The Austin Public Schools Board decided after a self-assessment to work on communication within the district.

“As a group, share the information, so everyone is hearing it,” Superintendent David Krenz said. “It’s not one individual talking to another individual, we’re all hearing the same message.”

After participating in a self-assessment survey, the Director of Board Development for the Minnesota School Boards Association Katie Klanderud discussed the anonymous results with the board.

“As she pointed out, the scores of the evaluation were fairly high,” Krenz said. “[She] just pointed out a couple of areas that needed to be clarified, and hopefully we’re able to do that.”

Austin Public Schools has already been doing some of the things that Klanderud went over, but the district had low scores due to wording. One example was the implementation of task forces, where the district calls them working groups.

“We’ve had working groups, or task forces, for a number of years, but just not understanding what some of [the survey] meant,” Krenz said. “That’s part of the difficulty.”

Some of the policies were unknown to board members simply because they hadn’t dealt with them often. One area they discussed was the hiring process and how involved the board members should be. The topic was confusing because the district and the board have not gone through the process often, and members were confused at what procedure to use.

“If this is something that we see as important, within the personnel committee we put a procedure together if there is an opening or should be an opening,” board member Kathy Green said during the meeting. “In the last few years we’ve had sporadic openings, and people … have kind of stepped in, but I don’t think we’ve had necessarily a formal process for getting the board involved, so maybe that’s an area that we can look at in the personnel committee.”

But the main thing Krenz said the board needed to get better at was communication between board committees.

“As board members and administrators, we all have our individual committees that we’re a part of,” Krenz said. “This is something that every year we talk about doing, and I think we get better every year, but obviously we can continue to improve, is sharing information out of those committees with the group at large.

“We get so busy just doing our jobs that sometimes we forget to explain some of the smaller, minutiae items,” he added. “Helping people understand the work of each of those committees.”

The district has about 45 committees that different board members are involved in, including Austin Leaders Council, County Collaborative, Schools for Educational Equity, Gifted and Talented Advisory Committee and more.

Although the board hopes to get better at communication with these committees, they had positive feedback as well.

“I think the trust level has really grown over the years, as I’ve been here, and I think that really helps [the board] through their work, which is a real positive,” Krenz said.

Although each member may do things differently, Krenz said they are usually headed in the same direction.

“Why we’re doing it is all on the same base, and that is to help kids achieve at their highest potential. It’s all about the students,” he said. “We all know we’re doing it for the right reasons.”