Creighton trustees work to 'align saying and doing,' test time-use coding and practice SMART monitoring questions

Creighton Elementary District trustees spent a study session reviewing how they spend meeting time and practicing the kind of strategic questions that staff say lead to clearer follow-up and faster improvement.

At the start of the session the coach framed the exercise around a simple premise: "When we see what someone spends their currency on, that provides us with insight into what they most value," and urged the board to treat time as its "most precious" currency. The board used a time-use evaluation template to code a recent meeting and discuss where minutes were allocated.

The coach presented the April 21 coding as an example: call to order and routine items about two minutes; governing board reports nine minutes; superintendent report six minutes (15 total); progress monitoring 36 minutes; consent agenda 22 minutes (including pulled items); and action items roughly 25 minutes. The coach said the district's recent meetings are averaging about 33% of public meeting minutes on student outcomes and encouraged the board to aim toward a 50% benchmark for outcome-focused time.

Trustee Katie Gipson McLean said practical adjustments can move the needle: "If we got down to two minutes [for some routine items], it would have been 40%," she said, urging advance preparation and tighter consent- agenda practices. Trustees and staff discussed tools to pare dense progress-monitoring slide decks into one-page summaries or infographics that the public can readily understand.

The session also focused on improving board oversight through sharper questions. The coach described a SMART strategic question as measure-focused, ask-oriented (open), results-focused and time-bound and had trustees draft questions from the April 21 Goal 3 (literacy/language) report. One example produced in the exercise asked which school-level instructional interventions would be implemented to close a specified gap and how the district would measure progress before the final post-test window.

District staff told the board they sometimes lack perfectly correlated interim measures and are piloting new assessments; trustees responded by tightening questions to focus on what strategies have changed and which indicators will reveal short-term impact. The coach urged trustees to submit one well-crafted strategic question each month, noting staff need lead time to research and prepare meaningful responses.

The meeting closed with a governance case study about how boards can fracture when evidence and expectations are unclear; participants emphasized the fragility of reform and the importance of consistent public communication, recruitment of aligned trustees, and disciplined question-submission timelines. The board adjourned after brief one-word reflections on the session.

Next steps: trustees were asked to submit SMART questions on the district calendar schedule so staff can produce targeted answers, and leadership said it will pilot more concise public-facing monitoring summaries before the next board meeting.