Knowing Our Lanes: Boards, Principals, Pastors and Dioceses

Boards which serve our schools sometimes misunderstand their role, believing they have an authority they may not actually have. This leads to enormous tension between boards, principals, pastors and dioceses.

My mentor, Dr. Tom Doyle, used to say, “A clear understanding of who makes which set of decisions is an absolute pre-requisite for organizations to function well.”

This is certainly the case with Boards, as there are different types of Boards, each with a different scope of authority. It’s important to understand which type our schools are in!

There are three:

A “Board of Trustees” (BOT) is typical of most independent schools. As its name implies, an “independent school” BOT operates distinct from any higher “authority,” like a pastor, bishop or superintendent. It hires, evaluates and sets the salary for the school head. It establishes tuitions, approves budgets, creates policies, and in rare circumstances, hears appeals of the head’s decisions.

A “Board of Limited (or Specialized) Jurisdiction”  (BLJ) is a model that might be seen in schools founded by a religious order, now sharing their authority with lay Boards. Typically, the order delegates specific areas of authority to the lay Board while retaining authority in all other areas. A religious order could delegate to the Board the authority to create the budget, for example, but keep its authority to hire the head. The bylaws or the constitution of the BLJ, signed by the order, make these distinctions explicit.

An “Advisory Council” (AC) is the most common model in Catholic schools today. The Council’s authority is advisory only. The Council recommends actions to the pastor or bishop, who has the authority to veto the recommendation. If a Council is doing its work well, the vast majority of the time, the pastor or diocese accepts the recommendations of the Council, so the practical impact of the Advisory Council’s work ends up similar to the other models.

With AC’s, the evaluation, hiring and firing of a principal (or president if the school is in a president-principal model) are the responsibility of the pastor (if a parish school) or the bishop/super (if a diocesan high school). Pastors (or supers) would typically ask for candid feedback from the Council as part of their evaluation.

In all three models, the purpose of the Board/Council is to promote the mission of the school in terms of strategic planning, policy making, and securing and protecting the finances of the school.

Wheres a Board/Council recommends policies that are broad in nature, indicating a direction--the "what?" and the "why?"--the principal’s job is to operationalize these policies in the day to day life of the school-- the "who?" and the "how?" and usually, the "when?"

When every group understands which lanes they’re in, Boards are a great blessing for our schools.