To govern is to decide

We are elected to the Board of Trustees to govern our local education system. The Board is responsible for ensuring that children receive an appropriate education, but it needs goals, plans, and policies in place in order to define our role as governors and our employee's role as educator. The Board of a corporation, whether it be a school board, a municipality, or a large corporation, only has one employee, the CEO, or in our case, the Superintendent. The CEO then oversees the employees and ensures the Board's goals and plans are met. The Board and the Superintendent work together to achieve the goals and plans using respective policies to make decisions. The Board of Trustees has a Board Policy Manual that it uses to make its decisions. There are only a couple of dozen policies within our local St. Paul Education Board Policy Manual. On the other hand, the Superintendent uses hundreds of Administrative Procedures in order to ensure our school system runs effectively. These policies and administrative procedures are constantly reviewed and revised, when necessary, to adjust to our evolving society.

Through its Strategic Planning process, the Board sets its Mission, Vision and Values statements that guide all of its decisions. The St. Paul Education Board of Trustees underwent a community consultation process in order to complete a full review and update of its Mission, Vision and Values statements a couple of years ago. Students, staff, parents, trustees and community members from across the division came together to answer questions and discuss the who we are as a division, as well as the future of St. Paul Education.

Our updated statements are included in Policy 1 of the Board Policy Manual and are as follows:

These are St. Paul Education's Foundation Statements and guide the Board of Trustees in all of its decisions. The remainder of board's policies can be found here.

A policy makeover for St. Paul Education

As a member of the St. Paul Education Policy Committee, it was an exciting day for me on Friday, June 12, 2009, as the Board of Trustees began a revision of our entire policies manual. I know...you're probably thinking, "What? Policies are exciting?". It's just not about revising policy, it is about reviewing and improving upon our roles as legislators within the school division. It still may not be that exciting for some of you, but it is exciting for me to see this type of change within the division.

We are using the services of Alberta School Boards Association, and more specifically, Leroy Sloan and Terry Gunderson. We are taking the hundreds of policies that exist in our current manual, extracting the ones pertaining to board governance and placing them in a new Board Governance Policy Handbook. All other "policies" that do not pertain to board governance, will become administrative procedures -- the Superintendent's "handbook." 

This shift also includes a Board Annual Work Plan, which outlines the reports and items we should be reviewing on a month-by-month basis. It just makes for more organization and streamlining our governance roles as trustees. 

The next step is for administration to review all of the remaining policies to be converted into administrative procedures. Then we will finalize our Board Handbook in the fall. These two new documents, the Board Governance Policy Handbook and the Administrative Procedures, will be posted on our new website which is also undergoing a makeover, later in the fall. 

I feel our Board has accomplished a lot since I was elected almost two years ago. Looking forward to the next school year and more progression.