Board Prerogative - Virginia law on in-service - Brief Article

School Administrator, June, 1997

Should school board members be free to pick their own in-service opportunities?

Not in Virginia, according to the Virginia School Boards Association, which believes school board members should fulfill their annual training requirement by selecting their programs from a list of activities pre-approved by their own board. VSBA recently prevailed in its legal challenge to a new state board of education directive that had granted individual board members the right to choose their own training.

VSBA, which provides virtually all of the in-service workshops for board members, argued that state-law grants local boards alone the authority to approve or disapprove what training individual members receive.