Building and Maintaining Relationships Between Superintendents and School Board Members: The Approach of Two Public School Superintendents

The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted a variety of responses by organizational leaders throughout the United States and internationally. This paper explores the responses of five rural school superintendents who work in a conservative Midwestern state. Using an exploratory qualitative research design, the study analyzes interviews and documents collected remotely to adhere to current public health guidelines. The study adopted a crisis leadership perspective to explore how rural school superintendents were responding to the COVID-19 pandemic and managing the politics associated with it. Findings suggest that superintendents were acutely aware of their community’s current political stance toward the COVID-19 pandemic and were especially responsive to the individual political philosophies of their elected school board members. The superintendents did not uniformly adopt crisis leadership behaviors to respond to the circumstances created by the pandemic. Rather, superintendents responded in ways that managed the political perspectives held by their elected board members and sought to reconcile differences in the board members’ political perspectives that precluded action. As part of this reconciliation, the superintendents leveraged public health information to shape and at times change elected school board members’ perspectives. This information helped the superintendents overcome political perspectives that led some of the most conservative board members to resist widely accepted public health guidance. Implications for the field of educational leadership, research on rural superintendents, and potential revisions to superintendent preparation are discussed.

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Attitudes of Iowa school board members toward selected criticisms of public school education

10.31274/rtd-180813-341 ◽

1966 ◽

Author(s):

James Leland Robinson

Keyword(s):

Public School ◽

School Board ◽

School Education ◽

Board Members ◽

School Board Members ◽

Public School Education

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Attitudes of Iowa school board members toward selected criticisms of public school education

10.31274/rtd-180814-341 ◽

1966 ◽

Author(s):

James Leland Robinson

Keyword(s):

Public School ◽

School Board ◽

School Education ◽

Board Members ◽

School Board Members ◽

Public School Education

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School board member definitions of accountability

Journal of Educational Administration ◽

10.1108/jea-04-2016-0040 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 55 (3) ◽

pp. 280-296 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Michael R. Ford ◽

Douglas M. Ihrke

Keyword(s):

Public School ◽

Public Education ◽

School Board ◽

Charter School ◽

High Stakes Testing ◽

Governance Structure ◽

Board Members ◽

School Board Members ◽

Content Type ◽

Traditional Public School

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to determine the differing ways in which nonprofit charter and traditional public school board members define the concept of accountability in the school or schools they oversee. The findings speak to the governing consequences of shifting oversight of public education from democratically elected bodies to unelected nonprofit governing boards. Design/methodology/approach The authors use originally collected survey data from democratically elected school board members and nonprofit charter school board members in Minnesota to test for differences in how these two populations view accountability. Open-ended survey questions are coded according to a previously used accountability typology. Findings The authors find that charter school board members are more likely than traditional public school board members to define accountability through high stakes testing as opposed to staff professionalization and bureaucratic systems. Originality/value The results speak to the link between board governance structure and accountability in the public education sector, providing new understanding on the way in which non-elected charter school board members view their accountability function.

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