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School Board Journal
March / April

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Technology adds a new dimension
to school governance

By THOMAS A. SHANNON

There are many ways technology can help school board members. What they need is their own or a district-provided computer at home or in their place of business with a modem (enabling the computer to communicate over telephone lines with other computers), a printer, applicable software, and a telephone line installation.

If board members' computers are tied into the district's main system and the Internet, they could draw governance-related information from the district, communicate with each other and colleagues across the nation, and tap into a nationwide information network, including their state and national associations of school boards.

While information is neutral until it is given the particular spin an advocate places on it, it always is a source of potential power. It is this power dimension that emerges from the details in the use of technology by school board members. School boards must address this issue when they enter the world of technology.

Let's look at some specific major applications:

1) Preparing for board meetings. Because of the corporate nature of governance that is, school board members exercise their governance function only as part of the board, just as do members of Congress and state legislatures preparation for board meetings is crucial.

Technology can provide board members with meeting agendas and access to back-up material for agenda items, including research data relevant to the superintendent's recommended course of action.

It also can serve as a vehicle by which board members can express their unique perspectives on issues to the superintendent in advance of the board meeting. If board members have questions before a meeting about agenda items, they can discuss them with the superintendent or other board members. Following a board meeting, they can also monitor implementation of decisions made and actions taken at meetings.

2) Planning district policies. The raw information needed to conceive, examine, propose, and evaluate school policy initiatives usually is in the district data bank and available for the asking via computer and modem.

The litany of such information is long. It encompasses budget and financial planning data, school attendance reports, truancy statistics, school building and materials needs, construction program status, demographic trends, implementation of curriculum programming, progress in board-initiated reforms, information about city and county services available to children, reports about state and federal legislation affecting school governance and educational programming, and much more.

3) Constituency responsiveness. A critical part of the American institution of representative governance of the public schools as epitomized by the local school board is the accountability that school boards and board members have to the public who entrust them to govern.

To do this vital part of their governance job effectively, board members need immediate and ongoing access to information to prepare speeches, answer questions posed by parents and others, to know about and understand administrative actions, and evaluate the manner in which school board policy is implemented.

Pondering how board members use the information they obtain in these three major categories directly bearing upon their governance function, several new problem areas emerge. And they must be addressed and resolved or the school board/superintendent team can be shredded, which would hamper sound governance and sensible administration of the district.

State open-meetings laws always hover on the horizon whenever there is unfettered private communication among the members of a school board. If communication on a computer network results in decision making on public school policy issues outside of the public meeting, it clearly would be an outlawed activity. It's one thing to request information, another to exchange views about the information with one or more fellow board members, and quite a different thing to attempt to arrive at some sort of consensus.

Exactly where the line between legitimately gathering and evaluating information and illicitly coming to conclusions lies is shadowy. Thus, the school board should request specific guidelines from its attorney and these should be scrupulously observed.

Another potentially troublesome area is the confidentiality of information that board members have access to through their computer.

Personal information on students and school employees certainly qualifies in this category. Mostly, though, this sensitive matter can be best resolved by determining in advance in concert with the superintendent and board attorney the exact information files for which board members should have unlimited, limited, or no access to in the performance of their governance duties.

An offshoot of this issue is the right to access district computers by the media; supportive groups, such as PTAs; taxpayer watchdog groups; and parents seeking information about their own children. Such rights, if any, should be spelled out in the school board policy.

Finally, the toughest problem of all will be the common-sense use of the information obtained.

For example, if a board member calls up information not normally available to the public and holds a press conference just before a board meeting in order to embarrass and upstage the superintendent or board (who might be working on or expecting a comprehensive report on the issue under question several weeks hence), the results are not going to contribute to a harmonious working relationship.

Like every other new way of operating the school district, technology will bring both pluses and minuses to the table. The challenge is to maximize the positive contributions and to safeguard against the negatives.

Sound policy formulated by the school board with the help of informed advisers will do just that.

NSBA's 1996 Annual Conference and Exposition, slated for April 13-16 in Orlando, Florida, will offer a hands-on demonstration in conjunction with Apple Computer on how state-of-the-art technology will produce the "school board of tomorrow." For more information, call 703/838-6722.

Thomas A. Shannon is executive director of the National School Boards Association. This article first appeared in the February 6, 1996, issue of School Board News.