Carrie Fisher is the Director of Finance at Belgrade School District in Belgrade, Montana.

Andy

But what I’d like to do is just kind of start off by having you tell me just a little bit more about your role in the district and how long you’ve been in this role. I’m the district clerk. I’ve been a district clerk in Montana schools for 20 years, but I just have been with Belgrade for the last two years.

Carrie

There’ll be two years for me in September. And when I got here, we were doing board books with Stamping the Corner, exhibit one, exhibit two, and then running them through the copier. And then if something would change, we’d have to go back and redo everything.

And it was stressful. So we were like, there’s got to be a better way. There wasn’t any sort of platform in place at the time, not for meetings or policies.

Okay. Policies have always been done kind of through our school board association. And so they just had, like, a big PDF, and you logged in, and I don’t really remember the name of whatever program that they used to do that, but it wasn’t easy to search and it wasn’t easy to down.

Like, you had to download the whole book to get one policy. And so when they switched over to assembly, that was huge. That was amazing.

That’s when you took on policies and you decided to use the policy service, not only that the association was providing, but to use Simbli as a mechanism for delivery on those policies. They took it on for the whole state. And then when we were looking at platforms to do minutes, it came to my attention that Simbli had the Minutes module along with it, and it just made sense.

So we looked at it and we’re like, oh, my gosh, it integrates so well with policies, because if we’re updating a policy, it just goes straight into those board agendas. There’s not a lot of extra work there. There’s no conversion there’s anything, you just click on it and say you’re going to review that policy.

Andy

Was there any lag time between your exposure to policies and adopting the policy module and then meetings, or did you get them at the same time?

Carrie

No, what was kind of interesting is I didn’t know that the state was going with Simbli at first, and then we had done a bunch of demos on a bunch of different platforms and Simbli actually never came up. And then I was sitting in a meeting talking to someone, I think from the Montana Boards School Boards Association and telling them that we were getting ready to look at adopting a board minute thing. And I think it was Deborah Silk said, hey, have you looked at Simbli, they have a minutes module.

And I said no. So we scheduled a demo and it did everything we were looking for. And then the fact that it went with the policy part was just an extra bonus.

Andy

So talk to me a little bit about that first exposure in terms of training. Obviously you probably had to go through a little bit of training and with our training and support team, tell me what that was like and was there a learning curve and how did that roll out? 

Carrie

It was very user friendly. There was not much of a learning curve. In fact, even going back, once you learn where everything is, I think the biggest struggle personally that I’ve had is the attendance part of the meeting. So to do the minutes, I have to take attendance. Like I’ll go and I’ll be in the meeting and all of a sudden I’ll be like try to import my motion and then I go, oh, I forgot to take attendance so I can’t record votes.

It’s those little things that have probably been the biggest struggle. But as far as building the board minute book or board book and getting the agenda ready, it has cut our time in half, I bet, or more, just because we were trying to track down things from people. We had really long meetings because there wasn’t a lot of information in the board book because people wouldn’t send us stuff, or they would just say, I want this on the agenda.

And then you’d get there and they’d have to make a presentation or they’d have to talk to the board about it, or there was no opportunity for the board to gain information ahead of time. And now we have that ability where we’ve set up the template, where it has the details, the background, they have their recommended motion there, everything’s just kind of set up. And I think our meetings I attribute it to simply have gone from we used to start a meeting at six and sometimes not get out of there until ten.

So we’re looking at 4 hours, we’re down to 2 hours, we’re getting out of there by 8:15, 8:20. It’s crazy. And I think a lot of it has to do with the board just has all the information they want in front of them.

You have what it’s going to cost, you have the background information, you have the why behind why, it’s in the board packet, why they’re making a decision.

Andy

How was it rolled out to the board members in terms of their first exposure to it? Did they get some training? Did you provide that? Are they using it? 

Carrie

I did. I did the training with the board. But the board member side of the training is so easy.

It’s like here you log in, you can look at everything, you can put sticky notes in there if you want. There was not a lot of stuff that the board needed to do to learn how to use it. The principals and the people that are the contributors to the board book have probably had more training than anyone else just because they’ll call with questions or I want to do this, how do I do it? How does this happen? But even that’s been really easy to roll out.

