Hello everyone and Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from the Board.

As you can see now the email at Odyssey is fixed, so we will continue our plan of updating you weekly.  The board recently met with the Director Search Committee to help facilitate their work.  This has turned out to be quite a big job for the committee and they will soon be adding more people to the committee to help get the job done.  In addition Mr. Schellhous will be helping with the Director Search interviewing process to help that along.  The end goal for all this work is to have day long interviews with the final two to five candidates January 25-29.  We then will offer the job to the best candidate January 29, with the acceptance anticipated January 31 so we will be ready to announce our new Director 1 February 2010.  YEA!!!

It is great to see all this work coming to fruition.  Thanks again to all the members of the Search Committee and everyone at the school for all their work getting this great endeavor accomplished.  The next board meeting will be January 15, 2010 with a tentative time of 4-6 pm so as to better utilize Dr. Carpenter's time. We hope to see you there!

Rob Corniea
OCS Board Chair

Email from Board Dec. 2009

Hello to everyone from the Board.  First we need to apologize to everyone.  Our communication to parents and staff has been poor.  We hope to remedy this with weekly e-mail blasts starting with this and weekly notices in the Breeze starting next week. 

Second we want to report the director search is recently moving along nicely.  We have 50-60 resumes our director search committee is sorting through and planning to narrow those down quickly so we can start phone interviewing.  After the phone interviews we will ask our top candidates for personal interviews.  We had originally planned to have this process finished by January 31, but we have been told this is overambitious.  As we sort through resumes and start interviewing we will let everyone know a more firm date for this process to be finished.  Any questions can be addressed to the head of the director search committee Peter Rehm at prehm@odysseycharter.net or to the entire board at gb@odysseycharter.net and of course everyone is welcome at board meetings. 

Last we want to report on the current board training we are going through.  It is a sad fact most boards fail to do what a board must do: Ensure the intended outcomes take place.  Board failure happens mostly when good people get together and try to manage a business, school, or other entity with no clear direction about how to do so.  We have hired Brian Carpenter PhD to not only train us, but to train the administrators how to use Policy Governance by Dr. John Carver PhD.  Policy Governance is the only governance model that gives clear direction about how a board must do its work.  Once this training is finished the board will will have clear policies in place and know much better how to do its job.  In addition it will be crystal clear what the director must do, and in turn part of the director's job will be to make it crystal clear to staff and parents exactly where the school is headed and how we are going to get there.  Best of all, when the members of the current board are gone and a new board is in place, the policies from Policy Governance will be there to guide the school in perpetuity.   

Again, we apologize for our poor communication in the past and look forward to future communication with the wonderful families and staff of Odyssey Charter School.

 Sincerely,

Rob Corniea
OCS Board Chair