Of Duties Unfulfilled, Part One

It would be understandable if an outsider, witnessing the Eagle Ridge Academy Board of Directors perform their twice-monthly burlesque, began to ask just what it is a charter school Board is meant to do. Besides dark comedy, that is. ERA’s Board provides little in the way of clues. Certainly the histrionics surrounding the assault on the Director have occupied the Board’s time and energy, and no doubt it has done yeoman’s work sorting out the debris into neat piles. It would almost be heroic, if the disarray were not cause by its own reckless duplicity. But the recent melodrama only serves to obscure the question of what the Board should have been doing when they were instead conspiring to oust their own employee.

Any Board of Directors is charged with the long-range planning for an organization. Boards do not run organizations, they lead them. A Board holds the vision and set the course, looking out for big-picture issues that are not on the radar of the individuals in the trenches day to day doing the work that the organization set out to do. This crucial task is somewhat circumscribed at a charter school. There are, no doubt, endless service agreements and vendor contracts to wade through. But these will not make or break the school. The duty that falls to the Eagle Ridge Academy Board falls into three general categories: policies, facility, and revenue. Whatever their gift for dramatic meetings, even the casual observer cannot help but see that this Board has failed utterly at all three for four years running.

The committee structure of the Board is incomprehensible from the outside, perhaps even to the Board itself. Nonetheless, there seems to be a policy committee currently taking stock of ERA’s policies. That shouldn’t take long, as there seems to be very little out there. There certainly was no policy for terminating an underperforming teacher. There apparently is no policy for staff evaluations. Attending the Board meetings early this year might have left one with the distinct impression that there was no policy for creating policies. A Director is an executive officer who is charged with carrying out the policies that the Board sets. Absent a policy, the only governing principle is the sense of the Board majority at any given moment. It’s amazing that any executive could function in such a leadership vacuum. One can only hope the Board is being straight with the potential directors they are interviewing. (Come to think of it, that may be what qualifies the current interim Director; he has already worked for a dysfunctional Board and presided over a train wreck. Nothing else presents itself as a qualification.)

The sad fact is that the founding Board itself is culpable here. The only policy that mattered was the whim of the founding Board chair. The fact that those whims lead to the near collapse of the school before the departing Director righted the ship never swayed anyone on the Board to seriously assess the situation. Though they had a solemn responsibility to lead, they followed the original chair into the teacher majority debacle, a flawed facility search and a years-long quest to remove the Director they had hired while not appearing to do so, all the while flaunting the open meeting law. No mere policy could stand in the way of control.

And now the Eagle Ridge Academy community is faced with more of the same. At least two of the individuals currently running for the Board are cut from this same tainted cloth. They have shown the same penchant for backroom dealing and the same arrogant grasp for power. Electing them will ensure that future Boards run much as this one has. Of course, there will be one crucial exception: dissenters will not be tolerated. This new breed is far less demure. There will always be a way to make the unbeliever unwelcome. Few will hold out as long as the departed Director has. The only policy then will be expelling those teachers, staff and families who don’t share the vision.