Tracy Rushing, newest director for White Salmon Valley School Board, talks priorities

“I think it’s easy as a citizen to kind of feel like things are heading the wrong way, are always bad. And you know, it’s easy to get pessimistic. And being a candidate for a political office, you have the opportunity to interact with groups and leaders that you may have not before as just a citizen,” Rushing said. “It was inspiring to me to be learning more about actions that groups and people and neighbors even were already taking, and had been taking for a long time to kind of make meaningful change in their communities or in our state.”

So when former White Salmon Valley School Board Director Andrea van Sickle stepped down from her position, Rushing saw an opportunity to get involved in local decision making. She applied for the vacant spot and was later appointed as the newest board director for the district.

Rushing, a pediatrician at North Shore Medical Group, also devotes some time to Providence Hood River Memorial Hospital’s emergency department.

Rushing said she was inspired by the district’s unique health and wellness program, which offers students an on-site resource for behavioral health therapy services and links to outside therapy programs.

The health and wellness center, she said, offers a great opportunity for students — an opportunity which calls for medical expertise.

In her experience, a pediatrician only sees a patient “maybe a couple times a year, if you’re lucky.

“In an education system, you have a support network, you have adults invested in the lives of these kids who see them on a day-to-day basis,” Rushing said. “So the wellness center in general I see as a fantastic step forward to actually optimize the health and wellness of the kids in our area.”

With the health and wellness center located right on campus, Rushing said it allows students to easily access the resource. She said she hopes to see the program continue to grow to provide more services, such as a physical health clinic, and even routine medical care, to offer students an on-site resource. This, she said, could be valuable for a student and their family who might otherwise have to take time off to go to a clinic.

With the coronavirus pandemic still hanging around, Rushing said she felt that someone in a leadership position who possesses a medical background could a benefit to the district.

“Having someone who’s a little more familiar with the landscape of what’s going on with the pandemic and the changes on a day-to-day basis,” she said. “I feel like I have a perspective that can bring a little bit of my knowledge and my background to those conversations.”

That perspective, she said, can inform school operations, such as how the district is setting up classrooms, how the district is giving teachers the resources they need so they feel safe enough to teach in a classroom, and how the district is communicating with parents about what the district is doing so they too feel safe.

“As a parent myself, I think the safety issue is a huge concern for a lot of parents,” Rushing said. “Schools always are a setting where families are entrusting the care of their children to others, and that’s just amplified times a zillion during a pandemic.”

While COVID-19 is still on the forefront of her priorities as a board director, Rushing said the district should look to making broader changes while in this environment of flux that school districts across the nation find themselves in. She said it’s a good time to reexamine the ways in which our educational system is benefiting some and failing others.

“We can still continue to have the conversations about the educational opportunities that we’re offering students in the district,” she said. “We have the opportunity to make changes from how things were before because we kind of had things turned over on their heads for the past year.”

Rushing mentioned as an example that students should be able to provide more input to the board, something she said the board is receptive to.

“We’re all in this together, essentially,” she said. “But it’s not so much a hierarchy of the board, the superintendent, the principals all making the decisions and everyone else kind of trickling down from there. There is motivation to move our school district in the direction of getting consistent input from students from teachers, and making our decisions based on the goals of the students who are actually learning in the system.”

One aspect of that she mentioned was to seek partnerships from local industries to offer vocational training, which she said is an area that hasn’t typically been analyzed or expanded.

“It’s not a finite conversation, because one class year is going to be very different from the class below them or above them, so how those opportunities evolve with time is going to be in constant flux,” Rushing said, adding that her fellow board members have been willing to bring students in and have those conversations, “to make sure that we’re offering the opportunities to those students who are here now want.”

To Rushing, being a member of the school board gives her an opportunity to collaborate with the community. “The issues that a family might have further up Snowden is way different than the challenges that a family living in town might have as far as either access for their students,” she said.

Rushing’s term expires in 2023, and she said she has not decided whether to run for the term following her appointment.

“The moment in time that we’re living in right now is so different than, obviously, anything else that we’ve all lived through before,” she said. “But the ways that we’re processing this moment in time, you know, very child to child, person to person, family to family.”

With this unique moment we’re living in, Rushing said being on the school board means taking into account all the different stakeholders to find solutions that are based in support from students and families alike.