Master Board Training Continues

“we are student centered and student focused”

This week our school board met to continue our Master Board training.  The Master Board Program is a formal school board training program through The Florida School Boards Association, Inc that is to assist in building a strong and well working school district’s leadership team (e.g. the school board and superintendent).  Monday’s training session was a public meeting workshop in a conference room upstairs from our board chambers providing a closer and more relaxed setting to “roll up our sleeves” and talk less formally.

I have appreciated my fellow board members and Superintendent Himmel. of Citrus County Schools, taking the many hours and days of training over the last several months to re-certify our board as a Master Board. They have done this training, in part, because one, we lost our standing as a Certified Board due to having a newly elected board member (me) and, two, because the training helps the board to learn how we each work and think, and how we can be more effective in working together as a team.  Why is that important you might ask?  Our district has been blessed for many years now with a very functional School Board that works together to make positive change and decisions for the students of Citrus County.  The better a school board can communicate and make decisions, the better and more positive work can be accomplished.   This has been the case for many years in our district and when I was elected I desired to continue that while bringing my personal concerns and voice to the leadership team.  This training, in my opinion, only helps to perpetuate the boards’ ongoing success.

The programs training has included; Strategic Planning, Establishing Trust, Ethical Management, Leadership Styles, Meaningful Change, Personal Styles and much more.  This week’s training was more customized to our specific group and focused, in part, on communicating with each other and learning more about what in our individual backgrounds contributes to the way we communicate and make decisions.  I believe I learned something new about each of my fellow board members that day that will help me in working and governing with them.  One of the things that make our school districts leadership team so powerful is that we have learned over and over from working with each other that we are clearly “student centered and student focused”.

We all have very different personalities and backgrounds and we all communicate in different styles.  This means that we, at times, have different ideas on how to solve problems, but we work, listen and communicate with each other until in the end we make decisions that we feel are in the best interest for our students.  I have firsthand seen this leadership team solve problems over and over again, whether in closed door hearings or at a public meeting.  Don’t misunderstand, we sometimes disagree and even, at times, have strong disagreements but it is resolved amiably in the end because we all were elected to put students first and I believe our Leadership Team is “walking the walk”.

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