School boards lax on training mandate

About one in five local school board seats in Georgia will turn over this year, and for the new members, it’ll be time to head back to class.

School board members have long been expected to receive annual training — 12 hours a year for first-timers and six hours a year for veterans.

But some years, as many as 100 board members haven’t complied, state records show.

The state could withhold money from their school districts but never has, according to the Georgia School Boards Association.

This year, as part of legislation that’s being touted as a landmark for school board governance, lawmakers put some teeth in the training requirement. The law now says that, beginning next year, candidates will not be eligible to run for their local school boards unless they commit to the annual training.

The legislation grew out of the business community’s desire to avert more accreditation messes, such as those in Clayton and Warren counties. Clayton County Schools lost accreditation in 2008 over the behavior of its governing board, and the Warren County school system near Augusta was placed on probation. Clayton County had its accreditation restored last year on a probationary basis.

The bill requires local school boards to adopt minimum codes of ethics and conflicts-of-interest policies. It also makes it easier for the state to replace dysfunctional local boards.

Most states require some training for school board members because of the complexity of their duties, including adopting multimillion-dollar budgets, setting policies and long-range planning.

“The work of school board governance is often very different from the work or experiences that a new board member brings to the table,” said Steve Dolinger, president of the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education. “It’s important that they not only learn about state and local laws, but also about their role as a school board member and about the ever-changing issues around education policy.”

Only four of Atlanta’s nine school board members had the annual training for 2008-2009, the last year for which figures were available. State records show the new school board chairman, Khaatim Sherrer El, hasn’t had the minimum mandatory state training since 2004. El said the state doesn’t count training he’s received outside of the state over the years. He also said he supports the mandatory training requirement in the new law.

For years, the Georgia School Boards Association was sole provider of the training, said Jim Puckett with the GSBA.

“The state used to allocate money specifically for training but later rolled it into regular school funding, so there is nothing specific for school board training,” Puckett said. “What has happened over the years is as state funding has basically disappeared for school board members, the rules have become a little lax.”

By law, a district’s school superintendent currently is expected to sign a statement saying his or her district meets all the requirements, including training. Systems where school board members aren’t trained can have state money withheld as punishment. But that’s never happened, Puckett said.

GSBA still provides 90 percent of the training, which focuses on things like school funding and finance, student achievement, communications and school law, said Tony Arasi, the association’s director of professional development.

For boards, and for trainers, the challenge comes when turnover occurs, he said.

“That whole team, whether it was training, whether it was teamwork, whether it was conflict, whether they learned to disagree agreeably, you almost have to start all over,” Arasi said.

This year, Arasi said, is “a huge election cycle,” where potentially 200 to 300 of the state’s 1,100 school board seats could change hands.

School boards have weighty issues to decide. They set budgets that collectively will raise and spend billions of dollars just in metro Atlanta. They approve tax rates that bring in the biggest chunk of property owners’ tax bills. They make decisions on new schools, on curriculum, on personnel and on a whole host of other things.

So training is important, said Donald R. McAdams, president and founder of the Houston-based Center for Reform of School Systems.

“But it’s not a silver bullet,” McAdams said.

“There are people you just can’t train ... they either can’t learn because they are not able and it’s too complicated for them or they don’t want to learn because they have an agenda. They are there for a reason and they know what that reason is and you’re not going to deter them, whether it’s representing a part of town, an ethnic community, an ideology, or sometimes it’s a political agenda.”

Likely about 30 percent of the time, training won’t be effective, McAdams said.

In those instances, the board members “are who they are, they don’t want to change, they go through the motion because someone told them they had to,” he said.

“They think they know it all or they have some agenda and they don’t change.”

Under the new law, the state school board has until next July to decide what type of training board members should receive.

Mark Elgart, who oversees accreditation for most of the nation’s public schools, hopes the emphasis will be on training for the whole board, instead of individual board members.

“Individual members don’t have authority, only the board,” Elgart said.