Appropriate Number of Goals, Budget Votes, & Unauthorized Expenditures

TESBM: The number of goals you adopt matters because the school board that prioritizes everything is the school board that prioritizes nothing. We recommend 1-3 goals, no more than 5. This is one of the hardest challenges for leaders: focusing on being effective at 1, 2 or 3 things and accepting that it doesn't feel good, rather than doing what feels good -- having 20 goals -- at the expense of being effective. In the moments when you have to choose, would you rather look/feel good for you or be effective for students? The school board should identify the 1-3 highest priority areas of the community's vision for what students should know and/or be able to do, and use those to set the goals.

TESBM: You're not alone. School system financials are typically challenging because of state legislative requirements. We recommend learning about school system financials to support your role (here's a great place to start). But as a school board member, being an expert in finances isn't your job. A budget is a vision and values document, and your job is to ask questions to understand alignment between the community's vision and values and the school system's resource use. Your job is to represent the community's vision and values, not to be an education, legal, or financial expert. School boards are the community vision and values experts. So the first step to evaluating whether to vote in favor of a budget is for the school board to adopt the community's vision and values -- we call these Goals and Guardrails. Once you know the Goals and Guardrails, ask the superintendent how much of last year's budget focused on Goals accomplishment and how that varies this year. Do not automatically assume there's alignment; it's the superintendent's job to convince you there's alignment between the Goals and Guardrails, and resource allocation.

In this district, the superintendent said the $870m spent without school board authorization was a "good faith error." Without insider details (the subscriber who shared this isn't a board member), what would you do? Go here to share what you would do in this situation. In the next newsletter, we'll share your responses and our coaching.

Here's research on the number of goals an organization should have for effectiveness. Our recommendations match their conclusions.

If you haven't read Project 2025's Department of Education section, it's worth reading to prepare for constituent questions. Whether you support or oppose the proposals, it's better to know the ideas being put forward than rely on someone else's opinion.

A subscriber asked us to watch the December meetings of a school board in Florida. Here are the highlights from the combined workshop/business meetings: