Partner Resources
Explore practical, actionable tools, model policies, and best practices to support your organization’s efforts to bolster academic excellence around the country.
Administrative Resources
Resources to help your organization get started and navigate incorporating your nonprofit, setting up HR and accounting, and hiring the right legal team.
Guide to Hiring Attorneys for School Districts
How to create your own network of local attorneys to refer to school board members who need to replace their school district’s attorney or to hire one as a supplemental counsel.
Presentation: Types of Public Policy Nonprofit Organizations
Learn the difference between 501c3 and 501c4 nonprofit organizations, and principles for interacting with political action committees, candidates, and elected officials.
Need Back Office Support? Hire Bearing Tree
Bearing Tree is SBAE’s top recommendation for a one-stop shop that can manage your organization’s accounting, payroll, human resources, tax filings, database management, and other services. They also can serve as a sponsoring organization, which allows you to receive tax deductible donations if your 501c3 application is not yet approved.
Strategic Planning
Resources to help you define your organization and build towards the future.
Organizational Roadmap
This worksheet lists the action items and organizational infrastructure needed to establish and build an SBAE partner organization. It includes basic, intermediate, and advanced steps to creating a high-performing organization, organized by internal and external resources. SBAE can help you develop all the items listed here, or you can complete them independently.
Sample School Board Association Competitive Analysis
A good place to start in defining your organization’s programmatic offerings is to review the services offered by the state school board association in your state. SBAE created this sheet for our partner organization in Oklahoma. You can edit it to reflect the realities in your state, or SBAE can create a custom analysis for you as part of your organization’s strategic plan. The finished product will help you plan which services are most important to you and your members, so you can prioritize the development of your organization’s programs.
Enterprise Architecture Capability Roadmap
The next stage in strategic planning is to create a roadmap for enterprise architecture. The primary difference between this exercise and typical strategic planning is that it results in specific goals and responsibilities for organizational leaders. This guide introduces the concept. It can be applied to your organization, as well as school boards, with the help of a qualified advisor. SBAE can connect you with an advisor, if desired.
Membership
Organization Membership Models
This guide describes the five basic membership models that SBAE partner organizations most commonly use. Reviewing these models will help determine how your organization wants to serve school board members and drive change.
Guide to Recruiting School Board Members
Step-by-step instructions and ideas for where to find and how to recruit school board members to join your organization.
School Board Member Toolkit
Use this library of resources to attract new members by meeting their needs. They can be used as part of an email or social media campaign, added to your website, or distributed directly to existing members. Any SBAE logos on these documents can be replaced with your organization’s logo. .
Fundraising
Here are some helpful studies to help guide your decision-making.
- Only 10-14% of high school teachers are using high-quality instructional materials (RAND 2020)
- Professional development must be aligned with curriculum (Carnegie 2020)
- Curriculum is 40 times more effective in improving academic achievement than reducing class size (ASPEN 2017)
- Content-poor curricula hurt economically disadvantaged students the most (General Accounting Office 1994)
- Students must become culturally literate by learning the history and great books of their culture to retain information across subjects (E.D. Hirsch 1983)
- Core Knowledge Curriculum is proven by longitudinal studies to improve academic achievement (Brown University 2023)
- Why science of math is better than student led instruction and other pedagogical fads (Codding, Peltier, and Campbell 2023)
- Using a science of reading curriculum improves reading scores (Yaacov Petscher 2021)
- Working with an academic goal setting coach improves testing scores (AJ Crabill)
Communications
Here are some model policies you can bring to your school district.
Information Technology
Here are some resources to help improve parental rights in the classroom.
- Parents Bill of Rights model policy
- Rated Books
- Virginia Model Policies for ensuring privacy, dignity, and respect for students and parents in public schools
- Virginia Model Book Review Form
- Virginia Model Book Reconsideration Form
- Title IX call recording video
- What School Boards Need to Know About Title IX (AEI)
- Title IX Model Policy
- Politics and Children’s Books: Evidence from School Library Collections (Columbia University 2023)
- Gateways religious liberty toolkit
- Schools and the Law: First Amendment US Supreme Court Decisions That School Board Members Should Know (AEI 2024)
- Model policy – Prayer in School
- Sexual Risk Avoidance Education Issue Brief (Family Research Council 2014)
- Public Support for Teaching the Success Sequence in School (AEI 2021)