We will begin with the assessment discussion and push this discussion to next month after the strategic planning session and today's discussion of the board assessment.

Rachel shared her screed and led the committee through a review of the reports on board on track from the board assessment. The overview shows all the categories and how the CEO and trustees ranked the board's performance against specific criteria. The areas where there is a variance between the CEO and the board's response is where the committee focused discussion.

Board composition and recruitment was ranked lower by Rachel than by the trustees and not because we do not do these things but because the specific language in the descriptors isn't what we do. The vetting is not done exactly as described and though we may use standard questions, we do not have them documented and use them consistently with a numeric ranking system. Our vetting process is less formal. We need to consider whether we want to aspire to these descriptions on all things or if our process is sufficient. David asked if these are common standards of board excellence for charter schools and Rachel explained that they are Board On Track's published standards and we need to decide for our board what our vision of excellence is, or our maturity model, in each of these categories. Tom shared that these standards do align with what he is seeing across sectors and in his industry and generally seem like best practice. The committee discussed that these areas and descriptions are basically our maturity model with some tweaking on a few bullets.

The committee revisited the overview with Tom's promoting to look more closely at Board Goals and Accountability. Rachel explained plans for the strategic planning session next week and how that would likely accomplish the descriptions around board goals but that accountability feels like a potential area for growth and focus for our committee. 

Xiomara shared that we need to consider development for the board ongoing and not just through the onboarding of new trustees. Xiomara expressed the importance of trustees learning about and understanding the community of students and families we serve in addition to the skills and knowledge of being a charter school trustee. 

Rachel will put the refinement of board goals as the agenda topic for next meeting as we can use the assessment results and the discussion at the strategic planning session to inform and finalize our committee goals. We will finalize goals and discuss onboarding and ongoing development of trustees at next meeting.

68% of trustees completed the assessment.