People don’t have a lot of questions. A lot of it is more they forget to log in and they can’t see the meeting. They’ll get to the page and then see the meetings listed and they’re like, I’m not added to this meeting.

And I’m like, did you log in? Oh, yeah, I got to log in. And then they log in and they’re good to go and they can see everything they need to see. 

The board members haven’t had any problem. I think their biggest hurdle is remembering to bring their device to the meeting now charged. 

Andy

Have they kind of standardized on devices or are they all using different devices? 

Carrie

Some laptops, all the same devices. We got them all laptops, but I have one board member that is like, I don’t want to carry around a laptop. I have an iPad and I’m going to use that. And so that’s what he uses, but everyone else uses it.

But if they forget their device, they just pull it up on their phone. They’re figuring it out. The first couple of meetings.

I have a board member who’s 80 years old and she was very nervous and she’s been one of the ones that has caught on the quickest, to be honest. So I had a hard copy printed and there for her just in case and we didn’t need it. 

Andy

Do you find from their perspective, in terms of, again, being consumers of the information, do they utilize the search function when sometimes maybe a question comes up around a policy or a meeting that happened six months ago Are they pretty keen on getting in and just doing a search or pulling up information from meetings that happened a while back? Has that been of use? 

Carrie

Good question. I’m not sure. I know I use it all the time.

I love that search feature because I’m like, oh. And then usually I’ll search something, I was like, oh, that was before. Simply got to go back to the hard copy.

We do do that. I use it a lot because it’s so nice to pull up. We had some hiring that was done and our payroll department was like, do you know how much I’m supposed to pay them? And I was like, I don’t, but I think I can look it up for you.

We were able to look it up in the board book and I was able to show her how she can search by a name or item or topic. That’s fantastic.

Andy

Yeah, it’s such really useful functionality. But also, I don’t know if you know this, but we’ve got a new kind of version of the search coming out not only for meetings, but also for policy as well that will access to all of the policies within the state of Montana. But after this search release, you’ll be able to actually look up policies that are shared by other districts and other states around the United States as well.

Carrie

And you can kind of filter those out and not see them or you can decide that you do want to see them. Just going to be pretty nice relief. We do use that feature a lot to see like, well, what does this school do? Or who has a policy on? One of our most recent ones was memorials.

Who has a good policy on donations for memorials and naming a stadium or whatever after someone. And so we were able to look throughout the state and see what other people had put in their policies. Super helpful.

Yeah, it was like you don’t have to reinvent the wheel and you don’t have to just send out a mass email and hope somebody reads it and answers you. You can just go figure it out for yourself. Yeah.

Andy

How about the community? Have you gotten much feedback or reaction from the community given the kind of level of transparency that there now may be in place? 

Carrie

I haven’t gotten anything which no news is good news on our front. I haven’t heard any complaints. I haven’t heard any positives either.

People just seem to have rolled with the punches and gone with it. 

Andy

I know you are highlighting meeting agendas and things. Are you also sharing meeting minutes from meetings? 

Carrie

Once they’re done and people have them on the website, we haven’t really started sharing them out and saying, hey, go here and find the minutes yet.

We just got a new website and we just hired a new website coordinator and so she’s starting to get the hang of all of that kind of stuff too and how it all works together. I’m sure we’ll get to that point. The other one that I haven’t really worked with in the agenda portion is the public comments section where you can turn on for public comment.

And we’ve had some superficial high level discussions about whether that might be something we want to do in the future or not. We have a mixed bag on the board where it’s like, well, if they want to give public comment, they should come to the meeting and then you’ve got the ones that are like, well, if we want real public input, maybe we just make it available. So I don’t know.

Andy

Yeah, because obviously if there’s a little bit more debate and discussion around it, at least you have the option if you want to turn it on. Right. I think it’s a great feature.

Carrie

I mean, if I was on the board I would do it because that just gives you those people that have conflicting schedules or they just can’t get there because of their kids or whatever. You still get to hear from them, they still get to be engaged and involved. So I know you mentioned kind of not having Simbli and what that experience was like before versus now having access to policies and meetings the way you do.

