It’s a pleasure to be here with you today, I really enjoy my opportunities to collaborate kind of across the continent through ThoughtExchange this year and it’s been really helpful in our work in Camas. This is Camas we live in a lovely part of the country just north of Portland Oregon across the Columbian River there. Our district is about 7000 scholars, community of about 24,000, adjacent to a larger community of Vancouver which is where I’m transitioning to be superintendent next year. I started my career is a principal and teacher in Vancouver so it; a little bit of coming home even though we live in Camas. It’s been obviously a great opportunity this year and we started off with this Imagine Camas really trying to think about how we could use the challenge to really think differently about our work. Had a lot of lofty goals and then feel ourselves kind of fall back on the tracks of just trying to manage crisis and the pandemic and gets kids in and keep them in. 

And still while trying to think about the long-term vision of what a public school system can be, what it should be for our students. And so in preparing for this just thinking about the board meeting we had last night where we were proposing our reopening plans, or not reopening our recovery plans is what they’re calling them in Washington State. And so we need to submit those to the State by June 01st. So we started with another ThoughtExchange and that had been powerful for us through this experience of engaging our staff, students and communities in town hall kind of cycle with the ThoughtExchange really launching that. So we’ve put out to our community a question around learning as we look forward to the future. Just thinking about this year what are you looking forward to for our students as we move forward? And of course that generated a lot of energy, a lot of conversations. 

One thing I think that you’re probably recognizing and I am is that it’s not like it’s a shock when the comments come out of ThoughtExchange. We know a lot of what people are thinking. But it certainly gives us some leverage to amplify some voices that are maybe a little quieter or don’t feel they have the opportunity to engage at the same level. And so I’ll show you just the word clouds that came out from this discussion and you probably could guess which one is the staff one and which one is the community one just by the words that are larger; so as this loads hopefully. You see some big words on this one “smaller sizes.” So you’ll guess probably that’s our staff conversation and they’re recognizing that the ability to serve leaners remotely and in-person has – they’re looking forward hopefully to having smaller groups of kids next year and consider their unique assets and opportunities to build from those. 

So that’s a powerful message from our staff. You can also see the other words in there that I think we’ve heard from previous speakers today that are really important to our staff moving forward. And this is our community exchange with the same prompt as we look forward to the fall what kinds of experienced do we want to have. And you’ll notice that lots of similar words but there’s not that big small on there. It’s more about the educational learning experience in my own child and what that might look like and the focus that I want. You’ll see mental health on here is really important to our community and I know that is for your communities as well. So what we did with that is we then created some design principles for our plan and that we hope that that would carry us forward not just in meeting immediate needs but also thinking more broadly about where we can go as a district. 

So really thinking on extension and focussed acceleration of whatever we currently have in place, and really a focus on eliminating inequities in our system, and really trying to keep coming back to students. I know that we all are disciples of that philosophy and I know it’s been hard as the pull of the year kind of shifts us to adult issues and our board meeting last night was all about adult issues which is really – can be frustrating sometimes; and then really thinking just as how do we as educators shift from the deficit to asset-focussed mindset. And so as we move forward with our planning, you know, really looking at how do we amplify and continue to give opportunities for students, family and staff to voice their experiences and help us learn and with them and having some assessments as a cornerstone of our process whether that’s diagnostic, formative, wellbeing. 

We use Panorama in our district as a wellbeing screener, that’s been really successful. Thinking about strategic support of course our students but also like just how do we inspire curiosity, right, like this opportunity that kids have had to learn differently like let’s build on that and then let’s also – like kids for the first time are pretty excited about being at school, even like 15 year olds were saying, “I’m happy to be here.” Typically you’re lucky if you get a fine out of them if you ask how their day was. So like let’s build on that and let’s not go back to just like six periods of boredom [laughs], like how do we ignite their learning, right. And then as a system how do we inspire innovation, so just even thinking about our summer programs how might we flex teacher schedules so we start thinking differently about the school year and really using this as an opportunity to build. So I’ll stop there.

Note: The following text is transcribed from the event audio. It’s largely accurate, but in some cases it may be a bit off due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It’s intended as an aid to understanding the event, but it shouldn’t be treated as an authoritative record.