January 24, 2023, Board Meeting — My Thoughts
We held a regular board meeting on January 24th. You can view the meeting here (on the Richland One website) or here (on YouTube). As always, I encourage you to watch the meeting if you can.
Thrive Richland
The administration provided a presentation about Thrive Richland–a grant-funded program focused on early childhood education to increase the number of children ready for kindergarten. This work will certainly help our elementary schools as more and more students show up ready, which, I believe, makes this work with the investment. Indeed, early childhood education and related efforts garner almost universal support at the state house–a rare event these days.
To me, at least, Thrive Richland’s work–whole child and family support as well as the childcare center training–is a critical program. I am hopeful that we will be able to find partners to help shoulder the expansion of this work.
I would encourage folks to watch the presentation.
Superintendent Goals
As I said in my last update, I do not think the board has engaged in a thoughtful process to determine our goals for the superintendent. Indeed, we are choosing goals for this year with less than a semester left to go. I think it’s unfair to hand down expectations to our superintendent and our school-level folks at this point in the year.
The superintendent provided some new, additional goals (pictured below).
And the board voted to add a goal that 60% of this year’s graduating seniors would be either career or college ready (the number last year was around 55%). While I appreciate that most of the new goals are, at least, measurable, I think these leave an incomplete picture of what the board should be evaluating. For example, the fact that the board has not even attempted to set a measurable goal regarding teacher retention and recruitment speaks volumes. We have more than 100 classroom teacher vacancies right now–more than we had last year. I don’t know how we will meet any of our goals if we don’t do a better job at teacher retention.
I believe the board should work as a group to figure out several areas that we think would move student achievement. We can’t set goals using every data point, nor should we. And we may not all agree on what areas deserve our focus, but let’s have that debate. Then, we should discuss those areas with the administration and set realistic, measurable goals. To do so requires that we have some understanding of why our numbers are what they are. For example, what if the data suggests that the most significant difference between graduates who are career or college ready and those who are not is their literacy level? We would need to be realistic about how quickly we can move that number up and what we expect of our high schools.
Therefore, I suggested that we use our February 24th work session to develop goals for the next school year and then use those goals to create milestones for this year. The board voted that idea down.
Studies show that school boards can have a tangible impact on student achievement by setting measurable goals. I don’t think we have done that this year.