Microschools, What Has Your Board Done for You Lately?

For microschool founders, establishing and working with your board can feel like tricky business.

You want a founding board you can rely on as you launch your microschool. Depending on your governance structure, your board often holds authority over your bank account and over important decisions about how you spend money, so trustworthiness is imperative. And for the half of microschool founders who have never run their own business or school before, being able to lean on board members’ experience at different aspects of the work, from accounting to real estate decisions to managing operational and instructional choices, is both useful and comforting.

Then as you move into your second year and beyond, establishing your microschool as both a place where learning thrives and business supports teaching and learning, it is important that you can continue to count on your board to remain just as useful, if not more so. Your board should be one of your most valuable assets. It needs to add value, or it may be holding you back.

It is the responsibility of a governing board to evaluate a school leader’s performance each year, and to provide feedback that helps turn weaknesses into strengths. But how are board members evaluated for their own contributions? Often a self-assessment process for board members, which includes an opportunity for the full board or a committee of the board to provide input to be considered as part of board succession plan implementation, is a healthy component to effective board governance.

Have expectations been clearly established by the board for its members? Are board members actively contributing to fundraising functions? To recruitment of new students? To creating operating budgets and tracking finances? To building maintaining key community relations, such as to Chamber of Commerce and neighboring businesses? What other roles will help your busy school leaders to succeed in the work they are relied upon to for your microschool to thrive?

And if your microschool does choose to establish itself as an IRS-recognized nonprofit organization, there are other required board trustee obligations as well.

Many microschools adopt bylaws that include term limits for board members. Some schools find this mechanism useful. But it is generally not required, so that if you have founding board members who help out in crucial ways, replacing them without losing important capacity may actually prove unhelpful. Your bylaws need to include a plan to renew, recruit or replace board members by standard procedures and votes, but term limits are not required.