Facilities, AI, Monitoring, & Coaching

TESBM: Your question assumes two prior questions have been answered. Who should draft the policy? And who should adopt it? Answer those first. Then come back to the specifics.

Drafting belongs to whoever has the expertise. The school board has one area of expertise: representing the vision and values of the community. The board isn’t an operations expert, a facilities expert, or a legal expert. A policy about running polling places in school buildings requires expertise the board does not possess. Staff or external partners should draft it.

Adopting belongs to whoever is willing to do the work of ownership. Ownership means two things: monitoring and reviewing. Monitoring means checking performance against the policy at least once per year. Reviewing means asking whether the policy should still exist, at least once per term. If the board is willing to do both -- and can do so without losing its 50% focus on student outcomes -- then the board can reasonabl choose to adopt the policy. Otherwise, it should delegate.

Most boards claim ownership of hundreds of pages of policies they never monitor or review. That is negligent governance. It’s like the child who begs to adopt a puppy and then refuses to care for it and feed it.

In this case, start by checking what the law requires. The law may already assign this responsibility to someone else. If it does not and the community has communicated this as one of its top 1-3 values-based priorities, then the board could draft a Guardrail that names the specific value to be protected. Security, fair access, and political neutrality are community values for which a Guardrail could be the right tool. The board drafts the value policy; staff drafts the operational policy to implement it.

If the community has not communicated this as a top priority, delegate it. The board's job is to choose what it keeps and what it delegates. That choice is itself effective governance because the board that attempts to care about everything is the board that cares about nothing. Students benefit when the board spends its policy capacity on what only the board can do.

TESBM: The same two questions apply. Who should draft it? And who should adopt it?

The issue of technological intelligence — LLMs, machine learning, neural networks, etc — definitely will require deep technical expertise. The board's expertise is in representing the vision and values of the community. If the board’s listening reveals that the community is demanding restrictions on technology use in classrooms, then the board may choose to evaluate if this is a values priority worthy of removing and replacing an existing Guardrail with. That Guardrail would name the non-negotiable value: what students must not experience because of technological intelligence.

But after that, staff still needs to draft the operational elements of any policy within it because this is such a technical and operational topic. Staff has expertise in the tools, the risks, and the classroom realities.

The board should definitely not try to draft a comprehensive policy on technological intelligence. That document would be hundreds of pages, will be obsolete before it is adopted, and the board would struggle to effectively monitor it given rapid changes in the technology. Instead, the board asks one question: is there a community value about technological intelligence that is non-negotiable? If yes, write it into a Guardrail and monitor the value. If no, delegate it.

This same effective policy ledership approach applies to screen time, school namings, and every other topic that keeps showing up at board meetings. Not every topic that comes up frequently is a board priority. The board makes the choice about what qualifies. Students are better served when the board governs through values rather than attempting to manage every emerging topic.

TESBM: Board leaders often assume this is only their challenge. It isn’t. It’s just as often a superintendent challenge. You will need to address both.

On the board side, the facilitator of the monitoring conversation -- usually the board chair -- should stay vigilant for questions that are technical or tactical. Most questions during monitoring should be strategic. A strategic question asks about alignment between board-adopted priorities and the superintendent's approach. A technical question asks how something was measured. A tactical question asks how a specific step was taken. When a board member asks a technical or tactical question, the chair can ask them to reframe it as a strategic question or note that it can be answered in the next weekly update to the board.

On the superintendent side, the superintendent must be prepared to answer every question through a strategic lens. If the superintendent isn’t clear about their own strategy, they tend slide into technical or tactical answers. They’ll start describing what they did instead of why it aligns to the Goal. Said directly: superintendents can be their own worst enemies in this conversation. Until the superintendent becomes more effective at clarifying strategy, no amount of discipline on the board's part will fix the drift.

We recommend the board chair and the superintendent discuss this together before the next monitoring cycle. Agree on what a strategic question looks like. Agree on what a strategic response from the superintendent looks like. Then the board holds itself to strategic questions and the superintendent holds themselves to strategic answers. Both sides are responsible for making the monitoring conversation work.

TESBM: As compensation? No, for the same reason that the cost of coaches for a teacher isn’t considered part of their compensation. As part of their contract? Yes. Every board and superintendent who wants to improve their effectiveness should have a coach. This is a reasonable performance investment that we seem to all understand makes sense for students, teachers, and principals, but seem to forget about when it comes to superintendents and school board members.

As with many situations, the amount of treasure (in dollars) involved is often a product of how much time (in hours) and talent (in expertise) is involved. One hour per month of a fairly inexperienced coach is very different than one week per quarter shadowing and weekly check-ins with a very experienced coach. Coaching is not the same as training — where you have a three hour session once per year and then nothing. Almost everything superintendents and school board members experience that’s called coaching is actually training. Training is necessary and important, it’s just not the same as coaching. Coaching happens weekly throughout the year, heavily embedded into ongoing practice, and deeply personalized.

A reasonable approach to annual superintendent coaching might involve a single coach engaged for 150+ hours — weekly check-ins, in-person shadowing, training sessions, document review, cabinet advising, etc. A reasonable approach to annual school board coaching might triple that for a board of 5-9 people.

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Join us next month for a conversation about nurting biological intelligence in the age of technological intelligence. This topic has been requested for quite a while now so we look forward to the conversation.

11am central on Friday, October 9, 2026

RSVP Here

The school board spent the majority of its November meeting immersed in reading data, a strategic choice that reflects genuine commitment to the district's stated literacy goals. The meeting opened with student recognitions and quickly moved into a detailed review of beginning-of-year iReady assessment results for kindergarten through second grade, followed by campus-level reading performance breakdowns.