Front Page: New Board Member Information
By Theresa Kelly Gegen
To all of the newly elected school board members in Illinois, I offer congratulations and a warm welcome.
The Illinois Association of School Boards offers this issue of the Illinois School Board Journal as one of the many ways your Association can help you begin to understand your roles and responsibilities, develop your leadership talents into board work skills and abilities, and advocate for public education. If you are a returning member, thank you for your continued service. This issue may help you reflect on what school boarding felt like when you started, and how far you’ve come since.
The school board’s responsibilities as trustee for the community are unique and essential to both district and community. School board service has many facets, from the smallest preschoolers and kindergartners with their pint-sized backpacks to the enormity of democracy itself.
Local boards of education play a pivotal role in maintaining and strengthening the foundations of democracy. As the primary governing body of public education at the local level, school boards influence the quality, accountability, and accessibility of education, shaping the future of each child, every community, and society as a whole. Elected school boards represent the community’s interests and are accountable to the public. Participation in local governance is a fundamental characteristic of democracy, because it empowers citizens to shape the policies that affect their lives.
Democracy is the big picture of where you are now. It’s quite a responsibility!
But it’s not the only one, of course. School board members are responsible to the children their schools serve. People who serve on school boards do so for a variety of reasons, and the focus of those reasons is the students, all students, who attend public schools in Illinois. For every decision you make, you want to ask the question, “What’s best for our students?” It’s going to be both that simple, and that complicated.
Remember the PK and K little ones on their first days. They learn and grow and become the high school graduates that we send off into the world with lessons they’ve learned and potential they bear, which their schools help nurture and develop.
In between the magnitude of democracy and those little backpacks is the actual work you will do: Determining what your community wants for its schools and making it happen involves engaging the community, goal setting, decision-making, delegating, policy-making, monitoring progress, and lots of meetings.
You can discover lots about how to do all of that from IASB, and we look forward to working with you. You can also learn from your leadership team how all of that is done in district you serve. And, for certain, you’ll learn a lot about the work by doing it.
IASB’s Foundational Principles of Effective Governance outlines the fundamental duties on the board. I’ll close here with Principle 6 to think about as you start your journey:
The board takes responsibility for itself. The board, collectively and individually, takes full responsibility for board activity and behavior — the work it chooses to do and how it chooses to do the work. Individual board members are obligated to express their opinions and respect others’ opinions; however, board members understand the importance of abiding by the majority decisions of the board.
Again, welcome and congratulations — and good luck with your new responsibilities!
Theresa Kelly Gegen is Editor of the Illinois School Board Journal and Director of Editorial Services for IASB. If you’d like to share your thoughts with the readers of the Journal, please email Theresa at tgegen@iasb.com.