Avery’s First Real Week

Love and Ruination: An Engaging Tale of Two Clashical Christian Schools

Chapter Five

Avery was mostly braced for his first full meeting with the board. He had had enough experience in his previous position to know something about board/administration dynamics, and enough personal interaction with Broderick in his first weeks at Riverfront to know that Broderick was going to be a handful.

There had been a board member at the Vermont school who had a fraction of Broderick’s throwweight, and he had been able to create some epic chaos. Avery had at least three war stories that revolved around that guy.

So Avery’s prayer had been that the essential issue would come floating to the top right away, so that he could establish the principle. He was pretty sure he was going to need to establish the principle. And on this point, as he was most gratified to discover, his prayers had been heard. His prayers had been heard in a most remarkable way.

The board meeting opened quite pleasantly. After the brief devotional and prayer, and approval of the minutes, the third item on the agenda had to do with whether or not the development office was actually earning its keep. Donations had been declining, not terribly, but still declining, and this was the third year of that decline. The decline was not a steep slope, but when put on a graph it was quite noticeable. Avery had in fact put it on a graph, and it was a graph that got the board members’ attention, most of them sitting up a little bit straighter in their chairs.

Broderick, ever the man of action, leaned forward and started peppering Avery with questions. Avery had done his homework carefully, and had the answers at his fingertips. After about ten minutes of that, the moment of truth then blundered into the room, like a sophomore who had forgotten that the board was meeting in there, and who came in to get a book. That moment of truth looked momentarily bewildered, just like the sophomore would have. But instead of just getting his book and beating it, the moment of truth just stood there, blinking.

“Look,” Broderick was saying, “I will stop by tomorrow afternoon. Will that give you enough time to put together a month-by-month financial report from the development office?”

“More than enough time. Happy to do it.” In fact, Avery had already printed them all out, and they were sitting on his desk in a folder that had Broderick’s name on it. “I would just ask that Kevin here”—Avery nodded at Kevin, who was the secretary taking the minutes—“include in the minutes that the board requested that Broderick obtain this information from me.”

Avery had not been there long, but it had been long enough for him to hear from teachers, and the bookkeeper, and even one janitor, that Broderick was fully capable of popping up out of nowhere, like a hurricane making landfall in the middle of the night. He was a force of nature, and moreover, did not appear to know that he was a force of nature. He always thought he was making perfectly reasonable requests. And he almost always said please.

“What?” Broderick said.

Avery repeated himself. He would be happy to do this, and it would be no trouble at all. He simply asked that the minutes reflect that it was the board’s desire that he do this thing.

“Why?” Broderick asked, pointedly.

Avery was clearing his throat to answer when Tom, an astute but quiet board member who was tracking very clearly what was happening, said, “I move that we ask Avery to supply Broderick with the information that he has requested.”

“Second,” another board member said quickly.

The board chair, a man named Richard, said, “All in favor?” Everybody said aye, and then Richard tried to go on to the next item.

“But why?” Broderick said again. His face wore an odd mixture of irritation and bafflement. Everyone looked at Avery.

“One of the lessons I learned at my previous school is that the authority of the board is corporate, and that individual board members do not have board authority on their own initiative. So if the board tasks an individual member to do something, or tasks a committee to do something, say, then they can ask for stuff all they want, and with the authority of the full board behind them. But I have learned that it is hazardous to act as though any single board member is a walking iteration of the board. But with that said, the request is absolutely a reasonable one, and I will have all that ready for you tomorrow.”

Avery saw that Broderick wanted more, and so he added just a little bit more.

“It is important for me as the headmaster to know exactly who my boss is. That would be the full board. If I were at the beck and call of each individual board member, I would have seven bosses, and sometimes their directions would be contradictory or inconsistent. One board member could tell me to have the reports ready in the am, and another board member could tell me to put that off, and generate a quite different report instead.  I find that it is simplest to just make sure that all such requests and directives are in the board minutes, clearly labeled as an action of the board.”

Broderick sat back in his chair, uneasy and dissatisfied, feeling himself in the presence of a new adversary. But he was unsure of why he felt that way, since Avery was happy to give him the report he needed. Broderick still felt crossed somehow, even though he had gotten his way. He felt some sort of disturbance in the air around him. Maybe the disturbance was in his head. Or his heart.

At the same time, about three other board members sat back in their chairs also, and their feelings could be summed up with the word finally! One of them also silently added better him than me. 

Another board member thought that Avery’s example was deficient in one respect—“two different board members barging in and asking for different stuff”—because none of the other board members ever acted the way Broderick did at all. But one took the point, of course. It was the principle of the thing.

When Avery got back to his office, he exhaled slowly, and thanked the Lord. He then sat down at his desk, put his forehead on the desk momentarily, and thanked the Lord again.

Like a wounded duck football punt, you never knew which way the ball was going to bounce on these things.