BERNE —Joan Adriance, Berne-Knox-Westerlo’s newly appointed school board president, sees herself as a facilitator. She doesn’t see her role as one which gives her authority to make decisions.
"I’m no more special than anyone else," she told The Enterprise, stating that the five board members "all work together."

Adriance, whose daughter is entering the ninth grade at BKW, has been on the school board for just over three years; BKW board members rotate into leadership positions rather than being elected.
"My role is to keep meetings on track and focused and to sign diplomas, " she said.

Adriance says she understands the importance of hearing multiple opinions and remaining neutral throughout the decision-making process.

In 1975, she graduated from Warvick High School, and majored in business administration at Houghton College. In 1989, she received a master’s degree in secondary education from the University at Albany.

This coming school year, Adriance, beginning the fourth year of her five-year term, will have the opportunity to put her leadership skills to the test.

The BKW School Board, she said, has many goals. It wishes to create courses to improve students’ test-taking skills and SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Tests) and ELA (English and Language Arts) scores.

Adriance feels it is important to know what students are capable of, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and to understand their test scores.
"We can use the data from test scores and align the curriculum," Adriance said.

As well as improving test scores, the board would like to see an increase in the number of students seeking Advanced Regents diplomas, Adriance said. The Advanced Regents diploma, a more challenging diploma offered by the state, requires students to take additional tests and courses and score higher on Regents exams.
"We encourage students to stretch," Adriance said.

Adriance also thinks the board can better communicate its expectations with students and parents and do a better job of creatively providing budget items to the community.

In past years, BKW eighth-grade students were visited by representatives from colleges throughout the state of New York. Adriance would like to see this event occur earlier in the year.

As well as having many goals for the students and the community, the board, Adriance said, is planning to improve its facilities.
"We’re looking at making facilities handicap-accessible in the high school," Adriance said.

BKW School Board members had once rotated board members through a graduated five-year term, but now elected board members are on a three-year term. The change from a five-year term to a three-year, Adriance said, was to try to get more people to run for the board. Though the ballot measure to return board members’ terms to five years was voted down in this spring’s election, Adriance would still like to see the board return to the five-year term so that its members would have a better grasp of its workings.
"It takes a year, maybe two, to understand," she said.

Vice president

Ed Ackroyd, BKW’s newly-appointed vice president, attended BKW. He is a member of the class of 1968, and served in Cambodia and Vietnam. At the BKW graduation ceremony this June he was applauded as he was given a high school diploma under a state program for those who left school to serve in the military.

Ackroyd, who ran unopposed for the school board in 2004 after Lynn Countryman stepped down, sees changes at BKW since he was in school.
"The classes are smaller now," Ackroyd said. "When I was in school, we didn’t have teachers’ aids".The students today have more opportunities."

Ackroyd, whose children also attended BKW, is beginning the third year of his three-year term, and says some of the motivation to run for the BKW School Board was curiosity.
"I was curious about where the tax dollars were going," he said.

Like Adriance, Ackroyd is also in favor of gathering multiple opinions on school-related issues.
"It’s important," he said, "to be open for a wide variety of influence throughout the community."

Ackroyd, who owns his own business, Northeast Power Supply, thinks it is best to be objective throughout the decision-making process.
"I think it’s best to pull the emotions out and deal in facts," he said.

Like Adriance, Ackroyd favors a five-year term over a three-year term for board members, because he thinks it allows a person to get more experience.
"The first three years, you get knowledge of how it works. The last two years, you could use that knowledge and apply it," he said.