But it’s also an opportunity.

By summer our school district will have lost superintendent Barb Grohe and associate superintendent Tim Grieves.

Shortly thereafter there’s an election for three of seven school board positions.

Fortunately, we have qualified educational administrators to fill in temporarily.  Some could be candidates.

So we can afford to take our time, as a board and a community, to think through improvements in district governance.  Time for new board members to participate.

Even if all we want is to replace Dr. Grohe with the best conventional superintendent we can find, we should make the most of our resources.

The members of this community have lots of contacts, including most of our nation’s top K-12 leaders.

Let’s get their recommendations on our table, not just those of expensive, unimaginative “head hunters.”

What do we want?  A manager to whom educators report, or an educator to whom managers report?  There are dozens of such questions.

But, to quote the song lyric, “Is that all there is?”  Is that really all we want?  Just replace a couple of deck chairs on the Titanic?

The School Board has not given much precise direction to district governance.

There are many alternative ways to organize and run a school district.  Some are being used by school districts elsewhere.  Some could be borrowed from other types of organizations.

Of course, most of the suggestions to come from any brainstorming sessions need to be rejected.  The same thing’s true for the range of options thorough research will produce. But who knows what improvements we might adopt after new ways of thinking?

For example, consider what UI College of Business Professor Amy Kristof-Brown tells me.  She specializes in management organization.  And yet she thinks it’s the wrong place to start.

She says today’s progressive businesses ask, “What do our customers need?  How can we best deliver it?  Who are the best people to make that happen?”

Only then do they organize for that result.

What a concept!

Some school districts already talk in terms of service to “customers.”

(College Community, up I-380 from Iowa City, is one.)

We could, too.

We’d need a different kind of survey of students, parents and teachers from anything the board now uses.  And an ombudsperson.  But it might be worth the effort.

Many organizational reforms these days, including schools, involve distributive decision-making – “horizontal organizations.”  Power is given to whoever has the most intimate stakeholder contact.

How might that improve our kids’ education?  No more hierarchy from the superintendent “down.”  As many decisions as possible made within schools by site-based councils of students, parents and teachers.  They’d have authority – not just responsibility.

How can we best organize the central office?  We need somebody there.  We have some of the highest paid administrators in the state.  But we don’t have many of them.  As a result, we often give a high-priced administrator a job someone else could do.

U.S. Supreme Court justices don’t hire “assistant justices” for $125,000 a year.  When I was a law clerk for Justice Black the pay was about $10,000.  If Supreme Court justices can manage with young law school graduates could a school superintendent do with fewer “assistant superintendents” and more “assistants to” the superintendent?

There are examples of team decision making.  “Self-management teams” of employees on a factory floor.  Five athletes on a basketball court.

There’s outsourcing (like our Ryder bus contract).  The extreme: the “virtual organization” with no “employees.”

There’s the university faculty model.  The doctor-hospital organization.  The arts management of a TV show, movie crew, or opera company.

There’s management for results.

You may have seen stand up comic Lewis Black’s routine.  He explains why we shouldn’t have an ozone hole. “We have men.  We have rockets.  We have saran wrap.”

And then, gesturing upward he orders, “Fix it!”

The board’s long range planning process could be the beginning.  We could say to the site-based councils, “Test scores going down?  Here are the educational attainment results we want.  Fix it!”  Let the professionals figure out how to do it.

Do I recommend all – even any – of these approaches?  No.

Only that we not squander this once-in-a-board-member’s-term opportunity to explore the full range of options before us.

Education is about teachers, students and parents.  It’s not about superintendents and school boards.  But how we structure and administer the system can make an enormous contribution to the environment in which that education takes place.

Let’s do it.

Nicholas Johnson is a member of the Iowa City School Board.