RUSD Sets Dates For Workshops, Discusses ‘Taking Meetings on the Road’

The Riverside Unified School District (RUSD) Board of Education voted unanimously Thursday to approve an updated 2026 meeting calendar to include seven additional workshops. Trustee Amanda Vickers was absent.

“The workshops are really a chance for us to do a deep dive on a specific subject matter, which is a little different than our traditional board meeting,” board vice president Jesse Tweed said at the January 15 meeting. “It offers an opportunity to be transparent in our thinking and discussion, but the focus is for us to understand the material better.”

The board originally proposed to hold 12 meetings this year, three fewer than were scheduled for 2025. However, Trustee Dale Kinnear, at the December 18 meeting, pushed for the board to set dates for additional workshops at the beginning of the year to show the community that the board was willing to set aside time to learn how to best serve the district’s students.

Board president Noemi Hernandez Alexander said her original calendar proposal was meant to be a “scaffolding” that would still allow trustees to request additional meetings when necessary. She previously voted against the added meetings.

“I wasn’t in favor of being very specific on the number of items, because the staff was looking for topics,” Hernandez Alexander said during Thursday’s meeting. “I, as a board, do not want to create busy work for the staff if we’re also holding them accountable to do the work that we’ve hired them to do.”

Trustee Brent Lee suggested that the board also look at “taking these meetings on the road” as a way to make the workshops more accessible to the community, but the board did not make a final decision on locations for the workshops. 

The dates for the seven workshops were set for February 19, March 19, April 30, August 13, September 3, October 15 and November 19. Topics for the workshops will include items such as deeper dives into student achievement data.