Reading Time: 7 minutes
I am a recent transplant to Chicago. This past spring, I learned that Chicago Public Schools have an administrative governance board at each school. The Local School Council operates as an advisory group for each principal, and is pulled from the school’s community of parents, teachers, and neighbors. The news reported that the system was short of volunteers so I investigated my neighborhood school, signed up for the election, and was voted in! Now I am on a governance board and have to go through the training for each new member.
Local school councils are a statutory creation that are specific to Chicago. They have strict rules about how they operate and who can be on them. This can make it a challenge to fill spaces if the school has a small geographic base from which to pull participants. When I was doing my research, I learned that neither of the community member seats–people who live within the catchment area but who have no students at the school–were filled. As I learned later, they had not been filled for some time. I was glad to try to plug that gap.
It is not just the opportunity to volunteer. I was interested to see what it was like to be on the other side of the governance board. As an executive director at two law libraries that had their own boards, and as an employee at two organizations with lawyer-only boards, I have usually been an outsider looking in. Or perhaps, as an executive library director, a guide or shepherd for the board.
One of the things that was a constant was to be the keeper of the rules. A public board, using public monies, has certain obligations it has to fulfill in its operations. When I was in California and subject to The Brown Act, it meant that our library built in a detailed set of processes to ensure we met our obligations. We had to give notice of meetings, we had to allow for public comment, and so on. Even though I was working with lawyers and judges, we had specific training for everyone as a reminder of these requirements. But as the operational chief, I was also a bit of the enforcer to make sure the organization didn’t misstep.
It was one reason I was curious about the Local School Council model. They are subject to Illinois’ Open Meetings Act as well as other legislation. As someone with a legal background, I felt like this would be a good pond to swim in or at least it would be a familiar one.
Even better, though, training is mandatory for these roles.
An Embarrassment of Riches
I will say that I do not recall either California or Ohio having a similar training approach. It may be that the law library governance boards are much older, legislatively, and so they are not impacted. Or it may be that, constrained as they are in personnel to members of the local bar or bench, there is a feeling that the training isn’t necessary. Perhaps its because they are not always clearly public bodies, even if they are spending public monies. I believe that regular Board training would be a good thing and having it in a regimented and recorded fashion–just like a conflict of interest report annually, with supporting training–would also provide a solid baseline.
When I was signing up to run in the election, it was made clear that there was a substantial amount of training on the other side of a victory. New members would be required to take a variety of training. I expected–and it has largely been correct–that much of the training was aimed at members of the public who may never have worked with governance issues.
However, what I really liked was the operational detail they explained. I have written before about simplifying information delivery for governance boards so that it resembles common examples of the same document. For example, if your board deals with income and expenses, then a normal profit and loss statement may be the best tool for sharing that information. Yes, you may need to change “profit” to “revenue” on a non-profit statement, but otherwise the common elements remain the same. Some lawyers and judges will know how to read a P&L statement but most do not. And if you use a custom financial report, with additional language or confusing math, not only do your risk your oversight body not being able to function properly, you create barriers to people who otherwise could read your financials. Like potential new board members or, more likely, members of the public.
The Illinois Attorney General offers two public facing courses. I’d recommend them to anyone as they are a nice mixture of information about the law and then very specific hypotheticals. One is on Illinois’ Freedom of Information Act (which I have previously used to extract my own legal research subscription contracts). The other is the Open Meetings Act (OMA) training. I took both, although I really only needed the OMA class.
The Local Schools Council offers nine training courses, all of which are required for new Local School Council members. They range across budgets, open meetings, rules of order and meeting operations, advisory roles and, crucially, what is not within their purview. This was a very positive sign to me: the governance Boards I have worked with have not infrequently veered from oversight to meddling. In law libraries, both my Ohio and California boards were very good about boundaries. But a second board I worked with in California, and my observations of the governance boards at the ABA and Law Society of Ontario, frequently wandered into the weeds.
A good executive director in those situations will “firewall the stupid” but not infrequently those requests would start to consume valuable governance time. Things like the brand of technology used, or the specific negotiations around a contract as opposed to whether to buy the technology or secure the contract, with the details left to the experts.
A good training session, then, can help to remind folks what the boundaries are. The Chicago Public Schools trainings did a good job of listing what a Council should do in advising the principal and what was off limits. None of these would be surprising to someone who had already worked with a law library governance board: yes to discussing strategy, no to discussing people issues, etc.
