February is a month with a disproportionate number of holidays – Groundhog Day, Valentine’s Day, a couple of presidential birthdays, etc. But one I did not know about is “National Clean Out Your Computer Day,” celebrated on February 11th. We all do some of this every day, but I like the idea of a day to dig into this task. Charter authorizing professionals gather a lot of data and documents on their computers, but unless you’ve got an automated tracking system or dedicated staff support, it may not be as easy to access as you would like. Plus, the recent changes in charter law may require some additions to your collection. Here are a couple of tasks you might consider for this “National Clean Out Your Computer Day”:
- Make sure that you’ve got the most recent version of each charter document (and any auxiliary agreements, like MOUs or service contracts) readily available. When a material revision is proposed or renewal approaches, you’ll want to make sure you’re aware of all of the necessary updates to bring the charter into compliance with current petition content requirements.
- Update (or create) a spreadsheet to track the credentials and assignments of teachers at your charter schools and include a column for whether they were employed in the 2019-2020 school year. All teachers in charter schools need to be credentialled, effective July 2020, but those who were employed in a charter during 2019-2020 have some extra time to comply.
- Find and update your list of charter school governing board members and each board’s meeting schedule for the year. Set up folders on your computer for each meeting so you’ll have a place to collect agendas, minutes and recordings (required effective January 1) for review for Brown Act compliance when you’ve got some time. You may also want a folder for each board to collect the conflict of interest policy and Form 700s required by the Political Reform Act.
I could go on, but you get the idea. There are a lot of components to effective charter oversight. It helps to have templates ready for the data you know you’ll need and folders in place for the documents you have to collect.