What Are School Boards Allowed to Do?

People don’t usually run for school board because they want everything to stay the same. They run with big ideas about how to make sure our schools are meeting the needs of our students. I was no exception.

After I was elected, I began trying to figure out how to turn my campaign platform into tangible change. I’d said I would advocate for several things when I was a candidate and my community elected me with the expectation that I would do my best to follow through on those commitments.

I figured the best way to do that was to tell the people around me exactly what I hoped to change and ask for their advice on how to approach those proposals. That didn’t work very well for me.

I remember, the day after I was sworn in, telling an administrator that I wanted to talk about expanding yellow school bus services to more of our schools. Several schools had lost this service and had to rely on metro transit. To be clear, it was exciting that kids were being connected to public transit, but the metro didn’t have great coverage on my side of town and several parents and students had come forward with anecdotes about unsafe situations; so I thought it was at least worth a discussion.

I asked the administrator how much it would cost to fund yellow buses for all students. The administrator gave a non-answer about how it probably wasn’t a good idea, which wasn’t what I’d asked. I asked what the process was for getting an agenda item to discuss it. They gave another non-answer about how they’d worked really hard on the status quo, which wasn’t what I’d asked. I tried to find out when in the budget cycle the board could direct the administration to fund yellow buses. I got another non-answer about how the board receives reports on transportation operations, which wasn’t what I’d asked.

Many people imagine school boards to be similar to city councils or legislatures in governance structure, but boards are generally encouraged to act like a corporate board of directors — asking a few questions here and there, receiving reports, but rarely directing the work of the CEO (superintendent). I ran for school board criticizing the existing board for being inactive, ineffective, and for being a rubber stamp. I didn’t realize how bad it was. I kept writing proposals to address community concerns and to change the way our board and district operated. No other board member ever reached out to me about anything they wanted to do. It just wasn’t done. Other board members and our administration acted like I was being a nuisance. Ideas for change didn’t come from board members and nobody would give me an answer about the “right” way to advance proposals for change. I had lots of ideas, but nowhere to put them.

I found myself in increasingly intense disagreements about the role of the board. It became more and more apparent that the administration believed the board should stay out of their way as they ran the district. And the board as a whole was not interested in challenging this dynamic.

Time and time again, I would try to have conversations about what the board COULD do and the administration would shift that conversation toward what they believed the board SHOULD do. But how can the board have a conversation on equal footing with administration about what the board should do if they don’t even know what they can do? Boards that don’t understand their own authority are in no position to make effective governance decisions.

So what can school boards do? I think it’s worth qualifying this question slightly. School districts as a whole are given the authority to make decisions for their own schools and operations. There are statutory and contractual limitations on the district’s authority and every state has slightly different requirements of their school districts. So the real question to ask, when trying to determine a generalizable answer for what a school board can do, is what authority does a school board have to govern its school district within the bounds of law and contract? Put another way: who is in charge of making decisions within these bounds, the school board or the superintendent?

Method

I visited the websites of each state government to collect the statutes that establish school boards and school board authority. I looked specifically for what they said about the school board’s role, the superintendent’s role, and how they relate to one another.

For each state, I sorted the statute into one of three buckets: Full Authority, where the board defines the superintendent’s entire role and the superintendent’s powers exist only because the board created them; Partial Authority, where the statute names at least one specific superintendent duty or power directly, independent of anything the board decided; and Superintendent-Directed, which would mean the superintendent has statutory authority to direct or guide the board’s work to some degree.

One state, Hawaii, doesn’t have local school boards at all. It has one statewide school district; so it is excluded from this analysis.

Findings

The school board is primarily responsible for everything that happens in a school district. In most cases, the entirety of the superintendent’s role is something the board itself decides.

In 39 of 49 states, statute gives the school board complete authority to determine the roles and responsibilities of the superintendent. The statutory language is direct almost everywhere you look. North Carolina’s boards “shall prescribe the duties of the superintendent.” Nevada’s boards, by statute, are required to “define the powers and fix the duties of the superintendent of schools.” Mississippi opens its description of the superintendent’s job with a single sentence: the duty is “to implement the decisions of the school board.” Ohio simply names the position what it is: “the executive officer for the board.” Georgia states it about as directly as any state in this review: “the fundamental role of a local board of education shall be to establish policy for the local school system… the fundamental role of a local school superintendent shall be to implement the policy established by the local board.” The same statute goes further, stating that a board “shall not delegate or attempt to delegate its policy-making” authority except where state law specifically allows it. The board is prohibited from giving away its authority to the superintendent.