Rubber, Meet Road
The place where the trainings could be improved was in their delivery. This can be the hardest part in delivering training. I get that. But also I feel as though content and assessment is important. It’s one of the reasons continuing legal education is largely a waste of lawyers time. Lawyers end up having to pick out what is relevant and there is no way to know if they retained anything they heard. Mandatory CLE is merely a time burden rather than any sort of guarantee of ongoing professional competence.
Those same issues arose in the training I underwent for the Council but there was much more of an educational approach. In particular, I thought the Illinois Attorney General materials were a good start. There is still more to improve, however.
Here is a screenshot of the Open Meetings Act training. You can see that the State has not spent a lot of time on user experience. The content is designed for smaller screens but not, as far as I can tell, in a responsive way.
The site is ugly. Utilitarian is perhaps a kinder word. I feel as though it could do with a bit of a glow up. But beyond that, it is boring and misses opportunities to assist readers who might be curious. This is common in legal information sites: citing to cases or statutes and then not actually linking to them, even though there are often freely available versions. No wonder journalists seem to avoid linking to the case decisions they mention in their articles.
Why not link to those cases, for example? Wouldn’t it be great to encourage people to read the law itself? Both of the cases–Better Government Association and University Professionals of Illinois–are on the Court’s website. If the information is important enough to cite to, then enable the opportunity for people to read it in context. And if not, then paraphrase it to make it more readable. Law does not need to be hidden.
The Chicago Public Schools content is a more common approach. I did not find it as engaging as they were mere videos of slide decks. The CPS offered both synchronous (virtual) and asynchronous and, after attending a synchronous session, completed the rest of the modules online on my own. The content was the same, even down to the instructor reading from the slides.
The synchronous sessions allowed for questions but also required a two-hour time commitment for one hour’s worth of content. The interactivity of the Illinois Attorney General’s training was attempted but didn’t require any action. The question was read, the reader paused, and then the answer was given.
I also felt that the detail of information was over the top. On the one hand, I get it: you need to provide people with as much information as you can so they start well-informed. But the level of detail could be overwhelming and often would not arise, if at all, until specific times of the year. I wondered if a simpler training regime might be a better one, to help them orient to running a meeting and their obligations, to the school and to the public, and leave some of the deeper detail to the time when it was needed.
The slide decks made common errors, typical of presentations made in person. Typos. Images with data on them that are shrunk to fit a slide so the text is no longer legible. Repetitive content. Information that was awkwardly worded and a heavy reliance on text when images or charts might have made the data easier to digest.
This is all completely understandable. It is the challenge of trying to deliver training to thousands of people at a time. Each of the modules covered very different content and so one might be straightforward as text while another might need more interactivity or visuals.
I ended up speeding up the videos, which were hosted on YouTube and so could be sped through at 1.5x speed (I tried 2x and was given a message in my browser that I had not spent enough time on the course). This was helpful to me because listening to a one-hour lecture is less preferable than reading a transcript, and there was no transcript that I could see, although I kept the closed captioning on.
At the end, the CPS folks had placed an assessment. Most were 10 questions, a few were shorter, and you needed a minimum score to pass and receive the certificate. I thought these were well done and were tied to the materials enough that, while I misunderstood a couple, I didn’t feel like they were either tricky or unfairly challenging.
Content Overload
One understands why some courses are repeated each year. Many of the concepts in these training courses may never come up. Or they will come up and someone will think to themselves, or say out loud, “I remember that was in a training but I don’t remember what the answer is.” There is a hope built into training that people will retain what they’ve been told. In these sorts of training programs, though, the mixture of speed and depth of detail makes retention very difficult.
It is not uncommon to go to a presentation like a CLE and hear the presenter say, “we’ll be covering a lot of ground” or, at the end, noting “I know that was a lot of information”. I frequently think to myself, then perhaps it needs to be (or needs to have been) more carefully curated? I felt like the Illinois Attorney General hit closer to the mark but the complexity of the statutes means that a training can only barely scrape the surface. There are too many what ifs to the fact patterns that are possible.
I think the CPS sessions could have been much shorter, and I would have used recorded vignettes of school principals and other Council members to speak about some of the issues, to put them in context. Yes, that increases cost and complexity but these are going to be seen by thousands, if not tens of thousands, of viewers. I think it would be a good investment. Also, some of these sessions were designed for the Council chairperson and not universally applicable. Only parents can chair a Local School Council, so gearing some of the training solely for that group–and allowing the rest of us to skip it–would have been a more deliberate approach.
I’m a bit done with training for the moment. That was 10 hours worth in just over a week and I have had training and other in-house seminars in the past few weeks. But it’s interesting to see different ways of delivering content. It would be useful for groups that have similar governance challenges to create a simple curriculum for Board members to experience (and repeat) so as to set expectations and ensure basic competencies.