September/October 2025

On Outreach & Training: Board Presidents, Transforming Setbacks into Comebacks

By Arlana Bedard

School board presidents lead teams of volunteers to move school districts forward and ensure educational excellence on behalf of children. That movement is impeded when school boards are plagued by mis­trust and misconceptions.

Fortunately, we have board president colleagues who have suc­cessfully led their boards through difficult situations. I interviewed five current and former board pres­idents who agreed to share stories about their challenges — including but not limited to long-term emo­tionally volatile situations and being dominated by constituency politics — and how they managed to lead the board to greater success. Below are four themes describing how they were able to move from overwhelm­ing setbacks to transformational comebacks.

Servant Leadership Mindset: “A servant to the greater cause”
One of the prominent themes that emerged from the leaders I inter­viewed was their identification with the practice of servant leadership, a term that was popularized by Robert K. Greenleaf in his 1970 essay, “The Servant as Leader.” This concept emphasizes listening, helping others develop their skills, engaging in open and transparent communication, and working to build trust between members.

Elements of this mindset informed how the presidents approached their role, including getting to know their colleagues as people. One board leader shared that it is important to “get to know each other, not just as a board member, but as a person. I think it is really, really critical. I do think it helps a lot with relationships and openness and talking to each other.”

Another board president expressed that, “What’s most needed in this role is to be a servant to that greater cause. Spend time getting to know members, listening to them. What do they need to be success­ful? Facilitate that.” Because they expressed interest in individual well-being and growth, they were able to build relationships and an under­standing of each person’s perspectives and needs.

Additionally, these leaders indi­cated that they often served as a connector or facilitator because it was essential to “look for the connections amongst each other, the superin­tendent, the community.” Building these connections was key to bolster­ing the level of trust.

One leader summarized this approach by saying:

Know the board’s collective mind. Maintain knowledge of it and know how to respond to it. How is the board gonna react? Help to facilitate the board’s relationship with the district. Think about how you facilitate the collective, which includes communicating the right tone to the community. Provide guidance to the district, to the superintendent mainly, and then facilitate that relationship. Always keep relationships front and center.

This approach seemed to serve as the connective tissue necessary for the changes that followed.

Purpose: “Everyone knows what we’re about”
While people volunteer to serve on school boards because they believe in the mission of schooling, they do not always have a sense of what governance is and the shifts they must make to fulfill that purpose. The board presidents I interviewed worked to ensure the entire board had a coherent understanding of governance and acted accordingly. One person said that at the begin­ning of their tenure as president, “We didn’t have any shared values. No one could really talk about what we did in a way that made sense to the community.” To address misunderstandings, the presidents instituted practices that reinforced the board’s governance role. For example, some boards aligned board meeting agenda items to their strategic priorities to keep the focus at the strategic level.

The dominance of interest-based positions also challenges the board mandate to make decisions based on what is best for all students. To coun­teract this, one president referenced the shift to data-driven decision-mak­ing based on shared goals. This focused the team and helped to mini­mize the reliance on overly emotional conversations and brought “the board back to center.”

They knew they were success­ful when “everybody knew what we’re about,” and “every board member could espouse the values that drive us.”

Ensuring shared purpose also led to stronger connections with the community because stakeholders had more clarity.

Team Orientation: “Building trust and raising our level of commitment”
Developing strong team practice constituted another theme. Doing so helped raise “the level of com­mitment” on the team because, as one president phrased it, “We don’t want folks to take a minimalist approach to the job.”

The following are practices that reinforced the board’s purpose and built effective team processes:

• Establishing norms and/or pro­tocols. The protocols helped team members holding each other accountable. In doing so, a president shared that “there was less of a feeling of me ver­sus them.”
• Engaging in self-evaluation practices, including exit slips and IASB board self-evalu­ations. One president stated that their board did an exit slip after each meeting. Examples of questions included: “Did you always think of students first? Did you make sure that you were staying in your role as a board member?”
• Aligning agendas to policy and/ or district priorities.
• Exploring ways to better com­municate.
• Instituting new member induc­tion processes.
• Establishing that everyone has an opportunity to voice their opinion. One president articu­lated, “When we have discussion items, I call on every single person. You’re going to be asked whether you have some thought on this.”
• Instituting and revisiting com­mittee structures, which helped elevate the level of dialogue and transparency.
• Exploring the distribution of responsibilities so that members could “choose their wheelhouse.”

These practices helped build trust, collaboration, and transparency.

Continuous Learning: “Learning and engagement go hand-in-hand”
A fundamental aspect of leading a board is engaging as a learner. While most of the interviewees had experience leading teams prior to becoming board presidents, they all expressed a commitment to ongo­ing learning.

They highlighted training, read­ing, and networking. Networking with other board presidents, in par­ticular, had a strong impact. One board member indicated, “There was a great local support system of people who served on other local boards, people who were board presidents, they understood the community, and so they just helped me immensely. They were great lis­teners and gave me strategies to try.”

Not only did they embrace the need to learn from others, as the board’s relationships and practices improved, they saw more interest in expanded engagement in profes­sional learning from the rest of the board, which included conferences, formal training events, observations of other board meetings, and local and state advocacy efforts.

Belief: “Got to trust in the possibility”
My board president interviews revealed four leadership themes that made a difference for the boards and their communities as they moved through tough situa­tions: a service leadership orienta­tion, shared purpose, aligned team behavior, and continuous learning. Their efforts became “self-perpetu­ating,” and led to sustainable prac­tices based on trust.

Transformational leadership is tough and involves a “workman­like diligence,” as stated by author Jim Collins in Good to Great. But “we must trust in the possibility… on behalf of our collective future” because the work of the school board serves as a model for the community of what we are all capable of being and accomplishing. 
 

Arlana Bedard, Ed.D., is Director of Outreach and Training with IASB, working with the DuPage, Starved Rock, and North Cook Divisions.