One of the most important things I have learned from studying school board governance is that poor governance rarely announces itself and will usually show up under a much nicer name: responsiveness, urgency, efficiency, transparency, and community input.
I have spent the last couple of years watching Laguna Beach Unified board meetings, reading agendas, and trying to understand how an idea becomes a district decision. Somewhere along the way, the California Education Code and board bylaws became recreational reading. This has done very little for my social life (thank you to my friends and family for listening to my newfound knowledge), but it does satisfy the part of me that wants to know how public systems are supposed to work, where authority ends, and why certain procedures were put in place before someone decides they are inconvenient.
As summer break begins, LBUSD is heading into another superintendent transition, a new budget cycle, and a board election in November. We do not yet know the full field of candidates, but before the mailers arrive and everyone discovers a passionate commitment to transparency, it seems worth deciding what the job actually requires.
What kind of school board would serve this district well?
We do not have to answer that question on instinct, since California law provides a solid framework. The California School Boards Association offers guidance, and LBUSD already has policies and bylaws that define responsibilities. Other districts have built governance systems that Laguna Beach can learn from.
The harder part is finding trustees who believe those rules still matter when they slow down something the board wants to do.
The California Education Code gives school boards broad authority. Section 35010 places school districts under the control of a governing board. Section 35160 gives boards wide latitude, provided their actions are consistent with the law and the purposes of public education. Section 35161 allows boards to delegate responsibilities while still holding ultimate accountability.
That authority belongs to the board collectively, but it does not make board members district administrators.
The board governs through policy, budgets, contracts, goals, superintendent hiring and evaluation, bargaining direction, accountability systems, and public votes, while the superintendent and staff run the district. Education Code Section 35035 identifies the superintendent as the board’s chief executive officer and assigns responsibilities involving implementation, budgeting, staffing, financial reporting, and carrying out district plans.
Essentially, the board sets the direction, the superintendent carries it out, and then the board monitors the work and evaluates the results.
This arrangement is not complicated, but it can quickly become messy when individual trustees act as though they have their own chain of command. Staff should not have to sort through competing instructions, and the public should not have to guess whether a decision came from the board, the superintendent, a site administrator, or one notably persistent trustee.
An engaged board should ask difficult questions, demand reliable information, examine budgets, evaluate the superintendent, and push for better results without taking over the work. The line gets crossed when trustees begin deciding which employee should handle a task, which vendor should be selected, which venue should be used, or which public complaint should be assigned to staff immediately.
For LBUSD, that distinction stopped being theoretical this year.
In January, the board introduced a change to Bylaw 9322, which controls how meeting agendas are developed. The existing language called for the board president and superintendent to work together, but the revision gave the board president final approval.
That may sound like a small procedural adjustment, but it wasn’t.
No history of repeated agenda failures had been presented to explain why such a change was necessary. At the time, Dr. Jason Glass said the existing system followed normal practice and that he had always had a productive working relationship with the board president—until a disagreement arose over one particular agenda item with the new board president, Sheri Morgan.
Staff, both employee unions, and hundreds of written and in-person public comments opposed the change. The majority moved forward anyway.
Agenda control is easy to dismiss as board policy minutiae until it determines which issues make it onto the dais and which decisions the board can take into its own hands.
The revised bylaw was passed on February 12. That same meeting included a lengthy discussion about the graduation location, and the item returned for action at the board’s very next meeting on February 26.
I am not claiming that the bylaw change caused the graduation vote, but the sequence shows why the change mattered. Almost immediately after the board president gained final agenda authority, a decision traditionally handled at the school-site level was brought to the full board for a vote.
Glass told the board that graduation locations had historically been site decisions and recommended leaving the matter there. Dee Perry also said she wanted it to remain “a site decision,” while arguing that community concerns deserved more attention.
That was a reasonable concern. Families should be heard, and students should be consulted. If the process was too narrow, unclear, or closed prematurely, the board had every right to ask questions and require something better.
It could have directed the administration to explain how the initial decision was reached, gather broader feedback, set clear criteria, and return with a recommendation.
Instead, Dee, along with Sheri Morgan and Howard Hills, voted to move graduation to the Irvine Bowl.
The board did not improve the site-level process—it replaced it.
That is the difference between oversight and management. Oversight would have required a better decision-making process, while management was the board selecting the venue itself.
Once public pressure is sufficient to bring an operational decision to the board, the same reasoning can be applied to transportation, facilities, staffing, discipline, communications, curriculum, or student services. A board does not have to make every decision itself to prove it listens; sometimes, listening should lead to a better process, not a board takeover.
The same preference for a desired outcome over a clear process has appeared in the board’s handling of superintendent appointments.
At the new majority’s first meeting in December 2024, the board voted 3–2 to direct staff to prepare a contract for a specific interim superintendent candidate. That effort fell apart when the candidate declined.
In May 2026, forty-eight hours after approving Glass’s separation, the same three-member majority voted to appoint Dr. Don Austin as the permanent superintendent without presenting a new public search process.
The circumstances were not identical, but the pattern is hard to miss. In both cases, the majority identified the person they wanted and attempted to move directly toward a contract. The December 2024 effort failed because the candidate said no. On May 14, 2026, the candidate said yes.
I have already written in detail about Austin’s appointment and the Orange County District Attorney’s request for answers, so I am not going to rebuild that full timeline here. The point I am making here is simpler: policies, bylaws, notice, consultation, and equal access to information matter most when the people with the votes already know what they want.
Howard Hills offered a very different view at the June 4 meeting, saying the board could appoint a superintendent “any way the board wants to do it and any time.” He was stressing the breadth of the board’s legal authority, and that authority is broad, but authority is only the beginning of the question.
