After a board retreat on Aug. 9, the school board and district personnel discussed goals for the coming year.

“Our first realization was that it was very nice to be able to talk about education and vision and plans instead of dealing with the major financial issues and loss of revenue that we have dealt with during the recession years,” Orcas Island School District Superintendent Barbara Kline said.

The board came up with an agreement on the current vision and mission statement for the district and added one over-arching goal: each student and teacher will show growth each year.

A formal set of goals (for staff, students and administration) will be presented to the board for their discussion and approval at the Aug. 22 regular meeting.

The group talked about the earlier Strategic Plan that was developed about seven years ago and carefully reviewed the vision and mission statements. The board agreed that those statements continue to make sense for today’s students.

“As we talked about district and board goals for the schools, we coordinated those goals with the new evaluation requirements for teachers and principals,” Kline said.