Job Interview: School Committee

A couple weeks ago I wrote about . Let's consider how that could apply to a Belmont School Committee campaign.

First, formally, for part of the job description, the Mass Dept. of Education has an excellent summary of Education Laws and Regulations, which directly applies. It would be a lot of work to fully digest all the responsibilities, but this summary nicely touches on the major points.

In Belmont, the most important role, or at least the most demanding, over the next year are budget development and hiring a new superintendent. The skills involved are far-reaching, much patience is needed and members need a very thick skin.

Budget: Any school budget of Belmont's magnitude is quite complex. I've done software design for 25 years, and a school budget is on par with the most complex most systems I've dealt with. School Committee members have to balance many, often conflicting, pieces – academic needs, sports, arts, salaries, utilities, special ed, benefits, building maintenance, union contracts, tax revenue, state aid, fees –and they are all moving as they are being considered. Then mix in various groups – parents, empty-nester taxpayers, Selectmen, Warrant Committee –saying too much or too little is spent in their areas of interest. 

I also think of a school budget as a unified expression of priorities and policy. Candidates' thoughts on where our resources, both money and time, should be allocated address this, as do their ideas for the process at arriving at an adequate and fair budget.

Superintendent search: Interviewing and hiring experience is a big plus here. This could include part of candidates' day jobs or volunteer efforts. In the abstract this includes assessing needs, interviewing, recruiting, selling the organization to the candidate and negotiating a contracts. In practice, for Belmont, it includes determining the characteristics that will complement the rest of the system, making Belmont attractive to the candidate. The pool of superintendents and other high-level administrators is small, and we cannot offer much in terms of money, staff or resources for large initiatives.

Not written into law, but vitally important, is the School Committee's position between competing and collaborating entities; parents, taxpayers, administration, teachers, Selectmen, Warrant Committee and Town Meeting. You can never make everyone happy, but having the professional respect and trust of all the above groups, as much as possible, is imperative for success. Empathy goes a long way here.

Schools are unlike most other government services. The immediate consumers of this service – 4,000 plus children and their parents – are passionately vested in the system. Kindergarten to 12th grade students are in school for 13 years, and schools' impact can last a lifetime. A large fraction of those parents, and several thousand others, are financially vested too, since Belmont property values are highly dependent on the reputation of the school system.

Lucille Ball is credited with this quote, which applies to the School Committee: "If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it. The more things you do, the more you can do." I think this definitely applies to School Committee members in any district. (The same goes for Selectmen.) The most successful committee members have juggled some combination of jobs, kids, spouses, other volunteer work, classes, jobs and social lives. Being able to manage the chaos can save you.

Part of the campaign – or the interview for School Committee – is demonstrating a proven track record in all these areas and convince the voters that they can grow in them. Yes, it's nice to like candidates we vote for, but we are putting them in place to do a job for us. This applies whether to a town position or president.

To sum it up in a sentence: which candidates are the voters going to trust with making educational decisions affecting 4,000 children, wisely managing a $42 million organization and evolving the system to meet future needs?