The ideal size for most school boards is between 11 and 15 board members.
One of the most common problems faced by charter school boards is that they're too small.
Governing a charter school effectively takes time, energy, and a diverse set of opinions and skills to do it well.
Therefore, a new school should start out with a board of 9 - 11 trustees and plan to build to a board of eleven to fifteen members by the end of its first year of operations.
Some boards try to start with a smaller group and then hope to grow the board once the school is more established. But it takes a lot more than five people to get the work accomplished. In fact, there's usually more work in the first 18 months to two years, with less staff support, than during any other time. In this case, starting small is not an effective strategy.
Form should follow function. To arrive at a board’s ideal number of trustees, consider the skills and committees it will require.
An effective charter school should have, at a minimum, a Finance Committee, a Governance Committee, a Development Committee, an Academic Excellence Committee, and a CEO Support & Evaluation Committee.
In addition, many boards need personnel or facilities task forces, and potentially others.
Each committee should be chaired by a board member and include at least two other board members. Trustees should not serve on multiple committees, as this quickly leads to burn out. So, 11 - 15 trustees are typically needed to do the work.
There are other practical reasons why the board should be larger than one might initially think:
- Board members come with networks that help find resources in the community, raise funds, recruit new board members, etc. The bigger the board, the more networks are represented and the easier it will be to get these types of tasks accomplished.
- A charter school board should represent the widest possible set of perspectives from the broad taxpayer base. It is hard to get this wide view from a small group of people.
- A charter school is accountable to the community for millions of dollars of taxpayer money. The board must be large enough to inspire confidence that they are conducting proper oversight over these significant funds.
A point to consider
Imagine you're a skeptical member of the public or an investigative reporter. You decide to attend a meeting of your local charter school's board to see how the school is governed.
How many people would you need to see in the room to make you feel confident that the school was being governed effectively, and its funds being managed properly? How many segments of the community would you need to see represented?
If the board has five people and one person is sick and another out of town on the day of a key meeting, that leaves only three people to make critical decisions for a multimillion-dollar public enterprise. Is that enough?
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