School Board Policies

The role of the Board is to establish policy; the role of the administration is to execute it. The Board expresses its policy determinations in the form of written policy statements; the administration implements policy through such devices as administrative rules, memoranda and directives, and through daily contacts with staff, students, and public.

Policies are principles adopted by the school board to chart a course of action. They tell what is wanted and may include also why and how much. They should be broad enough to indicate a line of action to be taken by the administration in meeting a number of problems day-after-day; they should be narrow enough to give the administration clear guidance.

Rules are the detailed directions that are developed by the administration to put policy into practice. They tell how, by whom, where and when things are to be done.

The need for written policies and a system for keeping them up-to-date and responsive to change has perhaps never been greater. School boards and administrators today operate in a cauldron. They must deal with the many times conflicting interests of employee groups, restless students, community factions, and troubled taxpayers. They must cope with new modes of manners and morals, with the "explosion of knowledge," with the development of new educational technologies, with profound changes in social patterns and power structures. School boards and administrators today are expected to be both "managers of change and diversity," and also guardians and transmitters of the best of our nation’s traditional values.

The Three-Ring Binder

The material enclosed is the updated Policy Manual for the school corporation. You will note that each lettered section has an index. The index is divided into three categories -- policy, rule, and exhibit. If an "X" is placed in the policy column, this indicates that Wayne Township’s School Board has adopted a policy on that area or subject. If an "X" is placed in the Rules or Exhibit columns, this indicates that the administration has set forth rules, regulations, and/or guidelines with the policy. Only those policies marked in the index have been adopted by Wayne Township.

The notebook is color coded to make distinction between policies, rules, and exhibits easily noticed. All approved Board policy has been placed on yellow-colored paper; rules are placed on blue-colored paper; exhibits are placed on green-colored paper. The indexes and explanatory letters will be placed on white paper.

The Policy Classification System

The EPS/NSBA policy classification and information control system offers comprehensive guidelines for the development of policies on all areas of school board concern. It also provides an efficient means of filing and retrieving local board policy statements, administrative rules, and policy reference documents. The system included with this binder contains 12 sections, or chapters, as follows:

Each section has its own family of terms -- called "descriptors" -- which provide suggested titles for policy statements. The coding, or tracking, of these descriptors is by letter. Letter encoding offers two major advantages over number systems; (1) it is more flexible in that the codifier has available 26 separate letters to use compared to only ten digits; and (2) it requires no decimal points, a feature which tends to reduce the likelihood of copying and filing errors.

The classification and coding system can be easily learned. It simply follows the alphabet. For example, look at the list of descriptors at the beginning of Sections A and B. Except for the governing letter for each section (A for "Foundations and Basic Commitments" and B for "School Board Governance and Operations"), the code letters in the left-hand columns appear in alphabetical order.

Where subcategories appear under broader terms, the alphabetic order begins anew. Consider, for example, the broad term "School Board Meetings" and its subcategories:

BD - School Board Meetings
BDA - Regular Board Meetings
BDB - Special Board Meetings
BDC - Executive Sessions
BDD - Board Meeting Procedures
BDDA - Notification of Board Meetings
BDDB - Agenda Format
BDDC - Agenda Preparation and Dissemination

Notice that the descriptors are presented in the form of a simple outline which arranges the terms in logical groups and subgroups. The descriptors have roughly equal value, for the most part, to the system as a whole. Except for Section A -- the "accountability" chapter -- there is no particular priority implied in the order in which sections or descriptors are presented on the classification pages.

There are 614 descriptors which appear once and once only as line items in the system and an additional 21 which appear twice. Counting the duplicates there are, then, a total of 656 line item terms. The duplicates are identified by the "Also" reference which appears after the descriptor title. For example:

ABA Community Involvement in Decisionmaking (Also KC)
KC Community Involvement in Decisionmaking (Also ABA)

This means that the identical descriptor (and policy) "belongs" in Section A -- and it also "belongs" with equal logic in Section K. The limited use of this double-entry bookkeeping in the system is necessary to keep certain terms in proper context.

The Looseleaf Format

The three-ring binder is used purposely because a policy manual must be considered a "living book" -- a book that never ends, for policy development is indeed a never-ending process. New goals, problems, issues, needs, laws, court decisions -- and opportunities for improving policy make it necessary that a policy manual be kept open-ended. As new policies are written or existing ones reviewed or reassessed, it is important that the policy manual have the flexibility of a ring binder in which new pages may be put in and old ones removed. With each additional policy approved by the Board, copies will be distributed to each person or building having a manual. Directions will be given on the placement of the new policy in the manual and a reminder to update the index for that particular section. There will also be a detachable memorandum to sign and return to the Administrative Assistant. This is done to assure that every person or building with a manual has received all newly adopted policy and thus, the manuals are completely current on a daily basis.

In conclusion, one person should be in charge of the manual -- keeping it current and placing it in an accessible but safe location. Teachers, parents, students, and community members should be given access to the manual during normal school operating hours.