Let’s say Ward Cleaver had served as treasurer on the Mayfield School Board. Before each meeting, a harried secretary would update his packet with updates. She would collect his bulky binder; mimeograph the minutes, agenda and appendices; file each page behind the appropriate divider; and return it to Ward’s office downtown. She would repeat this process for every member of the board. Lucky for her, school boards don’t have branch offices in Singapore! At a multinational corporation, she’d have to pack each one up to mail it to far-flung offices. The meeting would lob along at a snail’s pace from the oral roll call to the sleepy adjournment.
Since then, computers have made us more informed shoppers, more productive widget-makers, better-connected global citizens and faster typists. Why would the Mayfield School Board meetings feel eerily familiar? It would seem that only the photocopier has changed. Board software and portals could be making your school board leaner, faster, smarter and greener.
Brass Tacks: The Packet
Today that secretary is an administrative assistant who may work only part-time in a building that is more George Jetson than Ward Cleaver. The technology that orchestrated the Arab Spring is at her disposal. Has her job description changed? Is the meeting any smarter than it was? Software and portals can make searchable board packets faster to produce, easier to edit and kinder to the planet. Links in the document bring needed references to your fingertips, and templates generate colorful, robust illustrations.
Think about what goes into your board packet: the agenda, past minutes, budgets, project timetables, supporting documents, policies and more. A board portal can make these documents astronomically better than their paper-based cousins:
- Between meetings, some documents will need to pass through an approval tree in a specific sequence. The entire process is managed automatically, eliminating altogether cluttered inboxes and administrative headaches altogether.
- Documents concerning project management or strategic plans require visual timelines. Built-in templates make it a snap to generate customized charts that put to shame the clumsy counterparts that most of us can generate on MS Word – or even MS Excel.
- Unlike paper-based counterparts, the agenda can include links to supporting articles or files.
- Like the binder, the portal includes an archive that stores historical documents for reference. (Didn’t we vote on a recess policy last February?)
Each board member has retrieved the new materials from the board portal, where the administrative assistant has found a one-stop shop for papers that everybody shares at once. Goodbye, photocopies. Goodbye, postage. Goodbye, six-hour road race to substitute newly revised pages in all of the binders. Goodbye, paper mills turning forests into deserts. The document storage feature keeps board materials current and safe.
- Unlike emailed materials, the document storage contains only the latest version of edited documents – after the software facilitated asynchronous editing by disparate collaborators: Over a matter of weeks, numerous contributors leave input in one central spot. The portal has tracked all of the versions. Role-based permissions give a sole editor the authority to submit the final documents that consolidate those inputs. A synchronous editing feature could even have them working on the same draft, with others’ revisions visible in the margins.
- The materials are perfectly secure, as the portal offers tighter controls than other file-storage options on the market. Adding to the security and ease, no paper copies are left lying around.
Result: Better Meetings
With these materials in front of them, board members can find anything they may need in the course of the meeting. But that’s not all. A strong board portal can also:
- Record attendance.
- Record votes, count them instantaneously and post results.
- Collate comments and tally results of public polls taken since the last meeting.
- Allow each board member to take notes in a personalized version of the shared documents. In a virtual Post-it note, you could remind yourself to ask: “What about hockey?” when the agenda gets to an item on budgets for high school sports teams.
- Create timelines for tasks assigned for various projects. Some chairs delegate duties in the course of the meeting deliberations; others assign duties at the close of the meeting. Either way, task-management software can instantly convert the steps for each project into an at-a-glance format that shows deadlines and responsible parties.
- Offer remote access. Members who are out of town can still attend the meeting remotely.
After the meeting, the recording secretary can convert his notes into official minutes and post them on the school board website with a single keystroke. Signatures needed on the minutes – or any other material – can be solicited without making midnight car rides to members’ homes with folders full of pages with sticky arrows reminding members to “Sign here!”
You may be thinking: “You don’t know my school board!” Baby boomers on the board may still want all or some of their material in hard copy. Worse, those boomers are apt to hold the top leadership spots.
Before you get to a fully paperless board meeting, you can at least enjoy board meetings with less paper. The conversion may be faster than you think. Old-timers are coming around. Nothing converts them quicker than a business trip that makes them attend the meeting virtually or via conference call. Try lugging a traditional 10-pound board packet through airports and spreading out the papers on a hotel bed. A four-pound laptop starts to look pretty good. They can access all of the meeting materials from any device, even a phone.
Why Wait?
School boards can now benefit from technological advances just as retailers, researchers, romancers and revolutionaries have. With automated packets, your school board can work smarter, not harder. The result will be decisions based on more comprehensive knowledge of relevant facts by boards that are less overtaxed, tired and bored. You’ll save labor. You’ll save trees. You’ll save postage.
Will you miss the good old days? Consider: Never again will you face delays as materials circulate from office to office for needed signatures. Never again will you face an email inbox cluttered with multiple versions of documents by different authors. And never again will you miss a crucial vote because you had to be out of town. If that sounds like good riddance, join the tens of thousands of school boards already using portals and software to bring their districts out of the Dark Ages.
