Georgetown ISD trustees use facilitated 'team‑of‑eight' workshop to set aspirational priorities for 2030

Trustees at a Georgetown ISD board workshop on April 7 spent the second half of the meeting in a facilitated "team‑of‑eight" session aimed at translating community aspirations into a small set of district priorities. Facilitators Ben Mackey and Andrew Kim guided trustees through a nominal‑group exercise that produced a ranked list of aspirational outcomes trustees could endorse and ask staff to operationalize.

Nut graf: Using a six‑word prompt and a weighted voting exercise, the board surfaced a short list of highest‑priority aspirations — notably "academic excellence across every campus" and "premier public district in central Texas" — and asked administration to propose measurable progress indicators, resource implications, and alignment to existing goals for future board review.

The session began with introductions from the facilitators and a short discussion about the differing roles of a governing board (vision, values and goals) and the administration (measures, operations and execution). The group then generated dozens of six‑word aspirational statements and combined similar items by owner consent. Trustees privately weighted their top five choices (point values of 15, 12, 8, 5 and 2) and shared results; the items with the highest combined scores clustered around consistent themes: strong academic performance at every campus, exemplars in CTE and advanced academics, high student involvement in extracurriculars and a sense of belonging for students.

"If you ask kids every day, 'I'll get up in the morning because I love calculus,' it will be a small percentage — but the point is, when kids find their niche everything else follows," said a trustee reflecting on how extracurricular engagement and belonging relate to academic outcomes. Facilitators urged the board to differentiate between aspirational vision language and operational strategic plans: "Setting a strategic direction is 100% board. Writing and owning the strategic plan is administration's work to operationalize," Ben Mackey said.

Next steps agreed in the workshop called for district staff to map the board's top priorities onto the district's existing vision, student goals and system goals, and to return proposed progress measures and strategic priorities for the board's review and possible adoption. Facilitators and trustees discussed simple measurement ideas — for example, using student surveys at certain grade levels to track sense of belonging, or counting participation in extracurricular activities — and the superintendent said staff would return with proposals that included measurement and budget implications.

The workshop also introduced a board self‑evaluation protocol and asked trustees to complete a short reflective exercise; staff will compile responses and return recommended operating‑procedure language for the board to consider. The meeting closed after trustees completed exit cards summarizing three things learned, two things liked and one question for follow‑up.