Andy

Are there some kind of key benefits or things that changed the day after you started using Simbli and moving forward, how would you say that it’s impacted your job in terms of your ability to have better efficiency or do it better? 

Carrie

We cry less here. I’m not kidding. There was a lot of tears.

I think the biggest thing we saw in efficiency is getting the information from the people we needed to get the information from. And you just set up that workflow and it emails them and then if you don’t get your stuff, you can send out reminders, hey, we didn’t get your thing. But you can see exactly in the workflow where something is stuck.

There’s no finger pointing, it’s just straight up, hey, we’re still waiting on you to fill in your portion of this agenda item. That was huge. And then just I think making them include more than what they were before.

Just flushing it out, flushing those items out so that they have more information for the board to make an informed decision at the meeting because I felt like things were coming back two and three times to the meeting because they didn’t have enough information and somebody had to go back and get more. I see less of that now. I see more of them having all of the information and none of us being really caught on our heels at a meeting going, oh gosh, I didn’t think about the financial impact or something.

Now there’s a box that needs to be filled in that somebody’s in charge of to tell them what the financial impact is. That makes a lot of sense being done ahead of time. 

Andy

Yeah, I mean, the sentiments you share around shared responsibility is something that we hear echoed by a lot of districts, because a lot of times, the board secretary, the administrator that was inputting the information was the one who bore most of the responsibility in terms of chasing people down, but also in some instances having to kind of develop it or create it themselves as a true owner of it, kind of weighing in on it.

So that’s interesting to hear that you say that, and then also just a greater level of detail around and level of effort put into the things that you’re going to discuss here. 

How about the superintendent in terms of just the reaction from the superintendent and some of the benefits enjoyed there as well? Have you kind of heard much on that front? 

Carrie

So we are in a kind of interesting place. So we had a superintendent who retired June 30, so he retired before, shortly after we went live.

I think we went live in December and so he had about six months on it and he liked it. But really our assistant superintendent and myself were the ones that did all of the training and all of the demos and all of that together and now she’s our superintendent, so she has huge buy in, she loves it. We’ll be sitting in an admin team meeting or something and somebody will say, oh, that needs to be added to the agenda and she just hops right in Simbli and creates an agenda item and creates the workflow and off it goes to the right people to get information started.

That’s fantastic, we really like it. I mean, things that were like, oh, we can’t forget to put that on the agenda in September. Now we just sit in the meeting and just do that while we’re sitting there and get it going so that we’re not waiting until the last minute to get stuff done.

Andy

Yeah, I mean, you kind of alluded to it a little bit before, but maybe you can kind of talk just a little bit more on the topic and just about the ability to the integration, I guess, between the policies software and the meeting software and around accountability as well. So, for example, if you have a policy that needs to be discussed and you can reference that in a meeting and then highlight that you actually talked about it in the meeting minutes and be able to reference that policy that anybody can access. A little bit about the strength of the software in the sense that it helps you kind of align your work maybe a little better.

Carrie

It does. And then what’s really nice is it does all the redlining and additions for you, right? So it’s not like you’re having to worry about formatting and all of this.

It just kind of just does it for you as you’re making the changes. And so it just integrates so seamlessly into that that you just click a button. I don’t know how else to say it.

Like, you just click that button, draft policy, and boom, it goes in, and the board can see all of the red lines, all the additions. It’s just super easy. And then when you get done, you just hit the adopt button and put the date in and you’re good to go.

It’s so much easier before we would have to manually do all that, then you’d have to go back into the Word document, delete all your red line stuff, unhighlight know, do all of the formatting work, and then put the date in. And then you’d have to send it to the state school boards association, and then they would put it on their website. Just even through this whole assembly process, we’ve realized that some of our policies got missed.

Either we forgot to send them to the state, or the state got them and forgot to update them in our book. And so when we go into assembly, we’re like, oh, that policy is not there. I can quickly I mean, it took me like ten minutes one day to get three policies up that were ones that we had adopted the model policy, and I just had to go put the date in, adopt it, and it was like instantaneously up on the website.

