School boards as an element of democracy and strengthening citizen participation in local civic affairs

I love how Charlie Kirk said some murders were acceptable collateral damage from having a strong Second Amendment providing for gun ownership rights (the US has gone far beyond the reading of the original meaning of this amendment in expanding gun rights to individuals rather than to militias.

The same goes for democracy more generally, and citizen oversight.  Sometimes it's messy  and fractious.  Sometimes it leads to fraud and corruption.  The solution isn't to eliminate the oversight when it's problematic but to improve it.

For example, with DC's Advisory Neighborhood Councils, to reduce financial abuse, I argue all the bank accounts should be run through the city system, with checks beyond the existing ones when an ANC has an account at a local bank branch.

Calgary.

As importantly, in response to complaints about effectiveness of neighborhood councils, my response is to say we don't provide a training and technical assistance infrastructure for them--whereas cities like Seattle and Calgary ("Community association planning committees a hidden gem?," Calgary Herald, "New life for community associations," CREB) do, very effectively ("On the Role and Future of Calgary's Community Associations," University of Calgary).

In Calgary, community associations run recreation centers, not the city, such as the Thorncliffe-Northview Community Association with 800+ members and a recreation center with community functions.  "Calgary's 151 associations include approximately 1,800 board members, along with another 18,000 volunteers who run programs, said FCC."

-- "National Community Planning Month | Civic Involvement" (2025)
-- "Setting up DC's Advisory Neighborhood Commissions for success" (2022)

School boards.  The same goes for school boards.  Citizen oversight has been problematic for a long time.  This was true when NYC in the 1960s created community boards to provide input.  And with school boards in inner cities and suburbs both.

My solution, unlike what is suggested in Ontario, ""Getting rid of school board trustees is the right thing to do" (Toronto Star), is a training and technical assistance infrastructure with participation tied to salaries--often school board members get paid, at least in the US.

From the Star:

Perhaps they tried to persuade you that trustees embody true grassroots governance of our schools. More probably, you have no recollection of ever seeing or hearing from your local trustee, let alone voting for him or her. Possibly you have no clue what their name is after all these years — and all those elections. The reality of local democracy today is that turnout for most trustee elections is abysmally low — typically in the range of 10 to 30 per cent of eligible voters.

Yet our freshly empowered trustees gain a free hand to meddle in massive school board budgets. And then point fingers in ideological or tangential debates about what’s taught in classrooms across the province. Trustees weren’t always so disconnected.

More than 200 years ago, school trustees were Ontario’s first elected politicians, predating by decades the MPPs and MPs who later sat at Queen’s Park and on Parliament Hill. In a province dominated by one-room schoolhouses, they played a pioneering role as “trustees.”

All these years later, trustees are no longer the leading edge of democracy, they are a lagging indicator of dysfunction and distrust. Today, trustees have been overtaken in relevance and importance by senior levels of government — municipal, provincial and federal — on measures of accountability and also accounting.  ... To date, a record seven local school boards have been taken over by outside supervisors

I know there are professional associations for school boards, plus conferences (often citizens criticize attending such meetings as a waste of money) and they do get technical assistance and training, but obviously there needs to be more and better and accountability about it. 

From the Education Week story "School Boards Are Struggling. Could a New Research Effort Help?":

... Jonathan E. Collins, an assistant professor of political science and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Education research focuses more heavily on the work of teachers and administrators, and there’s a dearth of national data on how school boards form, how they function, and how their stewardship affects student learning.

Collins founded a new research lab this month to help provide solutions and paint a clearer picture of how the most local of local governing bodies operate. The School Board and Youth Engagement Lab, or S-BYE, plans to assemble a national data set on factors such as how boards are elected and how they interact with the public. It also will partner with local boards to pilot new communications tools.

An angry crowd at a Loudoun County, Virginia, school board meeting in June, 2021. Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Separately, an issue in the US is fractious opponents filling school board meetings with vitriol and even threatening members to the point where they choose to no longer serve ("School boards get death threats amid rage over race, gender, mask policies," Reuters, "Mitigating Threats Against School Board Officials," Princeton, "School boards around the country are under fire. What exactly do they do?," CNN, "Culture Wars Could Be Coming to a School Board Near You," Time Magazine).  That's a different issue but one that needs to be addressed.

Constituent services funds disbursements.  Another area where I've brought this up is with constituent services funds available from Councilmembers.  I think that the decisions should be made via participatory budgeting techniques executed by citizen committees within the office ("More on ethics: discretionary funding-constituent funds," 2011).