Arkansas School Boards Association

Visit their website at www.arsba.org

Dr. Paul Hance
President

Dr. Paul Hance, president  of the Arkansas School Boards Association (ASBA), serves as president of the Batesville School Board. He earned the Master Board Member Award from ASBA in 2007 which designates he has completed at least 50 hours of board development training. 

A dentist in Batesville, Hance is a founding member of Batesville Schools Coordinated Health and Activity Program. He also is a member of the American Dental Association, Arkansas State Dental Association and the North East District Dental Association.  Hance is a member of the Batesville Area Chamber of Commerce and the President’s Council at Lyon College and member and past president of the Batesville Kiwanis Club.  

Dan Farley
Executive Director

Dan Farley is a lifelong advocate of public education, having worked as a classroom teacher, the education writer for a major daily newspaper in Arkansas, the first communications director for the state’s largest school district, and since 1979, as a staff member of the Arkansas School Boards Association. He was named executive director of ASBA in 1999. Since then, the association has had 100% membership each year.  

Much has been added to the association’s menu of programs and services, including a Model Policy Service and the Arkansas Study Circles Project (ASCP), which assists school districts in engaging their publics in deliberative dialogue. Using that model, ASBA has undertaken several outreach collaborations to engage Arkansas citizens in conversations about their schools. The most notable event was “Speak Up, Arkansas!” on April 4, 2002, when over 6,000 people simultaneously engaged in facilitated conversations at 91 locations throughout the state.  

Under his leadership, the ASBA Workers’ Compensation Trust has been honored six times as the state’s Outstanding Self-Insured Group by the Arkansas Workers’ Compensation Commission. Through the association’s advocacy efforts, major changes were made to the state’s Teacher Fair Dismissal Act and a new comprehensive ethics law was enacted.   In collaboration with the Arkansas Leadership Academy, ASBA designed and implemented the School Board Academy which focuses whole board teams on effective systems thinking utilizing the Key Work of School Boards. The scope of the association’s training program continues to grow. By using Compressed Interactive Video, over 600 school board members at 15 sites around the state were brought together for a four-hour training session that ASBA provided its members at no cost.