The October 2nd OSD Board Work Session was short & sweet. In one hour and 20 minutes, the student representatives, along with Vice President Tourtellotte-Palumbo and Directors Flores, Huffman, and Seidel (President Clifthorne will be absent with notice for the month of October) sought to narrow their goals for the 2025-26 school year. This work comes ahead of new board directors joining the school board in December to take the place of President Clifthorne and Director Huffman.
The main topics in the meeting were procedures for onboarding new board members, strategic communications, processes for closing communication gaps with the public, the budget survey, and the alignment of the School Improvement Plans with the District Improvement Plan.
Following the Washington State School Directors Association (WSSDA) Assessment at the summer retreat, VP Tourtellotte-Palumbo said strengths of the board were “time and energy spent into policy work.” Tourtellotte-Palumbo went on to note board time spent on fiscal challenges and future work on transparency. “Being more transparent with the community about these challenges, such as establishing a monthly cash flow dashboard, gathering community input on how we can use our assets, and continuing to improve the budget survey.”
What I’m trying to emphasize is alignment and cohesion between board goals, district goals, school goals, so you can see the through line all the way through, and then you can see a clear process.”
Director Maria Flores
Director Seidel focused on creating a framework for board communication with the public, stating, “I think that a board’s strategic communication plan needs to be our number one goal for this year.”
While the board also decided to focus on evaluating the process of onboarding of new board members, Director Flores focused on school and district improvement plans, as well as ways to encourage more student involvement in their creation. “We have more schools on improvement status than we have in the past, and so all of this needs to be aligned to the Washington School Improvement Framework and those measures, rather than us taking ad hoc roles that aren’t aligned to what we get measured at the state level… What I’m trying to emphasize is alignment and cohesion between board goals, district goals, school goals, so you can see the through line all the way through, and then you can see a clear process.”
While Director Huffman would be stepping down in December, her focus was on the budget survey, “I would strongly work on doing something different with the budget survey. I think it has shown us year after year after year that it doesn’t really answer, help us, or answer the questions.” All of the directors present left the meeting with further work on their corresponding goals.