Brian L. Carpenter

Does your board meet too often, too long, and at practically the worst hours of the day? These three fatal errors choke the life out of meaningful board dialogue and oversight, often resulting in unbearably boring meetings that run late into the night, clogged with minutiae every minute of the way. Besides merely going through the motions of governance, such meetings make recruiting new board members all but impossible. (Hey, Susan, want to join our board? We meet for four hours every month, near the end of the day, when everyone is nearing the point of exhaustion, to discuss everything from A to Z about our school.) If this scenario describes your meetings, this three-part series can transform not only your board, but also your school. This month’s article explains why meeting too frequently causes problems, and what you should do about it.

To my knowledge, there are no scientific studies on how often boards typically meet, so this article is based purely on personal observations. These are derived, however, from my having spent the past twenty years working for boards, consulting with boards, or serving on boards. From these vantage points, I’ve observed that most school boards meet monthly. Few question why; it’s just what we do.

The problem is there simply isn’t twelve months worth of board work to do in an average charter school (excluding start-ups). So what does the board do during all of these meetings? Naturally it has to discuss something, so, for lack of purpose, it discusses anything. By anything, I mean nothing is off-limits. You name it, I’ve watched school boards discuss it: classroom paint colors, depth of playground fence postholes, restroom scheduling, overflow parking, Halloween parties, bulletin boards, lawn maintenance, bake sales, and so on—none of which have the slightest thing to do with governance.

What’s happening here?

It’s actually quite simple: Parkinson’s Law. [Wikipedia provides this definition: Parkinson’s Law is the dictum that  “work expands to fill the time available.”] How does this apply to this article? Charter school boards usually structure their meeting schedule so that frequency determines content rather than content determining frequency. In other words, when boards meet too often, they have to fill the time talking about something because they are meeting.

While there’s no question that some board members enjoy these repetitive, trivia-saturated discussions, the fact is, the kind of influential community members every board says it wants to recruit—you know, people that can raise money, etc.—do not. Successful people run from exactly this kind of waste of time. And there’s a simple reason why this is so. They got to be high-powered because they invest their time only in things that are productive. They decline invitations, albeit usually politely so, that require them to show up 12 times a year to perform work they know can be done in six meetings or less.

The solution is as straightforward as the problem: Meet less often. The first step to moving in this direction—if state law and your authorizer (or sponsor) allows it—is to redo your annual meeting calendar. There’s no reason why the board of a charter school can’t conduct its business in four to six meetings a year. The next step is to allow only vital things to come before the board when it does meet. How does the board figure out what’s vital? I’ll explain that in next month’s article.

Brian Carpenter is author of Charter School Board University: An Introductory Course to Effective Charter School Board Governance and CEO of the National Charter Schools Institute. For questions, or assistance in developing your board, you can reach him at (989) 205-4182 or bcarpenter@nationalcharterschools.org.