The school board convened a work session to begin setting district goals and focus areas that will shape the 2025–26 strategic plan, and directed staff to return a draft for formal action at the board’s August meeting. Interim Superintendent Joel led the discussion, framing the session around three buckets—academics and programming; families and community; and a combined facilities, safety and student experience category—and urging a continuous-improvement approach with regular reporting to the board.

Why it matters: The board said it wants goals that are measurable, informed by stakeholder input, and aligned with available resources so the district can track progress and adjust during each trimester. Board members emphasized the need for systems that bring regular feedback from students, staff and families into decision-making.

Board members and staff discussed a timeline that begins with tonight’s work session, moves a draft to the August board meeting for finalization and establishes trimesterly check-ins (end of first, winter and spring trimesters) to report progress. Staff said they will prepare a “dashboard” of key metrics for routine reporting to the board.

During the session the board also discussed values to guide implementation—putting students first, continuous improvement, caring for staff and “relentless optimism”—and asked staff to map goals to resources. Interim Superintendent Joel said district leadership matters and urged alignment between board priorities and district budgeting.

The board did not take any formal votes at the meeting. Instead, members gave staff direction to produce the draft plan, to include a dashboard of progress metrics, and to return a short report within the first quarter identifying any resource gaps that would prevent delivering the plan as proposed.

Looking ahead: Staff will circulate a draft of the 2025–26 goals to board members for feedback, present a revised draft at the August meeting, and begin trimesterly updates once goals are adopted.