School board

“ Unlike the governing bodies of cities and counties, school boards have only one responsibility: the education of the youth of our country during their most formative and impressionable years. Apart from health, no subject is closer to the hearts of parents than their children's education during those years. For these reasons, the governance of elementary and secondary education traditionally has been placed in the hands of a local board, responsible locally to the parents and citizens of school districts. ”

“ As a matter of fact, members of a School Board are no more than dummies in the hands of an inflexible Department, and are appointed to carry out orders and regulations without the power of modification, even when quite unsuitable for a country village school. ”

“ Every public rural school, then, is a state institution and, as such, falls to some degree under the control of a branch of the state government, which is usually presided over by a state superintendent of public instruction or a state board of education. In practice the actual control over any particular school is exercised by school-officers, elected by the people of the locality or chosen by the state educational officials. The local school-officers are known as school-boards, boards of school-directors, boards of education, school-trustees or county superintendents. ”

“ The local education authority shall throughout their area have the powers and duties of a school board and school attendance committee under the Elementary Education Acts, 1870 to 1900, and any other Acts, including local Acts, and shall also be responsible for and have the control of all secular instruction in public elementary schools not provided by them, and school boards and school attendance committees shall be abolished. ”

“ A Good School Board.—A good school board is one whose members are alive to their duties and wide-awake to the problems of education. They are men or women who have an intelligent grasp of the situation and who will earnestly attempt to solve the educational problems of school and of life in their community.
Board and Teacher.—If a poor teacher and a good school board are brought together the chances are that they will soon part company. A good school board will not retain a poor teacher longer than it is compelled to do so. ”

“ Every school board, board of education, board of vocational education, or county board of education which has control over the textbooks used in any district school, city school, vocational school, or high school, shall cause any textbook which the state superintendent has found contains matter prohibited in subsection (1) of this section to be withdrawn from use in such school prior to the opening of the school year following the publication of such finding of the state superintendent. ”

“ As at first proposed, (1) the school boards were not to be directly elected by the ratepayers, but were to be appointed by the town council or the vestry. (2) These nominated boards were empowered either to provide schools themselves or to assist existing public elementary schools, provided that such assistance was granted on equal terms to all such schools, upon conditions to be approved by the Education Department. Thus the school board, if it exercised the option of assisting denominational schools, would have been obliged to assist all or none. ”

“ In general.—Each local school board, and any agency school board that serves as a local school board for any grant or contract school, shall ensure that each individual who is a new member of the school board receives, within 1 year after the individual becomes a member of the school board, 40 hours of training relevant to that individual's service on the board. ”

“ The summoned parents wait in a huge crowd outside. They come in one by one to be disposed of. The president of the meeting sits with the book before him, in which the cases to be heard are fully entered up. Beside him sits the Board official, the inspector of officers, who advises him on little points of School Board law, and who marks the papers which are to be returned to the School Board officer 'in charge of the case' to be acted upon.
Standing round the room are the School Board officers of the different divisions in the district. ”

“ In the large towns the Board might become a Debating Society, but if it escaped this snare, it often did well. In small villages sometimes it was a farce, sometimes a tragedy. In most places, whether large or small, the real power fell into the hands of one man, either the clerk or the chairman, who managed both School Board and Board School.
Do you ask for an instance? At a Board School inspection, noticing that there were not enough desks for the children, I asked the chairman, who was present, to see that the deficiency was made good at once. ”

“ All power and authority in school affairs should reside ultimately in the board of education, consisting of not more than eight persons appointed by the mayor of the city, to hold office four years, two members retiring annually and eligible for reappointment once and no more. This board should appoint as its chief officer a superintendent of instruction, whose tenure should be during good behavior and efficiency, and whose powers and duties should be to a large extent defined by statute law, and not wholly or chiefly by the regulations of the board of education. ”

“ Under the plurality view, if a school board wants to be assured that it maintains control over the education of its students, every page of every book sought to be acquired must be read before a purchase decision is made. ”

“ There may be, it is true, a district board, but these are laymen, much better acquainted with the principles of farming than with those of teaching. They have no standards for judging a school and seldom visit one. The selection known as the "Deestrict Skule" illustrates fairly well the ability of the old-time school board to pass judgment upon the professional merits of the teacher.
Nominal Supervision.—In other states there is a county superintendent on part time who has a kind of general but attenuated supervision over all the schools of a county. ”

“ The plurality fails to recognize the fact that local control of education involves democracy in a microcosm. In most public schools in the United States, the parents have a large voice in running the school. [6] Through participation in the election of school board members, the parents influence, if not control, the direction of their children's education. A school board is not a giant bureaucracy far removed from accountability for its actions ”

“ Here the several schools in one township are all under the administration of one school board. There is not a school board for each schoolhouse, as in the district system, but one school board has charge of all the schools of the township. ”

