Leadership Structure: The New Britain Board Of Education

A public-school board’s main purpose is to create a representative body that will allow them to serve the education system effectually. These school’s boards play an imperative part in the community and hold many responsibilities, such as: representing the students, incorporating their community’s view to create school policies, being held accountable for the performance of their schools, and regulating that students are getting the best education possible (Peifer, 2014). To meet all these standards, like all systems, the board needs an effective leadership structure. How does a leadership structure manifest itself into these standards? I took a deep look at the New Britain Board of Education and analyzed its power structure to answer that

This power controlled by solely ten members and the administration is wielded to create school policies that affect the academic learning process of the public. The purpose of this research is to elaborate on the power the board has and its effect on the public who deserve to have more influence in this structure. Furthermore, I further investigated in looking at how which committee they serve and their office position (President, Vice President) intersected with this structure and found that both play a role. The New Britain Board of Education mission, as it states on their homepage, is; “to create an educational system which will facilitate the development of students so that they may reach their fullest potential as productive human beings and be prepared to function effectively in a changing society...District efforts to improve the quality of the educational process have only one focus: every student learns, and learns well, every day” (“Board of Education,” 2016). The structure of the New Britain Board of Education allows them to accomplish that mission, however, without much input from the

These leaders are nominated and are believed “to be generally influential… mainly persons who were prominent in economic and governmental affairs” (Pellegrin, 1976, p.7). As Stephen Jambor, President of The Westchester Putnam School Boards Association states, the responsibilities of the President of a school board is to, “Conduct board meetings, sets agenda items with the superintendent, bridge between board & superintendent, team builder & mediator, voting member of the board” (2015, p. 10). If the President is absent, the Vice President has the same responsibilities and power as the President (Fanniff & Abram, 2009, p. 2). Overall, the President is the voice of the Board (Jambor, 2015). Similarly, to the New Britain Board of Education, the President Nicholas Mercier leads the board in their day to day