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Winter Symposium 2016

KSBA's 2016 Winter Symposium

Speaker will help members learn "Art of School Boarding"

Kentucky School Advocate

November 2016

By Matt McCarty

Staff writer

School board members will have the opportunity to learn about the impact they can have from someone who literally wrote the book on school board service.

Jim Burgett, who is president of the Burgett Group and authored the book The Art of School Boarding, will be the luncheon speaker at KSBA’s 2016 Winter Symposium.

“He is going to talk about Denting the Universe, which is essentially the positive impact school boards have on society,” said Kerri Schelling, KSBA’s associate executive director and director of board team development. “We had Jim with us two years ago and he was so popular and so widely requested that we wanted to bring him back.”

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Burgett is a veteran of the school board association circuit.

“Even though every state is a little bit different, the basic functions and responsibilities of boards are universal and he is just so clearly an expert on those core functions and helping people understand the privilege of serving on a school board,” Schelling said. “It’s not just about the actions that they have to take, the things they have to do; it’s really about the philosophy that will help board members be most effective.”

There will also be a 75-minute session with Burgett prior to lunch. The session, titled The Art of School Boarding, is part of the New Board Member Boot Camp, but will be available to anyone who wants to attend.

New finance courses
This year’s Winter Symposium will include two new finance sessions conducted by a certified public accountant.

The first session – The Annual Financial Audit – will help board members better understand their role in choosing an auditor, the audit process, the timeline and specific responsibilities regarding the audit.

The second session – Financial Audit Recommendations for Effective School Boards – will help explain the financial audit recommendations that former state auditor Adam Edelen identified and how they impact school boards.

“With the state requirement for finance training, we didn’t want to just offer the same sessions over and over,” Schelling said. “The world of school board finance is fairly small. That’s not to say it isn’t significant, because it’s extremely significant, but there aren’t that many pieces of it school boards should get into. They quickly get into micro-managing if they go too far into the details. We’re committed to keeping the content fresh and presenting it in different ways, that’s really what we want to do.”

Other conference tidbits
The Saturday morning Plenary Session has been reworked to enable board members to get to know the association. Your Association: What You Need to Know About KSBA and its Services is a requirement for the Academy of Studies and “is a really good way for board members to become acquainted with their association and learn about the kinds of things we can do for them,” Schelling said.

There will also be more Level II and Level III courses available at this year’s Winter Symposium.

“Since we know it’s primarily new school board members who will be attending, we tend to lean pretty heavily on the Level I courses, but there are a lot of veterans who’ve said ‘We’d love to come but we’re really interested in working beyond the basics,’” Schelling said. “So we’ve incorporated a lot more Level II and Level III classes this year.”

Sessions that focus on all mandated training topics (ethics, finance and superintendent evaluation) are available for anyone still working on earning their credit before Dec. 31.

Members can earn up to 9.75 hours of professional development credit over the two days.

This will be the first KSBA training session conducted by Whitney Crowe, KSBA’s new staff attorney in the legal training services. Her session is School Law for School Board Members 101.

And returning this year is the traditional Friday evening tailgating reception, with food, drinks, games, raffle prizes, and an opportunity for board members to mix and mingle.