The Vital Role of the Academic Excellence Committee

Tune in to a quick 20-minute Q&A session with BoardOnTrack’s charter school governance experts.
~May 10th at 3pm ET~

Upcoming Q&A with the Experts

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Meet Your Experts

Gina_Farfard Gina Fafard
Senior Governance Coach, BoardOnTrack

Gina brings over 20 years of educational leadership experience to BoardOnTrack, having served students and families in both large urban and small suburban districts. Gina taps into her broad range of experience, from being a classroom teacher to Charter School CEO to providing governance coaching that is both practical and attainable. She believes that the key to success in growing a healthy and vibrant school or network of schools starts with its leadership. Gina helped pioneer the role of governance coach at BoardOnTrack and has twice been a BoardOnTrack Member – once serving as a CEO of a CT Charter School and the second time in Florida.

Gina holds an EdS degree, an MS degree in Ed Leadership, and a BA degree in Art. When she’s not coaching school boards, she enjoys everything outdoors, including camping, fishing, kayaking, and cycling.

BOT Guest Speaker Headshot Template - JD Travis Franklin Travis Franklin, Chief Executive Officer, Spokane International Academy

Mr. Franklin has been an educator in the greater Spokane region for the past 14 years. He served as a 5th/6th grade teacher for 8 years in the Mead School District. Five of those years were at a high-poverty Title 1 school where over 80% of his students qualified for free/reduced lunch. He also spent one year as the Highly Capable Program coordinator/teacher for four elementary schools in the Mead School District. In 2014, he was awarded the School Leadership and Design Fellowship from the Washington State Charter Schools Association in order to support him and his team in opening Spokane International Academy, one of Washington state's first charter schools, in the fall of 2015. SIA has since grown to serve 750 students and is Washington's only K-12 charter school.

Mr. Franklin has a B.A. in Elementary Education from Whitworth University, a M.S. in Education Media Design and Technology from Full Sail University, and a M.A. in Organizational Leadership from Gonzaga University. Additionally, he holds valid Washington State principal and teaching credentials.

About this Q&A:

Your organization exists to create great outcomes for kids. And we advocate that your board is running a multi-million-dollar public enterprise and should mostly have skills to augment those of your paid professionals. So that means most of your board members are not educators. So how is a group of busy professionals and non-educators supposed to govern effectively? One of the keys is having an outstanding Academic Excellence Committee.

During this lively, interactive session, we will:

Define the work of the Academic Excellence Committee
Provide you with a job description template you can customize and make your own
Talk about the role of this committee vs. the full board
Clarify who makes a great academic excellence committee chair
Clarify who should serve on this committee
Share some sample academic excellence committee goals
Discuss the governance-management line and the role of staff vs. the committee and the full board as it pertains to academic outcomes
Discuss what data this committee should use to accomplish their work
Share some observations on the common mistakes this committee makes and how to avoid them

In addition, we’ll make sure you leave this session with concrete action steps and access to tools to help you implement our recommendations.

We hope you can make it!

If you know someone else who would benefit from attending, feel free to forward this on. It is a "more, the merrier" event.

Want to submit a burning question in advance? Please do by sending a message to mmizzoni@transact.com.

If time allows, you'll be able to ask our experts anything.