Open Meetings, Agenda Setting, & Budget Alignment
QUESTIONS AND RESPONSES
Question: When a board member is accused of violating open meetings law, what process should the board use to investigate the allegation and decide on any censure, ensuring it follows its own governance policies and protects the board’s integrity? -- Board Member in Missouri
TESBM: The first question for the board is whether this belongs in your hands at all. Open meetings law is a legal question, not a governance implementation question. Boards are not in a position to investigate their own members for legal violations. This simply is not the board’s area of expertise. Policy violations? Maybe. Legal violations? The board lacks the independence, the procedure, and the standing to adjudicate fairly.
A legal allegation deserves a legal process: refer the matter to your legal counsel or the appropriate state authority, and let an independent body weigh the facts.
Censure is something else entirely. Censure is a political statement by public officials, not a finding of fact. That said, we recommend that it only ever be used after some type of finding of facts. Use it sparingly, transparently, and only after the legal question is settled elsewhere.
Question: What board-level policy should govern agenda-setting and the removal of items from public agendas, to ensure transparency, public trust, and compliance with open meeting laws? -- Board Member in Michigan
TESBM: First, we see all of board policy — policy that the board should own and no one else — as answering one of four questions:
Goals: What is the community’s SMART prioritized vision for what students should know and be able to do?
Guardrails: What are the community’s non-negotiable values that must be honored while en route to accomplishing the Goals?
Delegation: What’s the relationship between the board and its direct reports?
Governing: What’s the relationship between the board, its members, and its community?
So given those as options, the direct answer to your question is: this is part of the board’s governing policy. We encourage boards to adopt a written governing policy describing how items reach the agenda, who may add them, and how the public sees items before a meeting. That policy is the transparency mechanism -- not the removal itself, but the visibility of how removal happens. Backlash is rarely about removed items; it’s usually about removal without explanation. Those are two very different problems. The first is procedural, the second is a failure of trust. Open Meetings Act compliance sets the floor of board behavior, not the ceiling. The law tells you what you must post and when. How you keep a community believing the process is honest is a critical part of the board’s work. Adopt the principle of public visibility, then hold the board and superintendent accountable for honoring it.
Question: What process can we use to ensure every budget decision ties directly to our strategic goals, rather than just adjusting last year’s numbers? -- Board Member in Illinois
TESBM: The first question is whether your board has adopted Goals about student outcomes. If your “strategic goals” aren’t SMART or are operations-focused, then simply adjusting last year’s numbers may be the most useful thing to do. Without adopted Goals that are SMART and that describe what students should know and/or be able to do, budget decisions aren’t meaningfully connected to student learning. Confirm you have adopted student outcome Goals that are SMART.
With those in hand, require the superintendent to present next year’s budget not as a percentage change from last year, but as a resource plan mapped to each Goal. During monitoring, ask whether the funded strategies from last year that are showing up again in this year’s budget actually produced the targeted outcomes. And if not, the budget conversation must change. The intention isn’t to spend less money during budgeting. The intention is using the board’s budget authority to efficiently and effectively improve outcomes for students.
Teachers need coaches to be their best. Principals need coaches to be their best. Superintendents need coaches to be their best. School boards need coaches to be their best. If your school board wants support to be great on behalf of the students you serve, click below for a free consultation.
INTERESTING READS & LISTENS
The Education Gadfly discusses emerging trends in U.S. school board governance -- like shifting board powers, electoral dynamics, and accountability expectations.
A discussion with an elected school board member from Chicago.
Interesting ideas about how to measure human flourishing.
BOARD MEETING ANALYSIS
A subscriber asked us to watch the June meeting of a school board in Indiana. Here are the highlights from the Regular Board Meeting:
Total Minutes: 0
Minutes Focused on Student Outcomes: 0 (0.0%)
Key Topics: Electronic Monitoring Policy, Grant Transfer Request, Partnership with PD, Community Corrections Program, FY2026 Budget Administration
What Coach Celebrates:
The board efficiently handled legally required items such as the Electronic Monitoring Policy and Grant Transfer Request, demonstrating disciplined attention to compliance duties.
Proactive discussions about the partnership with PD and the Community Corrections Program reflect a strong commitment to community safety and student well-being.
Thorough review of the FY2026 Community Corrections Grant Transfer Request illustrated responsible fiscal oversight in resource allocation.
What Coach Recommends:
Dedicate the majority of meeting time to monitoring adopted Student Outcome Goals, replacing operational updates with data-driven reviews of summative achievement metrics.
Reframe agenda items around their connection to student outcomes.
Direct the superintendent to provide concise pre-meeting progress reports on end-of-cycle goals so the board focuses on evaluating results rather than implementation details.
UPCOMING OPPORTUNITIES
Effective Meeting Disruption Management
Have some of your meetings gotten a bit challenging to manage. Have tempers flared or things been said that can’t easily been taken back? Whether those decorum challenges are coming from staff, community members, or board members, there are more and less effective ways to management the disruptions. Let’s get into it together.
12pm central on Friday, July 10, 2026
Did you miss last month's 30-minute free webinar? Email Greg for a make-up session on any of our growing list of topics, including governance policy, delegation policy, effective budgeting, superintendent evaluation, professional services management, strategic planning, consent agendas, and more.
BONUS MATERIALS
For paid subscribers, here are links to additional resources (to gain access to the links below, please consider subscribing):
Additional details about the analyzed meeting:
Meeting Analysis
Board Meeting Video
Meeting Agenda
Strategic Plan
Guidance documents related to this issue:
Effective Agenda Design
Effective Budget Alignment
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