Andy

Yeah. Talking about the process that you endured before. Now, I understand when you said there were some tears that were shed, because that sounds painful.

Carrie

With the board book in the past because we had to stamp them in order of exhibit 8.18.2,

blah, blah, blah, all the way down. If somebody added something to the agenda at the last minute, it was like, it has to go at the end. And they were like, no, it needs to go at the beginning of the agenda.

And you’re like, no, because they need to go back and re-stamp all of those exhibits, recopy your whole packet. It was a nightmare. And now I just click the little button and I just move the agenda item up and it’s there’s no redoing that’s know, you mentioned the state association.

Andy

I had an opportunity to talk to Chris Goss not too long ago on the policy side at MTSBA. And can you talk a little bit about just your relationship with the state association and how the partnership with Simbli on both sides, both at the district level, but also at the state association level, how all that kind of came together and how it’s been helpful for know. 

Carrie

Chris and I actually have a school Business Manager Association meeting, MASBO, every summer, and Chris and I actually presented on Simbli together there.

He talked more about the policy side and what was coming because a lot of the schools in the state haven’t all the way shifted over. And then I talked about the integration with the policies, but also tried to let people know, hey, there’s this great module out there that lets you do your minutes in a quarter of the time of what you used to be able to do your minutes in. And so him and I presented on that and I think that partnership between us is really vital because we communicate constantly back and forth.

But I also know he’s working with, I want to say, probably 200 schools. And so for him to be able to keep track of everything, I don’t know how he ever did it, which I can see why some things would slip through the cracks. And then we’re over here updating policies, and if we forget to send it to him, then our information is only as good as what either side of us remembers to do, right? But now it puts more of the responsibility on us as a district to say, hey, MtSBA is going to give you all the model policies and all the updates, and then you guys go in and adopt them.

And when you get them adopted, you just click that button and they’re know it’s not this back and forth. And did you remember to do it and did you it kind of streamlines that process too, where it just is one person that’s responsible for making sure it’s posted once it’s adopted. 

Andy

I don’t want to take up too much more of your time, but you mentioned policies, but also the meetings that you have. Do you have different types of meetings that you have set up? Did that take a bit of learning?

Carrie

I say that’s probably part of that learning curve, is like how all those integrate. We have one main type of board meeting that we set up. We just call it a school board meeting.

Then we have committee meetings and we have a bunch of different committees. And those committees I have set up as their own meeting types so that if somebody wants to just look up our long range facility planning committee, they can see all of the agendas and the notes from those meetings versus a special board meeting versus a regular board meeting. They’re pretty much the same.

So we started out with special board meetings and regular board meetings, but when people are looking for information. They don’t know if it’s a special meeting or a regular meeting. And so that was becoming difficult for us not only in the application of setting up those meetings but also in going back and trying to find information.

So we’ve gone it’s just part of learning, I guess the whole process is we’ve gone to just one kind of board meeting and then for the template and then when we put the title in we’ll say special meeting or regular meeting. But as far as like if you were going to pull up all of our board meetings it would all say board meeting now not special or regular, it would just say board meeting. 

Andy

No, that’s great and I’m so glad that you’re getting that kind of use out of the software because as I’ve heard some people say that in some ways they’re just scratching the surface in terms of what can be done with it.

But it’s great that not only do you recognize that you can do those types of things but that there’s value in doing it, which is great to see. 

Carrie

I think we’re moving towards putting our student and parent handbooks in there and our staff handbooks in there just because when you talk about the revisions and the updates so quick, so easy to just be like hey, this got updated and be able to quickly share those sections with the board. Right now we’re printing out a whole handbook and putting it in.

It’ll be much easier to just do it by section we think. And so we just got a new handbook template this year and so our goal would be to get that in in the coming months into simply so that it’s easy for parents to search too. That was the other part is like if you just want to look up dress code, you can look up the dress code in there.

So that’s one of the areas that we’re hoping to expand our use of Simbli for. 

