The White County School Board will focus on improving district-wide stakeholder engagement as part of its newly updated strategic plan revealed Thursday.
The board met monthly for the last four months to update the strategic plan. A community-wide survey showed involving and informing the community needed improvement. School Board Chairman Bob Young said the board’s vision of excellence is students knowing that administrators, teachers, parents, and guardians are invested in their education.
“Our mission will be to create a cultural shift that leverages parents, guardians, and educators’ engagement in the students’ education,” Young said. “Our strategic objectives based on survey results from September 2025, is to move stakeholder engagement from a perceived weakness to a strength for our district.”
School Board Member Jayson McDonald said the board wants to align with the community’s needs. McDonald said improving stakeholder engagement will make students feel like they are wanted and want to be at school.
“I can think about some of my educators when I was in elementary school, and they still have a profound impact on my life to this day,” McDonald said. “So I think it’s good work by this board, and I think we have put in due diligence to develop a strategic plan that will see this school district through at least the next 36 months, and will make us be better at what we do.”
The plan did not reveal how the school board will improve stakeholder engagement. Young said figuring out how to improve engagement is what is next for the board.
“We are gonna continue to meet as a board and work with our directors to see if we can get some ideas from various stakeholders,” Young said. “In our minds, our administrators and our teachers, they are already doing a lot in those areas to try to deliver a quality education. But we are trying to get some feedback from them based on what we are wanting to try to do. And the intent would be that we can collaborate on ideas. Figure out how we can give them the latitude to implement some things to come back and measure and see if it is gainful improvement.”
Young said the board plans to use a survey to periodically measure how effectively the plan is working to improve stakeholder engagement.
In other business, Cassville Elementary Principal Shauna Hicks honored four students with Artist of the Year Awards.The board approved two new clubs. One is a Fantasy Football Club, and the other is a Mysteries and Conspiracy Theories Club.
The board approved to surplus several buses. Maintenance Director Randy Ally said two of them have rust underneath and would be more cost-efficient to sell the buses rather than make repairs. Three buses have aged out and will be replaced by propane buses. Ally said the three buses will be shredded for an estimated $33,000 each.
The board asked if removing that many buses would still allow the school district to have enough. Ally said the school district would have two sub bases left.