TORRINGTON – The Goshen County School District Board of Trustees met on Monday, July 8 for a special meeting and board work session. 

The meeting was called to order by the vice chair, Sarah Chaires at 6 p.m. 

After the Pledge of Allegiance, a motion was made to approve the agenda, which was then seconded, and the agenda was approved. 

After a brief introduction of all members present, the board moved on to socializing during dinner. 

Present at the meeting were board members Chris Alexander, Lena Moeller, Dylan Hager, Carlos Saucedo, Wade Phipps, school administrators, Matt Daily, Cory Gilchriest, Tyler Floerchinger, Lindsey Maxi, and Alan Van Tilburg.  Also, present Monday evening were superintendent Ryan Kramer, Kevin Derby, director of curriculum, instruction, and data management, and Loreen Fritzler, secretary. 

Kramer thanked the board members present as well as the school administrators for their attendance and participation. 

“Over the last about six to eight months, the board has engaged with the Wyoming School Board Association on building a strategic plan,” Kramer explained. “Looking at the vision, mission, goals, and then other shared commitments of success. The board developed a draft, as you can see, that’s what I handed out to you, of some of that information. The next steps that the board wanted to take and myself was getting feedback from administrators in the district on language. The administrators have seen this in our admin team meetings this spring,” Kramer said.

The superintendent and the board of trustees agreed to gather the feedback of the administrators of the schools and Kramer stressed to the group, the document was something that could be changed.

“This is a living, breathing document,” Kramer said. “Once we have a draft, coming out of this meeting the next step is to then survey our community in regard to the vision and mission. The Wyoming School Board Association has a survey format that they have provided me and then once we get to that draft, be able to share that with community members, staff members and solicit more feedback, more conversation for the board to take and initiate in the continuation of the strategic plan,” Kramer explained. 

As the board members and faculty continued to look through their packets of papers, Kramer explained how the evening’s meeting should transpire. 

“How I thought we’d talk this evening, is really about thoughts, questions, wording, all of those things centered about each step in the process,” Kramer said. “The document I gave you has the vision first and I thought that would be, of course, the most logical place to start. As we start having a conversation, it’s looking at the vision and then allowing administrators to share any thoughts, questions, have board members also share thoughts, any questions of other fellow board members as we develop this process to kind of just having conversation in a round table format about what we would like to see in a draft or an update and everyone can come to an agreement on those things.” 

Kramer then read the drafted vision statement to open discussion. 

“I think some of the thought behind that is we wanted to come up with something that wasn’t necessarily just focused, it was focusing on different ways that would encompass the uniqueness of kids and the diversity among our schools and our kids,” Saucedo said. 

Members of the school administration discussed their opinions of the board’s vision statement and provided input on how that statement would be seen throughout the different schools within the district. 

The board expressed how they felt the newly drafted vision statement would encompass more individual needs of students as a whole. 

“Being able to give them opportunities to be able to kind of figure out what they’d like to be able to do, early on,” Saucedo said.

The discussion continued with the board placing stress on the importance of recognizing not every student’s future plans include attending college as well as the importance of developing a vision statement that applied to all K-12 schools.

“I think a lot of our conversations talk about getting our kids life-ready and unfortunately I think that focuses a lot more on the secondary kids because that’s when you start seeing those paths unfold,” Chaires said. “So, that is a really good plan to help make sure that verbiage addresses our little kids too.”

“It is challenging coming from a K-12 world,” Gilchriest said. “I live in all three of places and seeing how just because of the necessary core work that has to take place it is challenging to fit anything else in outside of literacy and math at the elementary level.”

Gilchriest continued to explain the difficulties Lingle-Fort Laramie Schools encounter regarding the flexibility of offering multiple courses.

“Was one of the purposes of this workshop to discuss changing the language in the vision?” Moeller asked.

“I think this is an opportunity for the board to hear maybe some questions that might come up in the survey and then if there is a need to make a change to the draft right now, this would be a great time to make that change,” Kramer explained. “But also, it’s just an opportunity to kind of get a little bit of feedback, that first feedback circle, where we can hear from administrators a little bit who see it the most who might have the overall picture of the district also in addition to what we will hear from community members and staff and parents about that.”

Discussion continued on the vision statement for some time before moving on to the mission statement,  where Kramer asked the board for discussion. 

The board continued to share input on various components of the assignment until nearly 8:30 p.m. and members agreed to continue discussion during the next meeting.