“ The control of the ward schools is vested in district school boards, the districts usually being coextensive with the wards. The Central Board of Education, composed of one representative from each district board, has direct control of the high schools and regulates the preparatory courses of study. Each district makes its own tax levy. ”

“ There is also a board of supervisors, composed of three men or women, elected by the parents of the parish. Childless people are not allowed to vote. This board of supervisors does not appear to have any definite function except to advise and find fault. The school board elects the teachers, determines the courses of study and methods of discipline, and submits recommendations and estimates for appropriations annually to the municipal council. ”

“ The qualified electors of each district having an ungraded school elect a moderator, a director and a treasurer—one at each annual school meeting—for a term of three years, who constitute the district school board, and this board is entrusted with ample power for directing the affairs of the school. ”

“ The state of school affairs begins to attract much notice from the legislature, and no doubt the present system of school government will soon be improved. A board of education is appointed in each county, whose office it is to examine candidates for the office of parish school teacher, and report to the local governor as to their competency, previous to his conferring the required license. ”

“ There is a minister of education whose jurisdiction extends over the whole kingdom. He represents the school interests in the Prussian diet or Landtag, listens to appeals, distributes school moneys, and is the general educational executive officer. Each of the thirteen royal provinces has a school board whose presiding officer is ex officio the royal president of the province. With him are associated other royal counselors, and pedagogically trained men,—school superintendents and principals. This board consists of men of highest integrity and intelligence. ”

“ The local school board shall make a similar quarterly report to the Board. The local school board shall be furnished an office and necessary clerical force by the city superintendent out of the appropriation for his office. All construction or repairs of schoolhouses ordered by the municipal board, subject to the limitations of Act No. 74, shall be carried on under the Department of Engineering and Public Works, and the care and custody of school buildings shall be under the Superintendent of Biuldings and Illumination. ”

“ School boards have not always purchased everything that I have requested, but I have found in the vast majority of cases that if the board has faith in the superintendent and feels that he knows what he wants, and what he will do with it after he gets it, he will not have much difficulty in obtaining what the school really needs. ”

“ In the ’nineties, as I have said, visits without notice took the place of the field-day inspections, and we lost sight of the country Boards. Then came the great Act of 1902, which abolished all the Boards and made the county or county borough the unit, instead of the civil parish. “These our actors are melted into air, into thin air,” and the name of School Board remains only to the School Attendance Officers, the paidagogoi, [23] who, though they now represent the Education Committees, still keep their old titles among the populace. ”

“ He therefore proposed to create an entirely new local authority called the School Board. The board was to have the power of providing necessary school accommodation, and of directing its own schools, subject to the ultimate control of the education department. At first Forster proposed that school boards should be chosen by popular election in London, and elsewhere by town councils and vestries, but he soon adopted direct popular election in all cases. ”

“ Under other conditions the school board designates which of the appointed members of the committee shall be its chairman. In towns where the number of teachers exceeds sixty, the school board may direct that the school committee shall consist of the superintendent and the principals of the several schools as ex officio members and any determined number of other teachers selected by the body of teachers. The elected members are to be male and female in proportion [Pg 59] to their respective numbers on the teaching staff, exclusive of those who are ex officio members of the committee. ”

“ An effort is now made to get the schools once more under popular control, and render them what they were originally intended to be—mere educational institutions. To this end a school board has been appointed, but as soon as it undertook to act it was met, as to certain members, by a question of loyalty, raised, in all probability, by some interested party, who, being without offence himself, thought proper to fling a few stones at his offending neighbors. ”

“ According to the Constitution, each magisterial district is a separate school district, and the magisterial district furnishes the basis of representation on the county or city school board. In cities which have a population of at least one hundred and fifty thousand, school boards have the authority to decide for themselves, with the approval of the local legislative body, the number and the boundaries of their school districts. ”

“ The [Pg 291] district inspector is always a man of pedagogical training and experience. He is appointed for life and devotes his whole time to the schools in his district. His efficient and wise inspection of the schools insures their success. The district school board erects school buildings, determines the amount of the teachers' salaries, oversees their pensions, enforces compulsory attendance laws, decides upon taxable property, fixes boundary lines, and provides for the finances. ”

“ A school board in undertaking to select teachers is entitled to take into consideration not only an applicant's competency and loyalty, but also his or her personality, habits and manner of living, and social, professional, and political background and affiliations, to the end that it may select not only competent teachers, but those whose employment or retention in employment is to the best interest of all concerned. ”

“ So is most everyone else but what good does that do 'em? The students get out a petition asking for the school board to meet again and reconsider the matter but the school board pays about as much attention as a deaf ear. ”

“ The board must accordingly appoint teachers and a superintendent. These latter are selected because they have training and technical qualifications which the community needs in the schools. The technical officers have in an important sense an independent place in the educational system. It will be remembered that the teacher was the first one to whom the community delegated responsibility for the schools. Not infrequently the community finds its board of representative citizens on one side of a school issue and its technical officers on the other side. ”