NSBA President: Colorado initiative reflects importance of community engagement

For instance, I learned recently that Colorado has a new law that requires school boards to engage their communities in the development of a blueprint for their education system.

This community-based process also helps determine the kinds of skills students will need to succeed after graduation. The combination of a blueprint and skills mapping will help local school boards draft new high school graduation requirements that will take effect for students starting high school in 2009.

We often hear stories of state school boards associations working hard to keep the legislature’s hands off the public schools. But the Colorado Association of School Boards insisted that the community engagement provision be included in the law. CASB believes that’s the best way to carry out the state’s strongly held belief that local boards must connect with their communities and must reflect local values.

With the introduction of the Key Work of School Boards several years ago, our state associations and local boards have been moving away from situations where boards set standards in a vacuum.

In the past, a board, hypothetically, could have focused its instructional program on foreign languages and the arts while neglecting the community’s leading employer’s need for graduates with strong math and science skills. That is not happening today, thanks to more savvy school boards that have adopted the tenets of the Key Work, which stresses the importance of engaging the community in efforts to raise student achievement.

The Colorado initiative started with a series of discussions among school board members on the requirements of a 21st century education. CASB’s delegate assembly passed a resolution supporting this goal, which led to the legislation.

The importance of engaging the community was also made clear last month when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Seattle and Louisville school districts’ student diversity plans.

Despite the fact that the court ruled 5-4 against the districts, Justice Anthony Kennedy said that diversity as an educational goal is still a compelling government interest.

School boards can continue to pursue that educational priority through careful race-conscious policies. The only way to do that right is to look for participation and creative ideas from parents, business leaders, students, and other members of the community. Such collaboration is essential if school boards are going to continue to bring together students of different racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Colorado has taken the exceptional step of making community collaboration the law of the land. Over the next few years, every school in the state will have an academic blueprint to follow. Colorado public school students will learn skills that the entire community believes will help make them successful after they graduate.