The August Reset:

One Conversation Every Board Chair and Superintendent Should Have Before School Starts

There's a conversation that almost never happens in education governance, and it's not the one you'd guess.

Not in a board meeting. Not during a formal evaluation. Not even at a retreat with an agenda and a facilitator standing at the front of the room.

It happens between two people, the board chair and the superintendent, sometime before September, with enough time and enough honesty to actually talk through what the year looked like.

I've spent nine years as a superintendent and 28 in educational leadership overall. If you asked me to rank the most consequential working relationships in a district, board chair and superintendent would be near the top. If you asked me to rank which relationships anyone actually prepares for, it would be near the bottom.

The conversation itself isn't complicated. It just requires both people to show up and mean it.

What actually gets covered

Start with communication. Where did it work last year, and where did it quietly break down? Was there something the board needed that arrived too late? Something the superintendent needed from the board that never came at all? This isn't about assigning blame. It's closer to a diagnostic, the kind you run before you decide what to fix.

Role clarity comes next, and this is the one people skip because it feels uncomfortable to name out loud. Did the board end up making calls that were really the superintendent's to make? Did the superintendent defer on something the board should have owned? Most of the time this confusion runs both directions, and neither person did it on purpose. Naming it is really the only way either side gets to fix it.

Then there's whatever never got fully resolved. Almost every year leaves something hanging. A vote that left someone feeling overruled. A public moment that quietly created private tension. A personnel decision the board and superintendent would have handled differently on their own. None of that just evaporates over the summer. It shows up again in September as background noise, and it's a lot easier to name it now than to let it resurface at the worst possible time.

Last, look ahead. What does the board actually need from this superintendent this year? What does the superintendent need from the board to do the job well? What does success look like in June, and how will either of you know you're getting there before you're already too far in to course correct?

Why it matters

The crisis that lands in October, the vote that splits a board down the middle, the community conflict that catches people who were never aligned to begin with, none of that comes out of nowhere. It comes out of August. Out of the conversation that could have happened and didn't.

This conversation won't make a board chair and superintendent conflict-free. Nothing does. It just means they're carrying less into the year without realizing it's even there.

If you want this to lead to something durable, actual agreements on paper instead of good intentions that fade by October, the Governance Continuum Package at ArcSpan is built for exactly this moment. But even without that, two people willing to have an honest conversation is already a real step. The willingness matters more than the format.