Board-Savvy Superintendent
Streamlining the Board Committee Structure
By Nicholas D. Caruso Jr./School Administrator, December 2015


A while back, I was working with a board of education on governance — in particular, how the board members could remodel their leadership practices to focus attention on what really mattered: student achievement. I discovered this board had nine separate standing board subcommittees. When I asked how that came to be, board members said the arrangement enabled each of the nine board members to chair a committee.

I discovered one committee was named Cafeteria and Athletics. It was formed because one board member was interested in both. There were so many committees that they rarely could get a quorum of any committee to actually hold a meeting.

As we started talking about effective board leadership (I refused to let them use the term “efficient”), it became clear just how much work these committees created for the superintendent and central-office staff. Every meeting generated hours of staff preparation and required various administrators and staff to attend the meetings — almost always involving the superintendent. The board understood this was not necessarily the best use of their chief executive officer’s time and asked for help in restructuring their committee process.

A Helpful Matrix

It is rare, indeed, to find a governing board happy with its committee structure. They have too many or too few. They do too much or too little. A recent study by Board and Administrator newsletter showed that about a third of school boards have no subcommittees at all (operating as a committee of the whole), about a third have three or four subcommittees and some boards have up to 17 (I can’t imagine!). What works for one district may not work for another. The key is to determine what, specifically, the role of the committee is. Some committees delve into matters better served by the committee of the whole. Some spend time doing work better handled by staff. Most boards could benefit from talking about how committee work benefits the broader governance structure.

In this case, we spent a lot of time talking about what committees did, and after some good discussion, the board determined it could set up three committees to handle all the work: teaching and learning, policy and finance. We then created a matrix with four columns: (1) Committee name, (2) What the committee does, (3) How it could be done better and (4) Which committee would now do the work. We then talked about each committee in turn. We spent most of our time on the second column, asking the same question each time: “Is there a more effective way of making this decision?”

The board recognized they would be better served if many decisions that currently were being made in committees were regulated by policy language that would guide administration to a better resolution to the problem.

In cases where a subcommittee still might be called upon, the board quickly determined that any issue could easily be covered by one or more of the three new committees.

In the work we do with the Lighthouse Project, a research-based program that helps focus school boards on improving student achievement (founded on a study by the Iowa School Boards Foundation), we often refer boards to “the work that only the board can do.” Board subcommittees often are places where boards focus on work that would be better done by someone else. Part of the focus of the board’s work has to be determining if it is appropriate for staff to do the work and how much guidance through policy there should be.

What’s Critical?

In essence, streamlining the committee process is really about streamlining the work of the board. Is it critical to the mission of the district? Is this the work that only the board can do?

This becomes part of a much larger question: What is the role of the board in governing the district? Boards that spend their time talking about sports team captains and the cost of a pint of milk are not talking about increasing students’ math scores or how to improve reading.

Taking a good look at subcommittees and what role they serve in board governance can help refocus the work of the district.


Nick Caruso is senior staff associate for field service and coordinator of technology with the Connecticut Association of Boards of Education in Wethersfield, Conn. E-mail: ncaruso@cabe.org. Twitter: @gibsonjunkie