He told me many stories of his childhood. One involved a neighbor’s exasperated response to his son’s request for a nickel: “What did you do with the last nickel I gave you?”

It’s a question you might well put to me.

With a new school board election coming up Tuesday, Sept. 14, it’s been nearly a year since many of you gave me your votes – and some of you your dollars – to put me on our local School Board.

It’s time for an accounting, this board member’s annual report to the community. What have I done with the last nickel you gave me? Candor compels the concession I haven’t accomplished much.

There are some things a board member can do as an individual: attend school events, provide recognition and encouragement to others, answer e-mail, and read widely about K-12 issues. I’ve tried to contribute to more community communication with this column and a very extensive Web page (http://soli.inav.net/~njohnson/schoolboard). Among its first resources were the voluminous board policies I took the time to scan and upload.

But no individual board member can accomplish much board action unless he or she has enough basic math skills to be able to count up to four (a majority of our seven-person board). And I’ve had a lot of difficulty with that math.

Fortunately, there’s not much good – or harm – that a school board can do to a district. The strength of our schools comes from the high quality of our students, parents, teachers and staff.

And there certainly have been some positive actions from the board. No individual can claim credit, and I wouldn’t be brash enough to try. But I did encourage and support a number of changes:

• The board’s reversal on the “prep time” issue.
• The somewhat less confrontational approach to teachers generally.
• Board meetings that regularly include amongst the administrative trivia at least one item relating to curriculum and our students’ academic performance.
• The board’s finally keeping its years-old promise to provide all-day kindergarten at all schools.

1) Over the years I have held a number of jobs in which I had to write my own job description. This is another. But I still cannot tell you with any precision, one year later, what our board thinks our roles should be. We have yet to discuss John Carver’s Boards That Make a Difference, and fashion his suggestions into job descriptions that make sense for Johnson County.

By his standards we have never held a “board meeting.” We have merely played the role of audience members at “superintendent’s meetings.” The agendas were written by the superintendent and literally presented by her, in her office, to three board members for little or no modest revision.

2) As a result we have not done the tasks Carver says are ours: long range planning (including five year budgets and boundaries projections), setting measurable goals and standards, formulating a few guiding policies, establishing “management information reporting systems” and delineating the relative responsibilities of board and superintendent.

This was not done before I came to the board. In fact, the board was unable to evaluate Superintendent Barb Grohe’s performance because it “didn’t have time” to set any objectives a year earlier. It was not done at our fall retreat. It was not done during the year. And we “didn’t have time” to do it before making budget cuts -- or before searching for a new superintendent.

Those are the two biggest ways I’ve let you down. But there are others:

• My concerns about “stakeholder relations,” and the failure to provide remedies, were outlined in the prior two columns.
• We have not always complied with the spirit of the open meetings law – or, some might say, even the letter on some occasions.
• I’ve failed in my efforts to get the board to demand more in the way of supporting research and data before making decisions.

It puts him in an elite and revered minority.

A minority group I am proud to enter.

I apologize.

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