Public Engagement in Five Colorado School Communities:
A Report from the Colorado Association of School Boards
By Alice Diebel
How can citizens and school boards work together to educate a community’s children?
This is the question posed by the Colorado Association of School Boards (CASB). To find an answer, the CASB studied the community-engagement efforts of five Colorado school districts.
The resulting series of unpublished cases provides examples of what can happen when local school boards attempt to change their relationship with the public. The CASB research highlights the factors that contribute to a gap between citizens and schools and among citizens themselves. These include districts with large and growing populations, professional educators who watch out for teacher self-interests, and school-board efforts to protect the educators. These factors make citizen engagement a challenge for the schools.
Despite the challenge, the CASB believes school boards are well suited to engage the local community. It sees school boards as the bridge between school professionals and citizens. The CASB recognizes that bridging diverse community and professional staff interests poses a challenge that requires school boards to lessen their focus on internal, administrative issues of accountability and instead turn attention outward to the community.
The five communities studied by the CASB had mixed success building this bridge. In three of the cases, the relationship change between the public and the school board was short lived. Because the boards had already determined the issues and the possible options to be considered before going to the public for support, the public felt betrayed. The public believed that what they had to say was being ignored and that they were simply being used to legitimate the board’s predetermined decisions. In these cases, the gap did not close, and the long-term relationship between the public and the school boards may even have deteriorated.
Two of the Colorado cases stood apart from the others and their differences can be instructive.
In the Sheridan school district, the city council and school board began collaborating to address significant community problems related to crime and safety that impacted the schools. Public forums about safety were held and were well received by the community. Enlisting others in improving the crime and safety problem helped members of the school board relate to the community as a long-term partner on issues of mutual concern. The school board and citizens worked together on what was defined as the community’s problem, not just the school’s problem. This board saw that its concerns about crime and safety should not, and could not, be resolved through internal school action alone, but required involving the larger community in understanding and addressing these concerns.
Similarly, in Jefferson County, the school superintendent redesigned the district’s governance practices to connect with the community’s values. The superintendent established regular conversations between the school board and a large segment of the community it typically did not hear from. The conversations led to policy and curricula changes that reflected the community’s values. This change in relationship between the school board and the public remained strong even when there was a change in superintendents.
The Sheridan and Jefferson cases teach the importance of changing the way school politics is done in a community. Three of the school boards saw the public in an instrumental way. They saw engagement as a way of legitimizing predetermined solutions rather than working together with citizens to identify and address shared problems. These school boards focused on issues in a way that implicated the schools as the only actor in solving the problems rather than seeing the community as having a role. They were not changing how they interacted with the public in any meaningful or lasting way.
However, in Sheridan and Jefferson counties, the change in how they interacted came before the problems were clear and the solutions determined. Conversations began with questions about what the citizens want their community and schools to be and then moved to more specific issues.
These two cases demonstrate that school boards can establish mutually satisfying long-term relationships with the public. Yet for this to happen, boards must understand that they have a commitment to the public that includes building an ongoing relationship to address concerns that require a whole-community response. The Sheridan and Jefferson school systems minimized the kind of internal board politics typically seen in school boards and turned to their community for supportive deliberation.
For changes like this to occur, the school and school boards need to revise their understanding of the roles they and the public can play. When given a chance to engage authentically in decision making, the public is likely to step up to the plate. It is this kind of intentional change in relationships that creates the fertile environment needed for citizens to engage problems publicly over time.
Alice Diebel is a program officer at the Kettering Foundation.