The H.T. Edwards Sr. Teaching and Learning Center, where the Clarke County School District administrative offices are located, is shown on Feb. 10. The CCSD Board of Education looked into how it can better structure its committees at a Jan. 30 retreat – a two-day weekend long meeting. “This is still fairly fluid because we’ll continue talking about it, but the plan is to align the committees that exist with our strategic priorities just because it makes it a little bit easier to function. It makes things a bit more efficient,” CCSD BOE President Dr. LaKeisha Gantt, who represents District 7, said. Photo by Micah Shannon
The Clarke County School District Board of Education looked into ways to improve its committee organization during a Jan. 30 retreat.
The CCSD BOE is fairly large, which occasionally makes it difficult to manage discussion.
“We have a nine member board, which is a fairly large number. In fact, we have more board members than some larger districts, and in a lot of ways that’s good because it provides representation across the entire county, but it sometimes makes it difficult to have discussions and have meetings and make decisions,” CCSD BOE member Kara Dyckman, who represents District 5, said.
The BOE works around this size issue by creating committees for certain subject areas, allowing each board member to focus on key issues.
“Committees are designed to have a smaller group of people more focused on one particular thing, there’s no voting in committees,” Dyckman said. “The committee can have discussions and the committee can do work and they can bring a recommendation to the board.”
“One of the things that we’ve been discussing is trying to make our committees more efficient, and also more useful, and that came not just from board members, but also from Cognia.”
— Dr. Kara Dyckman,
CCSD BOE member representing District 5
This committee reorganization was spurred by a April 27, 2020 report from Cognia, CCSD’s accreditation agency, directed the BOE to create more efficient committees.
“One of the things that we’ve been discussing is trying to make our committees more efficient, and also more useful, and that came not just from board members, but also from Cognia,” Dyckman said.
Although no changes are final, the current plan is to align the committees more closely with Superintendent Xernona Thomas’ proposed strategic plan.
“The committees that we had were a policy committee, a finance committee, property committee, government relations committee and a superintendent evaluation committee,” Dyckman said. “Now we’ve changed it a little bit to try to align the committees more with the strategic plan that Dr. Thomas presented. The strategic plan has five strategic priorities. Originally, when I presented my idea (for committee restructuring), my idea was to have a committee for each strategic priority.”
The CCSD’s strategic goals are displayed. Screenshot by Patricia Yager
The goal is to have a final plan for reorganization by March 1, so BOE members have time to wrap up their current committee work.
“Board members are still serving in the same committees that they were in before because we wanted to finish out our roles. We set the target date of March 1, and a lot of that has to do with the policy work that is currently underway that’s been led by (CCSD BOE member representing District 4) Dr. (Patricia) Yager,” CCSD BOE President Dr. LaKeisha Gantt, who represents District 7, said. “We want to at least come to not a place of completion, but at least a place where we feel like we made a significant gain with the revision of policies.”
