Mary Broderick has always gravitated toward education. As an English major undergraduate, she had just completed her MBA when she first moved to East Lyme, CT. At the time, her children were very young and she started attending board of education meetings for the East Lyme school system, which had 2,600 students (it\u2019s now up to 3,300 students). She quickly got hooked: that was 1989 and she hasn\u2019t looked back since.<\/p>\n
She first began with 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 motivating staff.\u00a0 She became very involved with the East Lyme school board, serving as board chairperson for two terms and a myriad of committee chair roles, when the\u00a0Connecticut Association of Boards of Education (CABE)<\/a>\u00a0came 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.<\/p>\n Her leadership skills and education knowledge proved beneficial while serving on the CABE\u2019s board of directors.\u00a0 She then progressed to a two-year term as president of CABE in 2002. Broderick\u2019s passion and enthusiasm for education and advocacy on behalf of public school children grew and she felt compelled to serve at the national level and she was elected to serve on the\u00a0National School Boards Association (NSBA)\u00a0<\/a>board of directors in 2005. NSBA leaders saw her potential too, and recently elected her president of the national organization for a one-year term. She had previously served as secretary-treasurer and president-elect.<\/p>\n \u201cWe 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\u2019s new president,\u201d said Anne L. Bryant, Executive Director of NSBA. \u201cMary 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Broderick will draw on her experiences to hone in on traits that bolster environments for students to flourish and said those characteristics can be incorporated by school officials across the country.<\/p>\n \u201cStudent success must be the priority,\u201d Broderick said.\u00a0 \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n In her \u201cspare\u201d time, which is obviously quite spare, she recently completed a\u00a0Ed.D. in Educational Leadership<\/a>\u00a0at\u00a0UConn\u2019s Neag School of Education<\/a>. Broderick, now officially Dr. Broderick, focused 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.<\/p>\n The decision to pursue an Ed.D. was \u201cactually someone else\u2019s brilliant idea\u201d recalled Broderick.\u00a0 \u201cWe had a dynamic superintendent (at East Lyme) who wanted to bring doctoral opportunities to a number of talented administrators and teachers in our region,\u201d she said. \u201cHe 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\u2019d been doing in my then 16 years on the local board.\u201d<\/p>\n Broderick selected the Neag School of Education\u2019s program due to the School\u2019s strong reputation and she had met some of the professors. \u201cI thought I would be able to study some interesting topics. Plus, it was offering a local Ed.D. cohort, so it was feasible.\u201d<\/p>\n Her Ed.D. has already helped her professionally. The speech she gave before the 5,000 NBSA annual conference attendees was closely tied to her dissertation work. She also continues to use many the concepts she studied at Neag in her columns and speeches.<\/p>\n \u201cThanks 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),\u201d she continued.<\/p>\n In addition to her role of NBSA president, Broderick works with communities on efforts to improve 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 previously worked as a facilitator for the Community Coalition for Children and in higher education in financial aid and admissions at Wheelock College.<\/p>\n With 20+ years of school board leadership experience behind her, along with completing her Ed.D., Broderick has some sage advice for fellow education leaders. \u201cTake the time to build a strong team, empowering school board members as well as staff,\u201d offered Broderick. \u201cWhen the district and community \u2013 especially through the board \u2013 are aligned behind a common vision, great learning can happen. CABE and NSBA offer tools to help boards and superintendents work together more effectively.\u201d<\/p>\n Broderick thinks it\u2019s important to avail oneself to those tools for the sake of the students. \u201cSchool board governance is very important to ensure that communities own and support their schools.\u201d<\/p>\n At the end of the day, it\u2019s all about the students.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mary Broderick has always gravitated toward education. As an English major undergraduate, she had just completed her MBA when she first moved to East Lyme, CT. At the time, her children were very young and she started attending board of education meetings for the East Lyme school system, which had 2,600 students (it\u2019s now up […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1855],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[1879],"class_list":["post-206616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neag"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-09 14:55:36","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206616"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206616\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":206619,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206616\/revisions\/206619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206616"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=206616"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=206616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}