Mary Broderick ’11 Ed.D. has always gravitated toward education.

She began attending board of education meetings soon after moving to East Lyme, when her children were very young, and quickly got hooked. That was 1989, and she hasn’t looked back since.

She started off writing reports of the board meetings, which were used for the PTA newsletters. Board elections were coming up, and board members approached her about running for a position. Broderick was successful in getting elected and her MBA, from the University of Toronto, prepared her for effective school board governance, since she understood finance and budgets, community engagement and marketing, and how to motivate staff.

She became very involved with the East Lyme school board, and served as board chairperson for two terms and in a myriad roles as committee chair, when the Connecticut Association of Boards of Education (CABE) came calling in the early 1990s. During that time, she also worked closely with the Connecticut Department of Education on issues ranging from preschool education to teacher recruitment and mental health issues.

Her leadership skills and education knowledge proved beneficial while serving on the CABE’s board of directors. She then progressed to a two-year term as president of CABE in 2002. Broderick’s passion and enthusiasm for education, and advocacy on behalf of public school children, grew and she was drawn to serve at the national level, being elected to the National School Boards Association (NSBA) board of directors in 2005. NSBA leaders saw her potential too, and elected her president of the national organization for a one-year term, beginning in 2011. She previously served as secretary-treasurer and president-elect.

“We are delighted to have Mary Broderick, who has such a long history of board leadership and advocacy on behalf of students in public education, as NSBA’s new president,” said Anne L. Bryant, executive director of NSBA. “Mary brings her ability to create an effective vision for public education and her skills at reaching those goals to the arena of local school governance.”

Broderick will draw on her experiences to hone in on traits that bolster environments for students to flourish. She says those characteristics can be incorporated by school officials across the country.

“Student success must be the priority,” she says. “I look forward, as NSBA president, to hearing from and working with educational leaders at all levels to encourage new investments in innovation to promote student learning.”

In her “spare” time, Broderick recently completed an Ed.D. in Educational Leadership at UConn’s Neag School of Education, focusing her dissertation on the practices of superintendents in school districts outperforming demographically similar districts. She was able to integrate academic research with her 20+ years of school board leadership experience and advocacy, an ideal combination for her role as NSBA president.

The decision to pursue an Ed.D. was “actually someone else’s brilliant idea,” she recalls. “We had a dynamic superintendent [at East Lyme] who wanted to bring doctoral opportunities to a number of talented administrators and teachers in our region. He first talked UConn into offering a cohort in our area, then he encouraged me and others to apply. He thought it would be interesting for me to get a credential for all the work I’d been doing in my then 16 years on the local board.”

Her doctoral degree has already helped her professionally: the speech she gave before 5,000 attendees at the NBSA annual conference was closely tied to her dissertation work. She also continues to use many the concepts she studied at the Neag School in her columns and speeches.

“Thanks to my course work, I am well informed about motivation and adult learning, which allows me to offer alternative perspectives to many current issues [like value-added compensation],” she says.

In addition to her role as NBSA president, Broderick works with communities on efforts to improve the odds of early school success as an educational consultant with the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund. She also supports communities across the state in conducting conversations about educational topics of their choosing.

Broderick says school board governance is very important “to ensure that communities own and support their schools.”

She advises education leaders to take the time to build a strong team, in order to ultimately benefit students: “When the district and community – especially through the board – are aligned behind a common vision, great learning can happen.”