White County Board Prioritizes Future Projects

The White County School Board underwent training and discussed plans for several upcoming projects in the district during this week’s work session.

Chair Bob Young said the board discussed an upcoming policy review and changes to the director evaluation model. Young said they also did a series of exercises he learned from his career in manufacturing designed to teach them about collaboration and strategic planning.

“You can have a lot of things on the table, but at the end of the day what boards and boards in leadership positions should be doing, they should be prioritizing those and working on ones that are most important at that, at the time because you cannot do all things at once,” Young said.

Young said they will also be designing a new model they can use to evaluate Director of Schools Kurt Dronebarger by taking inspiration from other districts and focusing on ways to align evaluations with goals.

“That’ll be another homework assignment that when we break down, come up with a model, that conceptual model, and we will bring that to one of our meetings and have discussion on that,” Young said.

Young said they are working to get that model done as soon as possible so Dronebarger can understand the metrics by which he is being evaluated.

Young said it was a healthy meeting that allowed the board to get information about ongoing work in the district and discuss what they want to focus on in the upcoming school year. He said the conversations they had also provided him with additional knowledge that he can use to better run the board.

“It gave me as chairman some guidance of what I feel, that the board members think is important in where we put our efforts, and so that primarily is used for planning future board meetings,” Young said.

Young said the board has to review its policies every two years, so he will be dividing their policy manual between the board members and they will each have a hand in the process.

“If there’s anything that needs to be, anything identified that needs to be considered or something that we’re maybe not doing as well as we should, we can bring that out and make adjustments, revisions to our policies as needed,” Young said.