How I Govern

I didn’t learn governance on the job

Most people come to a school board wanting to help and learn how it all works along the way. I came at it from the other direction.

Serving well on a public board is a craft. Most trustees, understandably, learn that craft while they’re doing it — a meeting at a time. I’ve spent the better part of my career on the other side of it: studying how public boards actually work, and then teaching it.

I teach this for a living

By day, I’m a professor and the chair of the Public Policy Department at William Jessup University, right here in Rocklin, where I teach courses like public-sector leadership, public administration, and state and local government. The work of a governing board isn’t abstract to me — it’s the subject I stand up in front of a classroom and explain. I’m even finishing a doctorate built around it, with a dissertation on how public board members actually make their decisions. It turns out that if you want to serve on a board well, it helps to have spent years asking why some boards thrive and others come apart.

And I’ve done it, not just studied it

The theory only counts if you’ve lived it. I’ve sat as a trustee over multi-billion-dollar public pension funds, where a single vote can affect thousands of families’ retirements. I’m a founding board member and corporate secretary of the Equable Institute, a national, bipartisan nonprofit that helps governments keep their retirement promises sustainable and honest. That combination — the classroom and the boardroom, the research and the responsibility — is what I bring to our schools.

You never stop going back to school

Here’s the part my kids tease me about: I don’t think you ever graduate from this. Even now, decades in, I still go back to school for it — this year I completed executive programs at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School on corporate governance and on being effective in the boardroom. Nobody made me. I did it because the families of this district deserve a trustee who treats governing as a skill worth sharpening, not a title to sit back and enjoy.

What this means for our schools

It means I don’t have to guess at the best way to run a board — I’ve helped write it, and I’m regularly asked to teach it. Over the years I’ve been invited to train city councils and school boards, to lead board retreats, and to speak at conferences across the country and beyond on how good governance turns a board and its administration into partners instead of rivals. When neighboring districts want to get this right, they’ve asked me to come help. I’m proud of that — but the point isn’t the training. The point is what it protects.

“Good governance is the quiet work behind the walls. You don’t notice it when it’s done right — you just notice that the lights come on and the house holds. That’s the job.”

A well-run board keeps the focus where it belongs: on students, and off the drama that has swallowed so many districts. It settles the boring questions — who decides what, how a policy gets made, when the budget gets set — so the important ones get the attention they deserve. That’s not glamorous, and it rarely makes the news. But it’s the foundation everything our kids get to stand on. I’ve spent a career learning how to build that foundation, and I’d be honored to keep building it for Roseville.

Pete Constant is a university professor and department chair, a former public pension trustee, a parent of five Oakmont graduates, and RJUHSD’s Trustee for Area 2. See the full Governance & Accountability record →