Award recognizes five-state project to link policy with student learning

Posted February 1, 2010

	WSSDA Interim Executive Director Harry Frost (R) and Policy and Legal Services Director Marilee Scarbrough with NSBA board member Mark Metzger. Photo courtesy NSBA.

The 5-State Policy Project: Targeting Student Learning has been awarded the 2010 Thomas A. Shannon Award for Excellence in School Board Leadership. The award, presented by the National School Boards Association, recognizes the staff and leaders from WSSDA, along with the Illinois Association of School Boards, California School Boards Association, Maine School Boards Association, and the Pennsylvania School Boards Association for their vision and collaboration to define excellence in local school governance.

“These teams took a leap of faith and what a pay-out,” said NSBA President Sonny Savoie. “Your work is so powerful and its progress tells our story: local school boards—with the necessary tools, support, and training—can be community leaders at the vanguard of providing a quality education for our students.”

The award, named in honor of former NSBA executive director Thomas A. Shannon, was established in 1997.

The 5-State Policy Project: Targeting Student Learning began in 1996 with Maine’s invitation to state school boards associations to meet and discuss school board policy and student achievement. Out of this meeting came a long-term collaboration between five states of varying sizes, locations, and governance models—Maine, Washington, Illinois, California, and Pennsylvania—committing staff and resources to balance the important aspects of policymaking with student learning. This collaboration enables the project to go beyond individual state-based models and develop a process and tool for policy-making that can be used by public schools boards across the nation.

The 5-State Policy Project, operating as a think-tank, authored the Targeting Student Learning Workbook, providing a process and identifying key policy topics to help school board leaders focus on student achievement.

“The work of these teams was ahead of its time. It was born and underway before No Child Left Behind was even ‘put to ink’,” said Anne Bryant, executive director, NSBA. “These teams’ valuable thinking, processes and tools continually improve local school board policy decisions and student learning. The teams’ expectations are extraordinary: every student achieving. Their work is an example to follow.”

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