As school board members, we have the important job of listening to constituents to ensure that our local public schools accurately reflect the values of our community, provide outstanding learning experiences for all children and produce future-ready graduates.
Within the last year, our Bellingham School District board implemented a new leadership model called policy governance. This helps our board focus on getting results for high-quality student achievement and avoids having us micro-manage how our superintendent and staff achieve these desired outcomes for our 10,900 students.
During a regular school board meeting, a member of the public can address the board for up to three minutes, but this isn't an opportunity for the board to respond. This can be frustrating for community members who are often referred to staff who can help them or for those who want to discuss issues in greater depth. Under our policy governance model, we are able to have different types of school board meetings called "linkages," which provide a much more authentic way for us to listen to our community. Based on what we hear, we work as a board to reshape the desired outcomes for our students.
So far, we've met with parent leaders of our schools, local early childhood education experts, parent representatives from our Latino community and, most recently, local business leaders.
We listened to our parent leaders about the role of parent organizations in our Bellingham public schools. They engaged in thoughtful conversation about the increasing reliance on parent organizations, such as PTAs, to fund before- and after-school programs and the inequities this creates for elementary school students, especially those without an active parent organization or fundraising capabilities.
The early-childhood experts we met with influenced the decision last year to locally fund full-time kindergarten for all students in Bellingham public schools and they urged us to explore more preschool opportunities in the future.
During our Latino community linkage last spring, we learned about the strong desire of our Latino parents whose home language is Spanish to engage in their children's education and the communication challenges they face. As a result, this school year, a Spanish-speaking district staff liaison is supporting families; open secretarial positions in transportation and some schools, as well as some principal positions, have been filled by bilingual speakers; and teachers are receiving professional development and support for helping students learn English, resulting in increased personalized instruction for all students - regardless of what languages they speak.
Most recently with our business leaders, we listened to what skill sets they need in our graduates to provide them with local, living-wage jobs. Our K-12 schools and our area's higher education opportunities are a critical investment for a strong local economy and the safe, vibrant community in which we live.
Our local business leaders emphasized the workplace skills required beyond academics, including focus, concentration, time management, preparedness, organization, social responsibility and ownership, but most importantly self-motivation and drive. This feedback, for example, helps our board shape policy involving life and learning skills as well as personal attributes and ethics for our students. This results in our superintendent and staff seeking programs or strategies that benefit the whole child. Our business community also helped us think about performance metrics to measure our success or opportunities for improvements in this area of character education, which is too often neglected with a national emphasis on standardized test scores and No Child Left Behind.
We are planning more community linkages later this school year to connect with our local nonprofit organizations and civic leaders. If you have ideas for future linkages, please submit them to our online listening post at http://bellinghamschools.org/form/school-board-listening-post. Meeting minutes from our community linkages are posted at http://bellinghamschools.org/communityboard-linkage.
Our school board is already seeing the benefits for our Bellingham schools students of taking a more active and engaged role with our community. We are fortunate to live in a community that highly values education and generously supports our local schools. Thank you.
Ann Whitmyer is president of the Bellingham School District board of directors. She was appointed to the school board in April 1997, elected in 1997, re-elected in 1999, 2003 and 2007 and is retiring later this month after 14 years of volunteer service.
