Board of education organizational structure and roles

Board of Education

An Examination of Several Issues Facing a Typical American School Board Today

According to Shannon (1994), school board members today are increasingly recognizing that genuine education reform is only possible when it is completely fashioned in the local community and only when there is a firm commitment to support and maintain it locally. "The school board," he says, "is the most credible agent of change in the community it serves. Elected directly by the people in the community (less than 3% are appointed by other locally elected officials), the school board has the political support to lead educational change in the best tradition of Jeffersonian democracy" (p. 387). To accomplish change effectively, though, a school board's consistent message to the entire school system must be that systemic reform is its main goal rather than just a passing fad (Kirst, 1994). Local school boards play a major role in coordinating numerous policies and identifying gaps in policies and potential conflicts between them; for example, state assessment requirements could conflict with local categorical programs, or board curriculum requirements could conflict with a reform policy of granting waivers to individual schools (Kirst, 1994).

In this regard, the school board in Farmingdale, New York, finds itself in much this same situation where a long history of scarce resources and unfunded federal mandates have left an infrastructure that urgently requires millions of dollars (almost $20,000,000 in 2005) in repairs, renovation, and asbestos remediation; unfortunately, the State of New York provides less than half of the needed resources for these initiatives with the majority being financed through bonds issues by the local communities (Farmingdale Public Schools, 2005). It is the position of the Farmingdale school board that more state and federal assistance should be provided to assist in this initiative; furthermore, the board has made it a priority to develop strategic partnerships between local community business leaders and the schools to address infrastructure problems as they are identified rather than waiting for them to become emergencies.

Another problem facing the Farmingdale Public School Board is the need to match the unique educational needs of their students while balancing their responsibilities to meet the mandates of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) which stated that it was important "to ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to attain a high-quality education and reach, at a minimum, proficiency on challenging state academic achievement standards and state academic assessments" (U.S. Congress, 2001). This goal was to be achieved through the reapportionment of federal funds from more affluent districts to high-poverty and struggling schools (Cochran-Smith, 2005). It is the position of the Farmingdale School Board the NCLB requires substantive revisions in the manner in which annual academic progress is defined and how academic achievement is measured for disabled and other student subgroups.