The same issues threaten every school board. Data breaches, derailed meetings, federal investigations, perceived secrecy, corrupt contracts, and document leaks undermine public trust in districts large and small, in rural outposts and major metropolitan areas alike. In both the U.S. and Canada, school boards can easily become weighed down by all of the pressing challenges they are faced with day in and day out. It is with the right practices and a strong system of accountability that school boards are able to overcome these challenges and work towards advancing education. In fact, top-performing school boards exhibit five core elements that any of their peers can adopt.
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Security Savoir-Faire
- A secure board portal. Such a portal builds a solid fortress around district documents and board communications. The portal must provide full 256-bit encryption of all data and storage on a secure, private, cloud-based server - not 128-bit encryption.
- A ban on board emails. Emails make light work of the hacker's job. If any board member using a district-issued email address falls for click-bait in an email subject line, the hacker can penetrate the district network's central nervous system -- harvesting salaries, grades, medical records, and bank account numbers of hundreds or thousands of stakeholders. Posting board members' email addresses on the public-facing website (a common practice) sends an engraved invitation to cyberbullies.
- Contained distribution. Board business must be confined to the secure board portal to prevent proliferation that cannot be traced. The best school boards have a policy prohibiting downloads onto personal devices or desktop hard drives.
- Ongoing training. An IT or IS expert should train the board to use the portal's security features at least once a year, ideally four times a year. Human error remains the leading cause of data breaches, and board members come to the job with vastly different levels of technological know-how.
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Structured Meetings
- Use Robert's Rules of Order. These rules normalize the practice whereby the chairman of the board grants and withdraws control of ''the floor'' to one person at a time. Meetings that erupt into chaos lack any clear rules dictating who may speak. Nor do they have a way to keep many speakers from chiming in at once.
- Prepare board members to get business done. The culture of the school board must make it clear that reading before the meetings is not optional; it is mandatory. To make the task easy, send the agenda and board packet electronically through the secure board portal. (After all, the board sees highly sensitive material.) The packet materials can even be a click away - and searchable! - if they're stored on a curated archive made possible by the most robust of board portals.
- Create an agenda designed for results. A secure board portal can post the agenda to the board and to the public simultaneously, satisfying public meeting laws. With the right portal, the committee reports and minutes that are attached to the agenda are just a click away. A single vote on all of them (known as a ''consent agenda'') saves precious meeting time.
- Indicate the action to be taken on each item. Is it time to vote on an item? Is it at the initial discussion stage? Has it been sent out for research? Make it explicit on the agenda at which stage each item currently stands and what needs to happen as a result of this meeting. Avoid the trap of slapping ''discuss'' before every single item.
- Provide forewarning of closed sessions. Impromptu closed sessions make the public suspect foul play. Use closed sessions sparingly, and announce them in the agenda. To convey honest, include on the agenda the exact phrasing of the state law with which the closed session is complying.
- Constructively direct public input. Speakers should sign up for time in advance of the meeting, stating the (single) topic to be addressed. An online form on the board portal makes it easy. The form provides an opportunity to prominently display the time limit for all speakers. The resulting list of speakers should appear on the agenda.
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Maximal Transparency
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Confidential Document Protection
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Freedom from Corruption
Media Highlights
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