The Garden City Board of Education last week discussed how to increase the effectiveness of the district's shared decision making process.

A lack of communication between site-based teams and the board, as well as inadequate training for citizens participating in the teams was talked about in last week's meeting.

To increase the relevance of the site-based teams' work, Board member Jim Ryan suggested having more and more timely reports from the teams to the board.

"Maybe [the teams] should get on the fast track and get their report in by December or January so it can be included in budget considerations," Ryan said.

Because of the way things are structured now, according to Ryan, the board receives the teams' report so late that it is almost outdated.

"If we don't get their input [in a timely manner], I'm not sure that what they've done has any meaning," he added.

Trustee Linda Leone agreed, citing communication problems as part of the reason for bureacracy in the district.

"The lack of communication hampers things," she said. "[For example] the site-based team could create an action committee, and then we as a board will direct the administration to make a committee because we don't know that the team's already done it."

Board member Bryan Rudy agreed, stating that input from teams before decisions are made is preferable.

"What changes would they like to make if they were sitting in our seats?" he asked. "Before we make decisions that affect their lives [we need to know] what they have to say."

Rudy also called for more involvement from the community. "If we'd had these grass roots committees over the years, we might have had more grass roots support for the board," he said.

Trustee Dr. Nancy Fredericks agreed. "It [the problem] calls for community involvement, which is invariably what's been missing."

The Board of Education also discussed how to expand the site-based teams' duties in order to make the groups more involved and their work more significant.

Leone said, "We need to help the site-based teams understand that thier focus can be broadened."

Trustee Ryan proposed a plan where site-based teams would consider several needs and prioritize them, as well as consider a cost benefit analysis.

"I would hope that we as a board would receive annual reports," he said, "including [site based team evaluations of] building needs, program needs, teachers' needs, and that they would work within adminstration to fit them into the budget."

Broadening their focus, as suggested by Trustee Ryan, would also include focusing the teams more towards giving input on budget matters, as well as census work and site-based teams giving evaluations of the state-based school report cards.

Rudy also suggested modeling the changes after other districts' citizens groups, allowing them to tour the buildings and make their own recommendations for repair.

Ryan supported that idea. "We've recognized the problem with building deteriorization; we have to take action," he stated.

Rudy offered another option for the site-based teams' work by proposing that teams coordinate sometimes with focus groups in order to find out parents' perceptions of how the district is doing with subjects like reading and writing.

"The purpose," he explained, "is to get some ideas and see where we are going."

In order to do that, according to Leone, there needs to be improvement in the site-based teams' training process. In the beginning there was a group training for team members, but "training has not necessarily followed along those lines," she said.

"Training [needs to] take place collectively, so they all start on the same page," she said.

Leone also noted that many of the suggested changes could happen under the existing structure, just with some modifications.

"It's an issue of becoming fully conversant with the plan as well," she said. "Working from the framework of what our shared decision process is, we could mesh these ideas into our current framework and get it done a lot faster than two years."