Olympia School District lays out 2024-25 Professional Development Plan  

The Olympia School District (OSD) Board reviewed its 2024-25 Professional Development (PD) Plan last Thursday, June 6.  

Superintendent Patrick Murphy said that the budget for PD matters has not been approved and the district has not received all of its grants yet.  

“When you have an opportunity, you want to make sure that you hire outstanding people. We do that in the only new school district,” said Murphy. “We can attract and recruit. The way we retain is we make sure we support them again from that training.” 

Instructional professional development 

Marc Elliott, Chief Information Officer explained the two areas where the district provides PD—instructional and operational. 

“Contractually certificated staff get 6 hours of self-directed technology professional development. And then teachers also have 31 hours and a tech affidavit to work on building skills with either equipment that they're unfamiliar with, or building additional skills with equipment that they are familiar with kind of on their own, or in conjunction with one of our coaches,” Elliott said. 

Part of instructional PD is student support. The district meets with community members to discuss topics, answer questions, and solve problems together. OSD also trains paraeducators and staff on behavior support and assistive technologies. 

Operational professional development 

Operational PD involves Human Resources (HR) Sponsored and Support Service Center Sponsored PD. 

“We provide some training. There's certain things that HR Needs to do… These are the things that we go over with all new hires. We retrain on these things annually—around sexual harassment, discrimination, go over how to investigate things when there is a problem,” said Murphy. 

The Support Service Center under operational PD involves ground maintenance such as Accident Investigation/Emergency Preparedness, and custodial services like Personal Protective Equipment.