Here’s a consent agenda template for your to download after you read the instructions below.
I’ll be the first to admit that “consent agenda” is not the catchiest name. But I did not make it up, and everyone else seems to be fine using it so we will play along. The question is, though, what does it mean and how can it help you. My first Board meeting experiences may shed some light.
No one likes a long Board meeting, other than perhaps that one Board member currently giving a 20-minute speech on last Tuesday’s school lunch menu. The first Board Chair I worked with committed to reducing our monthly meetings from two hours to 60 minutes. Everyone loved the fact that Board meetings which started at 8pm were reliably done by 9pm. The problem was, though, that we did not necessarily get to discuss everything that was on the agenda.
We could spend 15 minutes reviewing the previous meeting’s minutes since no one had read them, 30 minutes talking through the financials line by line, and 10 minutes discussing turf for our soccer field with the athletics committee. This left us with about five minutes for the Head of School report, a proposal for a new financial aid policy, and decisions that needed to be made on major facility upgrades.
We tried to fix the problem by limiting discussion time on less important issues, but once an item was raised it was quite challenging to cut off the conversation.
This is the beauty of a consent agenda. First you divide your agenda into two portions, the consent agenda and the main agenda. Then, you take all of the routine items like minute approvals, committee updates with no action items, monthly financials (assuming no surprises), and the beautiful new soccer turf, and place these in the consent agenda section.
Rule #1 is that nothing in the consent agenda section gets raised or discussed. All items from that section are sent out in writing 48 hours before the meeting so that all can review. The Chair opens the meeting by asking for approval of all these items at once. And the entire process takes about five minutes.
Of course, if based on the materials sent out anyone believes a consent agenda item requires discussion, that item is moved to the main agenda, provided that the reason for the request is not simply that a Board member did not read the materials.
The result? You start the meeting with a quick motion and approval, and you have 45 minutes to focus on strategy rather than small talk. (How to effectively manage a Board strategy discussion will be in our next resource package!)
Try it out with this consent agenda template.