A responsible trustee should also ask whether the process is fair, whether all board members have the same information, whether the public has been given an honest account of what is happening, and whether the decision will still look credible once the immediate excitement has passed.
Having the legal power to do something does not automatically make it wise. Moving quickly does not mean the work was carefully considered, and a policy does not lose its value because following it has become inconvenient.
A district that prides itself on excellence should be looking for the best way to govern, not treating the legal minimum as an impressive achievement. Of course, governance is about much more than the controversies that fill meeting rooms.
California’s Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP) requires districts to assess achievement, attendance, facilities, school climate, family engagement, course access, staffing, special education, mental health, safety, and whether different groups of students are being well served.
Good trustees should be able to ask whether a program is working without trying to redesign it from the dais. They should be able to recognize a disturbing result without turning one number into a districtwide catastrophe, and they should also be willing to look honestly at areas that need attention rather than hide behind LBUSD’s overall reputation.
Being a strong district does not mean every decision is strong or every student is getting what they need.
Labor relations require the same kind of judgment. Support for teachers and classified staff is not measured by appreciation posts or friendly comments during meetings. It shows up in bargaining priorities, workload, staffing, compensation, benefits, communication, and whether the board respects the people who actually do the work.
Trustees need to understand the district’s financial position, retention challenges, staffing needs, and long-term obligations. They should give clear and lawful direction to the bargaining team while avoiding side promises, public freelancing, or informal efforts to influence negotiations outside the established process.
A person can genuinely care about teachers and still be terrible at labor relations. Caring is important, but knowing how the process works is also important.
The board’s relationship with the public requires a similar balance.
A board meeting is not an open-ended town hall. The board has an agenda to complete, decisions to make, and legal requirements to follow, but public comment is still part of the meeting’s real work. It is not a formality everyone has to sit through before the important people begin talking.
The community does not get to direct staff or control every decision. At the same time, these are public schools, and the public has every right to question how they are being governed.
Trustees need ways to hear from people without assuming that the fullest room represents the entire community, but they also need to avoid the opposite mistake of treating criticism as an annoyance or a threat.
Public opinion is information, and it belongs in the decision alongside law, data, professional expertise, student needs, and financial realities. The board then has to explain what it decided and why, especially when the answer is not what the loudest group wanted.
None of this works well without the right temperament.
Trustees will disagree. That is normal and often healthy. The issue is whether they can disagree without making every conflict personal, ask hard questions without humiliating staff, and accept a vote without spending the next several months trying to undermine the result. They also need to resist the urge to turn every complaint they agree with into a direct assignment for the superintendent.
Winning an election also does not make someone an instant expert in finance, instruction, law, facilities, transportation, labor, special education, and every other corner of district operations. There is nothing wrong with admitting you need to learn something before deciding it.
Humility is not a side benefit of this job; it is part of being competent at it.
Other districts offer useful examples. Ohio’s Cleveland Metropolitan uses goals and guardrails to distinguish between the outcomes the board monitors and the operational boundaries staff must follow. Washington’s Issaquah uses written expectations and public monitoring reports. Virginia’s Fairfax County has invested in explanations that help the public understand complicated decisions.
None of this is revolutionary; it is simply more organized than waiting for a controversy and then deciding where the boundary should have been.
LBUSD already has some of the right pieces. The district uses public bargaining proposals, fiscal disclosures, hearings, and ratification procedures.
Those processes can feel slow and tedious when everything is moving smoothly. Their purpose becomes much easier to appreciate the moment someone wants to bypass them.
This is the foundation I plan to use when evaluating future board candidates.
Can the person explain the difference between governance and management without giving a vague answer about “leadership”? What would they do after losing a vote? When should the board defer to professional staff? How should the board respond when the loudest public demand conflicts with legal obligations, budget realities, student needs, or a staff recommendation? Do they believe adopted policies still apply when those policies slow the outcome they prefer?
Those answers will tell us far more than another campaign statement about transparency, excellence, or putting students first. Nearly every candidate will claim those values. The revealing part is what they do when those values pull in different directions.
Some warning signs are easier to spot.
A candidate talks much more about what the board is legally allowed to do than about when restraint is appropriate. Policies and bylaws suddenly become flexible whenever they interfere with a preferred outcome. The candidate promises to fix operational problems without showing any understanding of the board’s actual role. The superintendent is discussed as though each trustee personally supervises the position.
Other warning signs are quieter. A candidate uses the word transparency constantly but cannot explain confidentiality or public-meeting law. One isolated data point becomes the entire story of the district. Uncomfortable information is dismissed because LBUSD remains strong overall.
I will be listening closely to how candidates talk about staff. Praise is easy, but respect shows up in how someone discusses workload, morale, bargaining, professional expertise, and the limits of their own authority.
Poor governance has a very good publicist: role confusion becomes responsiveness, an incomplete process becomes efficiency, and meeting the legal minimum becomes transparency. The label changes, but the underlying habit remains the same: use the power first and explain it later.
My children are at the beginning of their time in this district, so I am less interested in who wins a board argument this month than in whether LBUSD remains stable, trusted, and well run for the next decade.
I am looking for trustees who understand the law and use their authority responsibly. I want people who value public input without allowing whoever fills the room to govern by volume, who provide serious oversight without directing day-to-day operations, and whose support for staff lasts through bargaining season.
I also want transparency before decisions are made, not only after the result has been announced.
Before deciding whom to support, I want to know whether candidates understand the responsibilities of the role and have the judgment to exercise them well.
Laguna Beach will be better served by a board that can work collectively, respect professional roles, follow its own processes, and keep the district’s long-term health in view.
