It’s hard to imagine a school board decision that doesn’t have strategic implications.

In a school board executive session your board members might discuss sensitive legal or personnel matters. In your open session any number of topics could be discussed that have wide-ranging implications for your district, including budgets, financial performance, standardized testing, and state and federal mandates.

In fact, there is a strong possibility that these—or similar topics—are discussed at every school board meeting.

When these critical issues come up on the agenda, what do you want your board members to base their decisions on? Gut instinct? Past experience? Local politics?

That is exactly what you don’t want.

You want your board members to approach critical decisions that impact your learning communities and the students you serve from a perspective of strategy and planning.

That doesn’t mean you should (or could) turn every board meeting into a strategic planning meeting. You and your board members don’t have the time—and the district doesn’t have the funds—to do that.

What it does mean is that you can use BoardPaq’s new feature that allows school boards to do a simple SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis on any particular agenda item. This new feature facilitates quick, strategic analysis of the important issues your board discusses at every meeting.

For example, is your school board considering moving resources from a successful school or program to one that needs more attention? That is the type of decision that needs to be reached through strategy and planning—not by instinct, politics, or thinking that’s “how we’ve always done it”.

Want to learn more about how you can use BoardPaq—the board portal of choice for a growing number of districts across the nation—to incorporate strategy and planning into critical school board decisions? Sign up for a demo today!