Peace-Oriented Leadership Training Predicts School Board Members’ Effectiveness: An Application of Peaceful Leadership Theory Authors: Jeremy Pollack Elizabeth Parks-Stamm Abstract School boards in the United States have become a battleground for contentious local and national issues. As elected officials, school board members often lack training in leadership and conflict resolution. Training that does exist often fails to develop the competencies that research in peace psychology suggest are essential to building positive peace. We present a framework derived from peace psychology and the organizational literature including three social psychological needs (i.e., trust, inclusion, and psychological safety; TIS) and five competencies that help meet these needs (patience, engagement, appreciation, curiosity, and empowerment; PEACE). We surveyed 72 school board members from 36+ towns in Maine about their training, competencies, preparedness, effectiveness, positive relationships, and feelings of being emotionally drained. Regression analyses confirmed the importance of formal training for their preparedness and effectiveness. Including TIS or PEACE in a second step in the model explained a significant additional proportion of the variance in school board members’ preparedness, effectiveness, ability to discuss contentious issues, and positive relationships. Based on the findings, we make