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Illinois School Board Journal
November-December 2000

Behind the scenes
IASB embarks on new era of school board member training

by Linda Dawson

Linda Dawson is IASB director of editorial services and Journal editor.

Even without a gavel, Jean Mitchell, president of Unified School Board, is definitely in charge as she leads her board through agenda items with Dr. William Crestland, superintendent, seated just to her right.

"The next item on our agenda is a report by Dr. Crestland on the status of the proposed after-school ..."

Does this sound like a staged, scripted school board meeting? Just what is happening in the boardroom at Lyons Township High School District 204 in LaGrange?

"What's happening" is the production phase for a training video being produced by the Illinois Association of School Boards. The video, which will depict eight different situations a school board could encounter, will be used as an integral part of the association's new board member curriculum.

Joan Isenberg, now-retired IASB field services director, is pleased with the day's taping so far. She has made some minor adjustments in the script, including asking one board member not to stress the "our" too much in one of his speeches and deleting a line when it was deemed a possible conflict with the way closed sessions are ended.

Following a carry-in lunch in the boardroom, as the actors and technicians relax, Joan shares the dream she has had for a number of years and how anxious she is to see the final product.

"Over the years, a lot of material has come out that's useful, but only because there was nothing else," Isenberg says of training videos and materials currently available. In addition to not adequately focusing on effective governance, earlier videos often portrayed school board members as over-the-top caricatures.

"There was nothing for the kind of governance we've moved into."

After implementing revisions in the new board member workshop curriculum two years ago, it became apparent that these training sessions would benefit from development of a training video based on the IASB's Foundational Principles of Effective Governance, according to Cathy A. Talbert, IASB director of policy services.

To make the material more relevant, IASB staff considered demographics for a representative five-member board governing in 2040.

"We wanted this to look and sound like a real board," Talbert said. The model school board consists of two women and three men, with age demographics that span almost 30 years and include representation by African American, Asian and Hispanic sectors of the community as well as Caucasians.

Click here to meet the Unified School District Board of Education

Even though the majority of school districts in Illinois have seven-member boards, a five-member board with a superintendent was chosen to allow the video marketability in other states that have adopted similar governance principles.

Once board demographics were established, short biographies were created for the cast, including their number of children, place in school, business life, length of service and community affiliations. Listening to them talk back and forth at the "meeting," the actors brought the sketchy personalities to life in very believable conversation. Easily discernable were the inquisitive newcomers and the long-time board member. But the tone of conversation came after much work and input on the script.

Creating the dialogue was one of the trickier parts of preparation. For assistance, the IASB staff turned to current and former school board members and staged a mock board meeting, providing the situations and asking the volunteers to improvise. The "improv" sessions were taped twice and transcripts were created from those audiotapes.

The IASB then contracted with Brella Productions in Evanston for the video, which took the drafts to a professional scriptwriter. Proposed scripts volleyed between the writers and IASB "editors" to come up with the most natural sounding dialogue to convey the principles portrayed by each vignette.

To cast the video, producer Bernadette Burke drew from an actor's cooperative, Talent Group, to find just the right faces to fit the demographics and biographies. The actors all are "really fantastic people with a solid experience base," according to Burke.

The IASB received headshots of a variety of actors to find the "look" they wanted to achieve for each board member. Those actors were called in to read for the parts, and IASB staff listened to audiotapes of each to make their selection.

"We found some right away," Talbert said, "and went back for more audio tapes on others."

Once the cast was selected, attention returned to the script, which was read for rehearsal before informal cameras and minor adjustments were made. Staff also used the script and the informal video to develop the curriculum's accompanying workbook content.

Talbert and Isenberg both stressed the importance of portraying the fictional school board as believable, realistic people. The eight vignettes, each portrayed twice, will depict the board operating in the absence of a governance principle and then as rewritten to show the board in the same situation but "living" the principle.

The situations are not portrayed as outlandish and none of the characters will appear to be "the rascal" throughout the video. The situations concern everyday matters that any board in any state might encounter, including music programs, computers, superintendent evaluations and dealing with parents and the media.

In her 21 years of working with school boards, Isenberg has yet to meet a board member who deliberately set out to do things the wrong way.

"When we see boards getting in trouble -- with the exception of a few -- most board members are doing the wrong thing out of ignorance and inexperience or different experiences," she said, "but not out of any evil intent.

"Subtle mistakes by people trying to do the right thing are more believable."

Helping boards govern more effectively by avoiding even the subtle mistakes is the premise on which the IASB has built its school board governance principles over the past three years.

In July 1997, the IASB staff met with consultant Susan Edsall at Heartland Lodge in Nebo, Illinois, to explore the Carver Model of leadership and governance to see how it could be more effectively applied to school districts in the state. While the Carver Model lays out a design for effective leadership, it was determined that school boards, by virtue of their often political nature, have distinctively unique characteristics that deserve their own principles.

After two more meetings that fall, the group presented a panel at the 1997 annual conference in Chicago to introduce their governance model to a standing-room-only crowd. The message was well received and feedback was positive.

Since January 1998, the governance model established by the IASB has been integrated into new school board member training materials as well as presented to individual boards in an effort to establish effective leadership throughout the state's school districts. The video presentation taped in LaGrange in October represents the next step by the IASB to develop tools and materials based on the fundamental principles of effective governance for use in training school board members.

While previous materials have been good at showing how boards can get off track, they often have not shown boards living the principles being espoused. Not only does this video show a board getting itself into troublesome situations by not following the governance principles, it shows the same board actually "living" the principles in everyday actions.

The video format, which can be paused between vignettes for discussion, and the accompanying workbook offer an excellent training opportunity for new board members as well as experienced board members looking for reaffirmation of governance skills.

The vignettes portrayed in the video will be identifiable with the principles as laid out by the IASB for school governance.

The scenarios include:

1) The superintendent presents a report on changes in the district's band program, which moved the starting year for band from third grade to fourth grade.
2) A progress report from the superintendent tells how a new after-school program is proceeding.
3) Administrative staff selections are brought to the Unified School Board for final approval.
4) A parent has complained to a school board member about the delay in testing her child for special education classes.
5) The superintendent's annual review and evaluation is conducted.
6) A recommendation from the superintendent is presented to the board to purchase new Macintosh computers for the district.
7) The board goes into closed session to discuss a matter of student discipline.
8) A heated debate ensues over a proposed uniform policy, resulting in contact with the media.

With the video, workbook and the updated new board member curriculum, the IASB has outlined what board members need to know and need to be able to do to govern effectively. But once this tape ends and the workbooks close, part of the job has just begun.

According to Angie Peifer, director of board education, this is just an overview, a foundation, for subsequent materials that will be developed to delve into more specific issues involved in each principle. The fifth principle alone on monitoring performance could involve days' worth of work and dissection to include setting parameters for what the board will monitor and how to collect the data.

While the principles of effective governance have been espoused since Carver's first edition hit the shelves in 1990, refinement of those principles and their adaptation to school boards is an ongoing process. When the lights go down and the tape begins to whir, this IASB project's debut represents the beginning of a new era for teaching effective school governance in Illinois.

Debut of the video and workbook at the New Board Member Workshop, which preceded this year's joint annual conference in Chicago, will be followed by additional feedback sessions and staff training before the curriculum is finalized in January.