The Trustee Was a Parent Long Before They Were a Trustee
Every fall, about a month or so into the school year, the questions start. A parent doesn't love the placement their child landed in. A family wants a policy explained, or exempted, or reversed. And somewhere on an all-parent board, at least one of those parents is also a trustee.
I spent eight years navigating exactly that overlap as a head of school, and if there's one governance lesson I'd hand a new head or a new trustee before September even started, it's this: a trustee is a parent first. The trustee hat goes on over the parent hat. It never replaces it.
What that means for the trustee
Every spring, when prospective trustees came to me nervous about joining the board, I told them the truth: you do not have to sacrifice your own child's wellbeing for the good of some future generation of students. That tradeoff isn't the job. A parent who joins a board and starts voting against their own child's interests out of an abstract sense of duty isn't being a better trustee. They're just a worse parent, and usually a confused one.
I said it every spring, months before any of it would actually matter. The assurance doesn't mean much until the school year actually starts and a trustee's term begins for real, which is exactly when the questions above start landing on a parent-trustee's desk too.
Governance asks a trustee to think about the whole school over time, past any one family's run through it. But that doesn't require a parent to stop being a parent. It requires knowing which hat is on in which room, and trusting that the people around them, the head, the faculty, the rest of the board, are strong enough that no single trustee has to personally guarantee every good outcome for their own child.
What that means for the teacher and the administrator
Here's where it gets practical. A parent who happens to sit on the board still has a child in a classroom, and that child still has a teacher, who still fields the same first question every other parent asks: is my child okay?
The moment a parent-trustee shortcuts that relationship, calling the head directly, raising a classroom concern at a board meeting, going around the teacher because a board seat feels like it should buy a faster answer, the structure starts to wobble. Teachers stop trusting that the usual channel means anything. Administrators start wondering whether every parent complaint is secretly a board matter.
So I made a point, publicly and often, of saying the same thing to trustees that I said to every other parent: start with the source. If a concern begins with a teacher, it goes to the teacher first. If it's an administrative matter, it goes to the administrator who owns it. A board seat doesn't move anyone to the front of that line. It's a separate job entirely.
What that means for the head of school
My own rule was simple, and I said it out loud often enough that people could count on it: I will always listen. Any community member, trustees included, could bring me a concern, and I'd hear them out. But listening isn't the same as intervening, and I'd always guide the conversation back to process. Who's the right first person for this. Have you talked with them yet. What did they say.
That's not bureaucracy for its own sake. It's what keeps a head of school from becoming the release valve for every anxiety in the building, and it's what keeps governance from drifting into casework, one trustee's family concern at a time.
An all-parent board isn't a design flaw. Parents who care enough about a school to govern it are usually the ones who'll fight hardest for its future. But that love only strengthens the school when everyone, including the people wearing two hats at once, knows which one is on, and which door to walk through first.
