Dive Brief:

• Future Ready Schools, an initiative of the Alliance for Excellent Education (All4Ed), announced a new partnership with the National School Boards Association to provide school board members with tools around budgeting, resources, professional learning and leadership, among other areas. 
• The program, Future Ready School Boards, is a new part of the network aimed at elevating school boards. The network already provides supports for district-level and school leadership, librarians, instructional coaches and IT directors.
• The executive director of Future Ready Schools, Sara Hall, said the resources available for school boards "will run the gamut" but will all be "tied back to student-centered learning and how we make sure our school systems are governed in a way that supports each student and their personal path to success."

Dive Insight:

A key component of the program is the FRS-School Boards Framework, which includes eight areas: 

• Personalized instruction for students.
• Ongoing and job-embedded learning.
• Robust infrastructure.
• Strategic fiscal planning.
• Community partnerships.
• Use of data to transform instruction and support students.
• Support for learning anywhere and anytime​.
• Collaborative leadership.

While at Future Ready Schools' core are district-level leadership teams, this expansion to include school boards comes because of the "critical relationship between districts and their boards," according to Hall. "We want to make sure there's some shared vision there." 

The existing network includes 3,500 superintendents, and the profile of districts "mirrors the country," she said, with small, large, rural and urban districts represented. Hall cited Ohio's Port Clinton City School District and California's Colton Joint Unified School District as participants that have taken advantage of the five-step planning process provided by Future Ready Schools to improve in areas like school culture. 

In the coming months, the program aims to set up an advisory team, driven by school board members, to "figure out exactly what content" will be included for school boards.