How to Not Be a Terrible School Board Member is a practical guide both for how to become an effective school board member, and for how school administrators can improve their board relations. The intended audience is prospective, present, and past school board members and school administrators. While the overwhelming majority of school board members have good motives, even people with good motives can make bad moves, even terrible moves. This book is dedicated to preventing situations in which good intentions can lead to bad outcomes. The book takes a case based approach that focuses on terrible school board member moves as the fastest and most memorable way to help one learn how to be an effective school board member ,and to see, by contrast, how a successful school board member operates. Case-based learning is used in many professional programs such as business, law, medicine, and even teacher education, and research on learning by example has a strong and growing empirical research base.