As you recruit board members, whether for a founding board or as you scale, it’s vital to assess the needs of the organization.
The skills of the trustees should complement the skills of the staff. The ideal board brings a depth of expertise that the staff of the school might never have.
There are a few key skills ever charter school board needs to have represented.
The skills that charter school boards most commonly need are:
Finance: accounting, banking, insurance, risk management
Fundraising: face-to-face solicitation, networking
Governance: previous board experience
Human Resources: employee benefits, grievances, compensation, CEO annual reviews
Public Relations: marketing, working with the media
Facilities: real estate, facilities finances, construction management
Depending on your strategic goals or charter promises, your board might need additional skills or need more representation in one skill set vs. the others.
Your Members Report reveals exactly which skills your trustees currently bring to the table, and how that will change over the next three years as trustees’ terms end.
What about legal expertise?
A lawyer can be a great addition to a board. However, a lawyer on your board should not serve as the school’s legal counsel. He or she can help you think about when it might make sense to get your legal counsel’s advice. But the board should also retain independent legal counsel.
What about educational expertise?
Educators with high-level school management experience can contribute needed skills to the board — especially if they’ve run a school.
For example, retired leaders of independent schools can make excellent trustees. They know what it’s like to report to a board, often have great fundraising skills, and are well versed in governance and management issues.
Just keep in mind that, as with all things in governance, balance is key. Too many educators on a charter school board can make it difficult to keep the focus on governance.
When recruiting new trustees, make sure they agree to use the skill set you expect.
If you’re recruiting a potential board member because they have an outstanding track record as a fundraiser for the local hospital, make sure they’re willing to use this skill for the benefit of your organization as well.
Sometimes, trustees are happy to use their professional skills on behalf of a board; sometimes, they’re looking to hone new skills. Make sure you’re explicit with them about why you’re recruiting them and what you expect of them.
Strategically build in some redundancy.
Too often, boards look for only one person with a particular skill set and then move on to the next skill to fill. Boards can use more than one person with most of the skills listed above. Make sure you’re building bench strength to ensure you’ve got a solid succession plan.
Round out your board's skill sets with non-voting committee members.
We highly recommend having non-board members serve on your committees. It’s a great way to try people out; to add certain skills and expertise to the right committees. And it’s less of a commitment to ask somebody to serve on your committee than on your full board, so can be an excellent route to recruiting.
See our sample policy for nominating non-voting committee members.
Note – the CEO Support & Evaluation Committee is the only exception to this recommendation. The nature of the work requires the leadership of full board members.
The Members Report keeps track of your board's skills, and which you need to fill.
As your organization grows, your board will grow alongside it. And it’ll continue to be even more important to have the right people in the right roles, doing the right work.
You’ll need to keep a close eye on what skills you need today, and what skills your organization will need in its trustees in the future. This means knowing who’s on the board, whose terms will be coming to an end, and how that changes the skills you need your trustees to fill.
This can be a lot to manage. It’s why we built a three-year recruiting roadmap into the BoardOnTrack platform.
The skills highlighted in the BoardOnTrack Members Report are the skills that are vital to run your multimillion-dollar public entity.
When each trustee completes their personal profile, the platform pulls all that data together for you and keeps it up to date. So you always have at-a-glance visibility into what skills are represented on your board today, and how that’ll change over the next three years.
And, each skills category includes its own subcategories.
For instance, click into the detail view for Academic Excellence and you’ll see how your board stacks up in these four key skills within that category:
This level of detail is key.
Simply having educators on the board is not enough. To meet your specific charter promises, your board needs to have the right mix of the targeted education-related skills that fit your goals.
This holds true for each of the categories highlighted by your Members Report.
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