Even in the states where a superintendent is given some statutory authority independent of their school board, that authority is usually focused on personnel and is nearly always framed as the authority to make recommendations on personnel or other aspects of school governance. Those recommendations are still subject to board approval.

Only three states come close to giving the superintendent authority to actually decide something on their own, rather than merely recommend it, without the board delegating that specific power first. New Mexico’s statute gives the superintendent direct authority to “employ, fix the salaries of, assign, terminate or discharge all employees of the school district.” Vermont lets its superintendent directly select and dismiss non-licensed employees outright, no board vote required, even though the same statute still requires board involvement when the position is a licensed one. Louisiana’s statute requires the board to delegate hiring and placement authority for all school personnel to the superintendent, and separately bars any individual board member from interfering with a personnel decision the superintendent has made.

And finally, a finding worth stating on its own, because it runs against what a lot of board members are trained to believe: not one state’s statute gives the superintendent the authority to direct the school board’s work. Zero. A striking number of board members spend their entire tenure operating under some version of the opposite assumption. They believe that it’s the superintendent’s job to tell the board what to do, or at least to set the board’s agenda and boundaries. That is not the case.

Conclusion

When I spoke to that administrator about yellow buses, I thought I was asking fairly simple questions that were in line with my role as a school board member. I found myself running into a wall, constructed by a belief, held through the administration and my board, that questions like mine simply weren’t the board’s to ask. This belief is common in school districts across the United States, but it is not based on statute. It’s manufactured by administrators, school board associations, and governance consultants.

School boards are allowed to do so much more than they generally believe they’re allowed to do. Boards can set the budget, hire and fire the superintendent, adopt curriculum, create the school calendar, set graduation requirements, approve bond issues, set policies on an expansive number of subjects. They can put items on agendas against the will of the superintendent and make decisions their administration disagrees with. They can hire their own attorney or auditor that does not report to the superintendent. They can create their own process for hearing directly from community members and investigate community concerns. They can bargain contracts directly with district employees. They can control the district’s communications operations. School boards have far more authority than they tend to realize or exercise.

I do want to make clear that I am not arguing that school boards should get rid of their superintendents and try to do everything themselves. This article is about what school boards can do, not what they should do, because so few school board members are given a clear answer about the furthest bounds of their own authority.

The entirety of the superintendent’s role (in the vast majority of cases) is determined by the school board. Every authority that the superintendent has is delegated to them by the school board. And there are many good reasons for task delegation and many good reasons to avoid micromanaging on delegated tasks.

The superintendent, and the district’s administrators, have specialized training, experience, and expertise that school board members may not have. This perspective is incredibly valuable for the district’s work and should be harnessed. There are innumerable tasks in the school district apparatus that are best handled through quick and efficient decision-making and don’t make sense to come to the full board for approval. Board micromanagement can lead to a hostile or dysfunctional work environment. And some tasks are so time-intensive that they just need to be handled by a full time staff member (there is only one full time school board in the United States: Los Angeles Unified).

The superintendent is a critically important position in any school district. The superintendent should be put in a position to succeed and to make decisions as necessary. But the board is still the authority in the district and can intervene and take on decision-making when appropriate. As the school board is developing its relationship with its superintendent and administrative team, they should have a complete understanding of what they can do so they can have a fully-informed conversation about what they should do.

There is a clear answer to the question of whether the school board or the superintendent is in charge of the school district. The school board is in charge — if they decide to be.

Works Cited

Alabama — Ala. Code §§ 16–9–1, 16–9–13, 16–9–23. Alabama Legislature, official Code of Alabama portal (ALISON). https://alison.legislature.state.al.us/code-of-alabama

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Tennessee — Tenn. Code Ann. § 49–2–301. Tennessee’s official code, like Georgia’s and Colorado’s, is published through a contracted Lexis arrangement rather than a direct state deep link; the General Assembly’s home page is https://www.capitol.tn.gov. Text confirmed via Justia’s mirror of the official code: https://law.justia.com/codes/tennessee/

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