According to the California School Boards Association, the 5 major responsibilities of a school board are:
- Setting direction
- Establishing an effective and efficient structure
- Providing support
- Ensuring accountability
- Providing community leadership as advocates for children, the school district and public schools
These include responsibilities such as ensuring governances by establishing the rules and policies. This includes things such as addressing ethical issues in the Administration to student bullying. They need to ensure the policies are being implemented.
The school board is responsible for giving the Superintendent their powers and ensuring that they uphold all his or her responsibilities.
The school board must be the guide for the school district’s budget and that includes approving bills, establishing spending priorities and even when to ask voters to pass levies that will benefit the school. They must listen to all stakeholders in order to determine priorities.
The school board has an important role in evaluating the curriculum as well as reviewing student achievement data regularly to evaluate how effective the schools are and make appropriate changes.
Transparency
According to Sunshine Review, an ideal school transparency checklist should meet at least two criteria: inclusion of relevant information and interpretation of data whoes meaning or impootance is not self-evident. Bonus points might be awareded for trend data (eg. on tax increases in recent years) or benchmarks and cross-district patterns (eg. tax and salary data for neary districts or test scores from districts with similar demographics. The following features should be available online and readable according to Ballotpedia:
| Checklist parameter | School district website features |
| Budgets | Annual budget, check registers and superintendent salary |
| Open meeting laws | Board and committee meeting schedules/agendas, minutes, policies & admin contact |
| Elected officials | List of school board president, members and superintendent |
| Administrative officials | Contact information for school district administrative officials |
| Audits | Information about regular financial and performance audits |
| Contracts | Contracts and bids with a union, vendor or supplier as well as teacher contracts and pay schedules. Formal board and union proposals in current negotations |
| Public records | Information for filing a CPRA/FOIA request |
| Other | Academics: district “report card”, test scores, dropout and graduation rates |
| Other | Background checks: information about the school district’s policies regarding background checks of employed staff |
DMUSD Accountablility 