BOE Self-Evaluates, Views Finance & Community Relations as Strengths

A critical part of school boards in New Jersey setting district and board goals for each school year, as the Fort Lee Board of Education did Tuesday, is conducting a self-evaluation.

Susan McCusker of the New Jersey School Board Association (NJSBA) took the Fort Lee BOE through theirs point-by-point at Tuesday’s special public work session “to show [the board] how much importance the state places on doing a board self-evaluation every year.”

“It used to be a best practice,” McCusker told Fort Lee school board members. “It is now required that you do it by law every year.”

Board members were first asked to evaluate the relative importance of the nine major areas of board functioning: planning, policy, student achievement, finance, board operations, board performance, board/superintendent relationships, board/staff relationships and board and community.

Breaking down the results of that part of the survey, McCusker said, “the single most important [area to you as a board] was finance, and closely following that were planning, policy and board and community.”

Board members were then asked to evaluate the board itself and themselves as board members in various areas, on a scale of 1 to 4, with 4 being “commendable” and 1 being “unsatisfactory.”

The two areas that the school board saw as their greatest strengths, McCusker told board members after an analysis of their answers, were finance and board and community.

“The areas where you rated yourself the least high were in board performance, which is how you work together as board members, and board operations—how you do your work,” she said.

McCusker said the board scored high in the area of planning, but identified “reviews action plans developed to support the goals” and “reviews and regularly monitors progress toward achieving the district’s vision, mission and goals and making adjustments as needed” as slightly lower than last year.

“Boards may be very frustrated if they have set district goals but do not feel that they really have a process set up for reviewing the progress toward those goals,” McCusker said.

She went on to read one board member’s comment in the area of planning:

“I do not recall the board reviewing the action plans to support the goals other than our two referendums. We do not have an internal system as a board to regularly monitor any progress toward our vision or mission toward the goals. Many times we are entrenched in the details.”

McCusker called policy “another area of strength,” with the one exception being “uses written policies as the framework for our decision making,” which she said was lower than the rest of the sub-areas of the policy category.

“The board as a whole could gain great benefit from being provided an in-house policy refresher course,” one board member commented, according to McCusker. “I would like to see our policy committee taking on a greater role to educate and inform the rest of the board members on new, revised and current policies.”

Student achievement was another area in which the board rated itself highly, with a slight blip in the sub-area of requiring “systematic evaluation of and feedback on the instructional program.”

“This goes along with feedback toward progress on district goals,” McCusker said. “It sounds like the board would like to have more presentations to it about what is going throughout the year as far as reaching board goals and what is going on with student achievement.”

The comment she read related to student achievement was this:

“In many instances I find that this board lacks a systematic evaluation of its feedback on the instructional programs, nor did we really monitor the effectiveness of any of our instructional programs.”

Finance, McCusker said, represented the board’s highest score.

“It is a very good score, and it is high across the board,” she said.

But the comment she read suggested that not every board member saw finance as an absolute strength:

“I would like to see the participation of the whole board from the beginning of the preliminary budget preparation rather than leaving it to our committee members. I have tremendous respect and confidence in our finance committee, but I believe that our school budget is one of the most important and crucial areas of our responsibility that requires the involvement of the whole board from day one in its preparation—not just that of a few.”

“Board operations is how you do your work,” McCusker told board members. “It involves holding meetings in compliance, of which you get a very high score, but also providing a climate that allows free and open and orderly discussion, developing and utilizing teamwork, using good decision-making processes acting only after giving the administration time to gather information and respecting the administration’s leadership by thoughtfully deliberating on recommendations.”

She said the board’s score in the area of board operations was one of its two lowest and quite a bit lower than last year’s score.

“There is a little indication of concern on open and orderly discussion, utilizing skills and teamwork and consensus-building on administrative recommendations and thoughtful deliberation,” McCusker said, backing that statement up with the following board member comment:

“I think overall, we work fairly well as a team, but our lines of communication are not as efficient as they should be. All board members are not kept abreast of all … decisions affecting our district.”

Next up was board performance, which McCusker said was the Fort Lee BOE’s lowest score—significantly lower, in fact, than last year.

“You may want to think about why,” she said. “You may want to talk about that. One possibility is a team-building workshop, if you thought you would benefit from that, or to do a workshop that talks about setting up rules for how you can work better together.”

Board/superintendent and board/staff relationships were “high across the board,” McCusker said.

One of the board’s two highest scores—second only to finance—came in the area of board and community, which left some community members in attendance scratching their heads.

“We as a board need to continue to improve community relations,” wrote one board member in the comments. “It’s been good lately, but we should not rest on our laurels and become complacent.”

McCusker said it’s unusual for a board to be completely satisfied with its community relations.

“Every board wants to do better in this area,” she said. “But again, you have indicated that it is something that is important to you.”

Board members were each also asked to identify three challenges facing their district.

“Like every board of education in New Jersey, you’re thinking about money,” McCusker told the board. “You’d have to be crazy not to be because of what’s going on at the state level and because of the changes that are going on in Trenton. You’re also thinking about student achievement. That is a theme. There’s a lot of that. It’s often the case that you’re thinking about how are we going to maintain the quality of our programs with the financial constraints that we’re under? And there are some indications of worry about space—not surprisingly because of what you’ve been going through with your referendums—and then some areas of working on your boardsmanship. You talk about teamwork. You talk about running board meetings. And there are some people [concerned] more about finance and labor, and then just how better to work together as a board.”

After going through the self-evaluation, McCusker guided the board in setting its four district goals as follows:

• Continue to work on closing the gap between student achievement for special education and regular education district-wide.
• Review and revise Language Arts curriculum for grades K-12 and Mathematics curriculum for grades K-8 to ensure student competence reaches or exceeds grade-level standards.
• Continue to address and resolve overcrowding, updating facilities and repairing aging infrastructure.
• Increase and actively encourage parental involvement.

And after a lengthy discussion, McCusker and the school board then came up with the following two board goals:

• Improve communication and working relationship among board members focusing on confidentiality and trust.
• Set up a process for monitoring progress toward district goals.