Internal and external partnerships

As publicly elected officials, board members have relationships with a wide range of internal and community constituents and entities. But the most important of these numerous and complex relationships is the one that they have with one another and the superintendent. CSBA’s Professional Governance Standards have long maintained that the board and superintendent assume collective responsibility for building unity and creating a positive organizational culture to govern effectively. This requires a high degree of mutual trust and collaboration.

The beginning of the school year is an ideal time for governance teams to recommit to the principles and protocols that will strengthen their ability to govern effectively and to look at the organizational partners that help them accomplish their work. A key question for boards to ask is: Are we having the right conversations?

Beyond the boardroom

Establishing community partnerships is a key activity of effective boards. Boards use district policies to define roles and responsibilities for community partnerships, establish expectations for the participation of district leadership in partnership efforts, and allocate resources to support these efforts. Surveys reveal that schools often construe partnerships too narrowly, focusing on a limited range of student-centered efforts.

In her book “Building school-community partnerships: Collaboration for school success” (2006), education researcher Mavis Sanders found that out of 817 partnerships among 443 schools, 366 (45 percent) involved for-profit local and national businesses. She found other types of agencies accounted for less than 10 percent of partnerships pursued by schools, including in health care, local government or military, service and volunteer organizations, faith-based organizations, senior citizens, colleges or universities, and cultural or recreation centers. These findings suggest that schools and districts have room to broaden their efforts and widen their circle of potential partners.

To be most effective, leaders must ensure that they are having the right conversations with the right partners. As the new school year begins and governance teams recommit to their mission, guiding principles and strategic goals, one conversation worth exploring may be this: If progress is built on relationships, and relationships are built on conversations, who are we talking to?