“As each school year winds down, many charter school boards scatter for the summer. They don’t meet much, if at all, while school’s out and typically reconvene in the fall as the hubbub of back to school has settled a bit. This is a major strategic mistake. What charter school boards do between the last day of school and the first day of school matters — a lot. When boards wait too long to align with school leadership on the goals and strategies for the new school year, oversight lags behind action all year. In fact, in our experience, many boards are unable to recover from a slow start and miss important opportunities to offer support, flag issues before they become problems, and take action to improve school and student success. Most school leaders set their goals for the upcoming academic year in the spring to guide their budgeting, hiring, and other decisions. Most boards don’t really start to think about how to measure progress toward these goals (if they think about it at all) until their first meeting of the new school year. But at that point, the year is well underway and it feels too late to backtrack and make time for the board to understand why these are the goals for the year and how the board will evaluate them. Further, most boards have no idea what strategies the school is using to achieve the goals, and are not equipped to monitor whether those strategies were implemented starting on day one. As a result, boards play catch-up while the school year marches on and the window for making meaningful course adjustments is already closing. While many boards hold summer retreats, the focus at these retreats often stays at a very high level, and board members walk out with only a vague sense of what’s happening in their school or network. They might know what the highest-priority goals are, but not how to closely track progress toward those goals. They rarely understand how school leadership plans to achieve those goals, what successful implementation of these plans looks like, or what to do if implementation gets off track during the year. A substantive, strategic, well-facilitated summer retreat can power timely, consistent governance all year long. Effective retreats focus on four key questions: Where are we now? An assessment of current school quality based on end-of-year data from the previous academic year that enables the board to clearly understand whether the goals for the coming year directly address improvement needs. Where are we going? Understanding the school’s goals for the coming year and how the board will know whether the school is on track to achieve these goals, beginning from the first day of school. How will we get there? Understanding the strategies the school will use to ensure it reaches its goals, why these strategies were selected, and what successful implementation entails from the first day of school. Most importantly, these conversations include aligning on actions the board will take if implementation is off track and progress toward goals is not happening throughout the school year. How will we know? Aligning on what metrics the board will monitor from the first day of school to the last to know if strategy implementation is on track and if the school is making expected progress to goals. Bellwether’s new Board Retreat Toolkit provides the resources boards need to hold the kind of retreat that answers these questions and dramatically improves governance all year. Together with other Bellwether governance resources, this toolkit paves the way for boards to ensure a successful school year ahead. Charter School Board Summer Retreat Toolkit — A practical guide for charter school boards and school leaders to plan a productive summer retreat that helps align boards and school leaders on the most important goals for the year, and sets boards up to govern effectively all year long. Summer Retreat Committee Guides — A resource designed to accompany the Charter School Board Summer Retreat Toolkit, with guides for each committee to facilitate effective work time at the retreat. During the Retreat Tools and Templates That Organize the Board’s Work Around Data Align on what a high-quality school looks like and assess current school quality based on end-of-year data. Use Bellwether’s School Quality Framework , your own strategic plan, or another approach to give leadership and the board an honest picture of school performance. Understand highest-priority goals for the coming year to improve school quality and metrics to monitor progress to goals. Create a board dashboard for the year that includes these metrics and benchmarks. Understand what strategies the school will use to accomplish those goals, why they were chosen, and benchmarks for successful implementation. Build board calendar for the year. Refer to Bellwether’s board calendar template to map the year ahead. Develop a workplan for each committee for the year. Use Bellwether’s committee workplans and board tracker to establish a unified approach to committee workflows. Need help planning or facilitating your charter school board retreat? Reach out to Carrie Irvin at carrie.irvin@bellwether.org with questions. And if you already have a summer retreat on the books, share updates and group photos with our team. The post Ready, Set, Govern: This Summer, Plan Your Charter School Board’s Most Important Retreat Yet appeared first on Bellwether .
Original story
Continue reading at Bellwether
bellwether.org
Summary generated from the RSS feed of Bellwether. All article rights belong to the original publisher. Click through to read the full piece on bellwether.org.