Governance Subcommittee Feb 20, 2019

On the main school board web page (link here) there are links to three standing committees. One of the committees I serve on is the Governance Subcommittee (link here). Wednesday February 20th at 1:30 p.m. was my second meeting as a member. This is the committee (three members of the board) that studies and recommends changes to the policy manual, which is binding on many of the operations of the district. All recommendations are sent to the full board for subsequent consideration and adoption.

This is a link to the official “Notes” (abbreviated minutes) folder for those meetings. My personal recollections follow.

Most of the nine policies considered for review were simply technical language updates made to conform with revised state laws/education codes. Almost all of them were revised to reflect, word-for-word, model policies published by the California School Boards Association CSBA), the organization that provides a slate of technical services to nearly all of the school districts in the state. You can review all of the changes we considered and approved at this link. Each update was explained by the central office administrator who specializes in that area, such as school health, suspensions, transitional kindergarten, etc.

The only one that caught my attention was the recommended deletion of the teacher transfer policy. Apparently, procedures in the contract are sufficient and CSBA had flagged an obsolete portion of the policy (which referred to the Academic Performance Index, which no longer exists). A replacement policy will be considered in the future, according to the administrator in charge.

Little by little, my exposure to details like this is giving me a sense of how the district runs. I’m almost always impressed by the expertise of those responsible for getting the details right.