RUSD To Hold Additional Meetings In 2026 To Study Student Achievement Data

After originally proposing to hold three fewer meetings next year, the Riverside Unified School District (RUSD) Board of Education voted 4-2 December 18 to instead add seven workshops to the 2026 meeting calendar.

This change came after Trustee Dale Kinnear pushed for adding the meetings over concerns about not having enough time to dive deep into complex topics around student achievement. 

“It’s not sufficient to say that we can or will add some special study sessions,” Kinnear said at the meeting. “Workshops on student achievement need to be intentional, they need to be planned [and] they need to be on our calendar.”

It was originally proposed that the board hold 12 meetings next year, three fewer than were had this year. 

The discussion was part of the board’s annual reorganization which also saw Trustee Noemi Hernandez Alexander unanimously elected to serve as president, Trustee Jesse Tweed to serve as vice president and Trustee Amanda Vickers to serve as the clerk for the upcoming year. 

Hernandez Alexander and Tweed voted against the additional workshops.

“More meetings doesn’t necessarily mean deeper delving into issues,” Hernandez Alexander said. “I personally can’t commit to the seven.”

Hernandez Alexander, at the meeting, said she drafted the proposed original calendar to serve as a “scaffolding” which would give the Board ample space to set additional meetings as necessary throughout the year. She added that she felt the decision could create unnecessary work for staff to fill the allotted times with content when they could instead tackle two topics during one workshop. 

Tweed also said that he felt board meetings, including in the workshop format, might not always be the best format to tackle deep dives on data. Most of the information could be best processed behind the scenes, he added, and presented in a live forum afterward in a more intentional manner.

Trustee Brent Lee, who served as board president until earlier in the meeting, suggested that the trustees instead look at reintroducing sub-committees. A sub-committee, he said, would give two board members time to deep dive into data and other topics and then present their findings to the rest of the board and the public at a regularly scheduled meeting. 

“I think that gives the board a little bit more input at the beginning of some of these discussions,” Lee said.

However, Kinnear said he felt the board needed to set the additional workshops to show the community that the trustees were willing to commit time to better serve the district’s students.

“Research is clear, school boards in high achieving districts are significantly different from those in lower performing districts,” Kinnear said. “Effective boards are data savvy. They embrace and monitor data on a continuous basis, just as we expect our teachers and site administrators to do.”

The board, according to Kinnear’s motion, is set to vote on the exact dates of the seven workshops at the January 15 meeting. 

The trustees also voted to re-elect Vickers as the second delegate for the California School Boards Association and Tweed as the representative in the County Committee on School District Organization.