Former NSBA President Gallucci reflects on governance
01/09—Author and consultant Doug Eadie, the governance columnist for American School Board Journal, has known Jane Gallucci since she advised him on his 2005 book, Five Habits of High-Impact School Boards.
Gallucci, who served as NSBA’s 2007-08 president, recently retired after 12 years on Florida’s Pinellas County Board of Education. Just before Gallucci left office, Eadie interviewed her about school governance and public education.
“Jane has been a tremendously effective policymaker and passionate advocate for public education for almost two decades,” Eadie says. “To Jane, public education’s merely hunkering down and surviving isn’t an acceptable strategy. She fervently believes that schools need to have what she calls a ‘success mentality.’ You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone more knowledgeable about the business of governance than Jane.”
Here are excerpts from the interview:
Jane, based on your experience and familiarity with national trends, what do you see as the pre-eminent leadership challenges facing school board members around the country?
Above all else, it’s a tremendous challenge ... to rise above the often-mundane, state-mandated functions that can crowd board agendas and eat you alive if you’re not careful, like detailed personnel actions. You’ve got to guard against getting buried in the minutiae and keep your primary governing mission front and center: student achievement. As public education leaders, students are our number-one customers, and what they get out of the educational process should always be our top governing concern.
The number two challenge, in my experience, is to play a leading role in building public understanding about the district’s operations and the critical issues they’re dealing with. Public education is an incredibly complex enterprise with all kinds of moving parts and labyrinthine financing mechanisms that defy easy understanding. It’s hard enough for board members themselves to become experts on the districts they’re responsible for governing, much less the average citizen, including the parents whose kids are our customers.
But wide public understanding and support are critical to the long-term success of every district in the country, and in my opinion the job description of school board members must include wearing the chief public communicator hat. It doesn’t make sense to rely solely on the superintendent and top administrators to explain district issues to the wider public. If we sit back and let our administrators carry the communication ball alone, we can end up wasting precious time and energy defending ourselves because of public misperceptions.
To take a real-life example, in Pinellas we were dealing with the issue of school closings not so long ago. We failed to make crystal clear to the public the specific closings that were under consideration. In the blink of an eye, the very effective (and destructive) rumor mill took over, and we found ourselves on the defensive, playing the damage control game.
What we should have done, in retrospect, is anticipate the potential for misunderstanding and the firestorm that might (and, of course, did) result, put together some clear talking points about the closing process, reach agreement on a strategy for getting the message out to the wider world, and then divvy up the communication tasks.
What school board member attributes and skills do you see as essential in meeting the governing challenges in today’s world?
One of the real governing barriers that most, if not all, school boards face is the lack of direct control over their own composition. Nonprofit boards typically select their own members, which means that they can identify desirable attributes and qualifications that they can use as a screening tool when they are considering candidates. By contrast, school boards, being elected for the most part, can’t exert much influence over their composition, so we work with what we get.
The good news, however, is that people can learn to be more effective participants in the governing game if that’s what they really want. Experience has taught me that it makes the best sense for a board to discuss and reach consensus -- formally and in detail -- on the traits, knowledge, and skills that make for effective participation in the governing process, and then to fashion a formal program for developing board members.
For example, make sure new board members are treated to a comprehensive orientation early in their tenure. Provide opportunities to attend state and national conferences. And expose board members to pertinent articles and books on governance.
Governing a modern school district is not for the faint of heart. You must have found enjoyment and satisfaction to keep doing it for 12 years. What have you liked most about the work?
Education is a labor of love and has brought abundant joy into my life from the time I began as a counselor through my years of service as a board member. That’s one reason I love graduation ceremonies and attend as many as I can. Students crossing the stage and moving on to the next opportunities and challenges in their young lives is what we’re all about -- it is our real “bottom line” and our fundamental mission in public education.
Moving toward the cooler end of the spectrum, I’ve always found it deeply satisfying to successfully work through complex policy issues that directly impact student achievement, especially when we can get away from the board room -- mentally and physically, with our cell phones turned off -- and really dig deeply into an issue.
That’s why board-superintendent retreats, assuming they’re well designed and led by a competent facilitator, can be such a productive and truly satisfying experience. The Pinellas board and superintendent spent the better part of a day off-site not too long ago comprehensively reviewing all the reading programs the district was employing.
Discussing the data, it was easy to reach consensus on the programs that deserved to be continued. That’s where the beef is, not bickering about one line-item or another in the expenditure budget.
As you well know, the board-superintendent working relationship can erode pretty quickly, falling victim to the inevitable stresses and strains at the top of every district. What has your experience taught you about keeping that precious partnership solid?
At the top of the list is detailed agreement between the board and superintendent on your district’s educational and administrative priorities and directions. You’ve got two powerful tools for arriving at agreement: first, an annual strategic planning retreat involving the board, superintendent, and senior administrators that focuses on your district’s vision and long-term strategic goals; and, second, an annual planning/budget development process that involves the board intensively in determining operational priorities and objectives.
I learned early in my first term that if you aren’t in agreement with your superintendent on what’s really important and what directions you should be moving in, you’re going to have a pretty rocky working relationship.
I don’t want to end on a downer, Jane, but can you think of a mistake you’ve made that has taught you a valuable lesson.
I started my board career, I’m sorry to say, as a single-issue gal, and I came to my first few meetings with a pretty big chip on my shoulder. My style was modeled after Genghis Khan, hammering my points home, talking a lot and listening much less, and, very soon, alienating the superintendent and my colleagues. It wasn’t that my issue was unimportant, but my style was, to put it mildly, counterproductive.
The good news is that I learned my lesson pretty quickly, before permanent damage was done. My advice to new school board members is to park your specific issues at the door, spend lots of time learning and listening, and recognize that governing really is a team sport.
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