Andy

That’s great. And that kind of leads me into my last question which is kind of where to from here? Do you kind of see not only expansive use, as you’ve already kind of mentioned, of the modules, but maybe even figuring out how to fit in the strategic plan and kind of taking a look at other things as well because I will say of the districts in Montana at the moment and we’re still early stages in terms of building awareness around simply in partnership with the state association as well.

But you guys are leading the way in a lot of ways because you’re the first and only that has adopted so far the meetings module in addition to and I love the fact that you presented on it because it shows that you guys get it and you are kind of leading the way in that regard. So with all that said, where to from here- what’s the next step or level?

Carrie

We’re still with a new superintendent and we’re really behind on strategic planning and so we’re just getting that going where we’re getting a really definite updated strategic plan. We’re in that process right now and maybe after we get it done, the board will see the value in using that module and attaching it back to their board agenda items. Because I think that’s vital.

I mean, if it’s not in your strategic plan, you shouldn’t even be talking about it, right? You’ve got to connect everything back to your strategic plan. And so if you had that module and you could attach things, I think that would be awesome to be able to move forward in that direction whether we get there or not. I know that a couple of our school board members really liked the evaluation superintendent evaluation component and so that be coming down the road.

I don’t know, just kind of depends how comfortable they get with the technology, know kind of what their capacity is. Andy they’re all volunteers. We have a new assistant, Soup, and he’s actually from Georgia and he was like, so do Y’all board members get paid here? And we’re like, no, they’re all volunteers.

So there is a capacity component where it’s like we want to make the meetings as efficient and stuff for them too because we don’t want to waste their time. We don’t want to waste our time. 

Andy

Yeah, it’s so great to hear you talk about that alignment and not having things on your meeting agendas that aren’t tied to your plan.

And that’s really the beauty of the software. I mean, we are a subsidiary of the Georgia School Boards Association, simply is, and we’ve kind of learned along the way how all of those things kind of fit together in terms of good governance. So if you’re building strategic plan and you can highlight elements of the strategic plan that you are talking about in your meetings and bringing actions on those and then measuring how you’re doing against the strategic plan and then using that in your board self assessments and your superintendent evaluations, it all kind of makes sense.

Carrie

It does. It totally does. We’re not there yet. We’ll get there, we’re headed there. 

Andy

And you’re ahead of many. So good for you, largely in part and thanks to your leadership and certainly you being a champion for doing that, so good for you.

Carrie

Well, I can’t being in this business for so long, like typing up board minutes and realizing the impact they have later on down the road for research, when you go back to refer back to them, like, why did they make this decision or how long has this decision been in place? You really start to see, especially coming into a district new, that I go back and I’m like, okay, when did they decide to do the X, Y or Z? And. I can’t find it in the minutes, or it says things like, yeah, they approved what was presented, but it doesn’t really tell you what was presented. And to have all of that information just tied up right there In Simbli for the minutes and be able to have the packet right there, nothing changes.

It’s all just right there. For somebody to go back and figure out exactly why they made a decision, how they made it, what information was presented. To get them to the point to make that decision is really helpful when you’re trying to explain it down the road to either somebody new like me that comes in or a new superintendent down the road.

Whatever it is, you can go back and you can find that information, and that’s priceless, really. It’s better than sitting in our dungeon of a storage room, going through old three ring binders trying to find information. It’s just pull it right up from your desk in a matter of minutes and figure out what was going on and what happened.

Andy

Well, I love hearing these sentiments, and I appreciate you taking the time to chat with me from here. What I’ll do is I’ll go ahead and just write something up and send it over to you. The output of this I think I may have mentioned is that we’d like to have kind of a combo of an article case study that might be available not only to read online, but that could also be kind of taken away by somebody that wanted to download a PDF from the website or take a closer look at it.

But we’d also certainly like to share it with other districts in the state as well and kind of highlight and draw some attention to the great things that you guys are doing. 

Carrie

I really love to chat with it about it because I think as a clerk, it’s life changing. I mean, it just cuts your work more than in half.

Andy

Well, I’m glad you’ve had a good experience with it, and I’ll share that with the rest of the team as well and follow up with you in the next few weeks and kind of what I’m up to in terms of progress.