district and makes you more stable as a district, that's money well spent," Nine explained.
Additionally:
"If it helps insure the long-term success of the district, it's a very cheap price to pay," Nine said. "I just want the board to know from the time I came here, we need to build trust. And the board has to earn trust back from the parents of the kids in the district and the community."If you're not improving, you're getting behind. You always have to be striving to improve things," he added. "And you want to build long-term success for your district. How you do what you do is just as important as what you do sometimes. The community needs to hear that. Not just from me or the state. Then after a while, they'll think, 'Hmm, they're all saying the same thing.' You build trust that way.
And:
Nine pointed out that one of the benefits for the newer board members is a program offered by the NSBA called the "board member boot camp.""That's an introduction for them and it includes sessions on school board-superintendent relationships," Nine said. "There's all kinds of information available that are good, like workshops on public relations.
"Basically for the board members, they become aware of the activities that are available nationally," he continued. "Ideally, we take that information, put it together, and between the end of the school year and the beginning of the next year, we'll go over it. But right now, that's not going to happen, because there's just not enough time before school is out.
"But we will have a retreat in our downtown board room and discuss what was brought up at that meeting and how it will help us over the long term."
And that's exactly what school boards and superintendents should do, together following the conference. Bravo Dr. Fine! The article also gets some good information from NSBA's Tips For Sharing Your Conference Experience With Your Community. It's great to see when the media "gets it" and actually shares it with the community. Bravo!
Posted May 4, 2007 3:53 PM | School Boards
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