The Fairfax County School Board recognizes that the Board has a unique and important role to play in assuring that the school system achieves the results expected by the community and deserved by the students the school system serves. The Board also recognizes that as an elected Board that represents and serves the people of the county, it must design for itself a governing process that allows it to exercise its responsibilities in a manner that assures that the staff, under the authority of the Superintendent, has the freedom and authority to do its work without interference but also has full accountability for the results of its decisions. And, the Board accepts the challenge to perform its own duties with the same degree of excellence expected of the Superintendent and staff members.
In addition to specifying the results expected for students, the Board has stated operational expectations that are reasonable for the Superintendent and staff members to work within. The initiative includes those operational expectations as well as student achievement goals as measures of school system success. The Superintendent and staff members are empowered to develop strategies and action plans to achieve both the specified student achievement goals and the operational expectations.
School system performance in both areas will be monitored regularly throughout the year by the Board to assure that reasonable progress is being made toward achieving the student achievement goals and that the system is complying with the Board’s operational expectations. And the Board will monitor its own performance just as rigorously in order to assure excellent performance at all levels, from the Boardroom to the classroom.
The Fairfax County School Board believes that the new Strategic Governance Initiative will assure that a very good school system will become an even better one.
| 