The Olympia School District (OSD) held the first reading of its Series 5000 - Personnel Policies during a meeting last Thursday, August 31, as part of its policy review.
The Citizens Advisory Committee (CAC) on Policy Review recently reviewed and revised the series.
“The 5000 series was a series that quite a few of our policies, there was no WSSDA (Washington State School Directors' Association) model policy, or they had been initially passed over ten years ago. And that happens from time to time when a district might initiate policies to address a particular issue and the work of education moves on,” OSD Vice President Seidel said.
“What we tried to do was get rid of as many of the policies that are done that did not have foster model policies as we possibly could and an effort to streamline policy maintenance for the future,” Seidel added. “And those that had had no relevance or issue that was trying to be addressed was clearly included in another policy, and so the policy itself was rejected.”
Seidel also shared that there are quite a few notations in the CAC recommendations about “deleting, moving, or remembering.” She said. “This is an effort to make sure that future staff doing policy maintenance will have a smoother process going forward.”
Denise Pigue, CAC member and Olympia Paraeducator’s Association President, highlighted the committee’s recommendations to the board, especially regarding employee leaves.
Pigue first discussed the changes on Policy 5403, which they plan to rename to ‘Emergency and Discretionary Leave’ from the former ‘Bereavement Leave.’
“We edited this to expand the definition of a family member for bereavement leave because we felt there should be more on the list. Family is not defined traditionally, and there's people who feel that they have very close personal ties with someone, and that should be considered family when we're talking about bereavement leave,” Pigue explained.
Pigue also explained Policy 5409, currently titled “Unpaid Holidays for Reason of Faith and Conscience,” which they plan to rename to ‘Professional and Extended Leaves.’
The CAC recommended deleting the district’s current model for 5409 and adopting WSSDA’s policy.
“The political leave for elected office– we moved it out of this one to the other, to 5403, where we felt it made more sense,” said Pigue.
Aside from leaves, Pigue mentioned that the CAC also extensively discussed the “Compensation for Non-represented Employees,” where the current policy will be deleted and merged with an existing compensation policy.
“It says, ‘delete and shift language to 5310,’ because it's all compensation whether they're represented or not. And it didn't seem we needed two policies for that,” said Pigue.
Pigue ran through the minor revisions of other policies. Most of the revisions for the 5000 series are connected to adopting WSSDA’s newer model policies and scrapping outdated district policies.
The next board meeting on September 7 will be the first reading and review of the 3000 policy series regarding students.
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