Tim Nickson Reflects On His Time Serving On the Enumclaw School Board

Patch asked outgoing members of the Enumclaw City Council and School Board to look back on their years of service and share highlights, lowlights and insights into what the pressing issues are moving forward.

Below is the response we've transcribed from an interview with Tim Nickson.

How long did you serve on the School Board?  From 2009-11. I'd taken over the term of previous board member Gerd Weyer.

Reflect back to before you actually started to serve your term. How did your expectations then of serving on council/school board compare to the reality now that you can look back? Was it easier? Harder?

I wanted to lend my expertise in systems integration, and it was process redesign or engineering to assure that we were creating a uniform and easy-to-use system for students and teachers and adminstrators. Before I came in to the board, I had wanted to make sure there was more synergy between parents, teachers, students and administration, making sure there were parent and community groups in every school building.

And utilizing technology to reduce the drudgery part of running the enterprise, such as having to calculate test scores by hand. To me, that was a way to spend that time instead on nose-to-nose type of instruction with students. Those were the kinds of things I was going to do. It's the same thing I do in business consulting, which is try keep people from having to spend time doing things that run the business and instead spend time growing their business.

If you had to name three things you were most proud of during your years of service, what would they be, and why?

1. Helping to change the structure of doing business in order to change the culture is what I’m probably most proud of, by voting to support the professional learning communities. That, and providing additional ways to make it easy for teachers to look at data-driven results, like in the assessments they do during the PLC time. It's key to having the LEGOs to build a new approach.

2. Then, probably getting structures in place so parents and community members have an avenue to be involved.

3. Using technology to put more tools in students', parents', teachers' and administrators' hands to build with those building blocks of LEGOs. For instance, we just purchased software that will compile test results for students so you can find high, low, mean -- it's key in assessment and with the results, you have lots of ways to look at that, such as comparing to other classes in the district. It's very helpful in that it provides resources and assessments that have been used around the country, best practices, drills to hone down on how do I get that concept across most effectively.

What, if anything, do you regret not being able to do in this role? Or have done but wish you hadn't?

First, that my job situation wasn’t allowing me to continue putting in the amount of time being involved as a school board member. You need to get around and be the face of the district for anyone in this volunteer position.

And also probably recusing myself for the Tri-party agreement because that restricted me from being able to give input to the board, being that I live in Black Diamond where it’s going on. The rest of board members haven't spent the time I spent, because I live here. It limited me being able to give them facts and information.

Other than that, it was the right thing to do to assure the public that there was no conflict of interest. My wife was an appellate on the environmental impact. It wasn’t written well so she appealed the acceptance of that.  

For me, with recusing myself, I didn’t want the public to think that our school board had another other agenda than to look at what was in the best interest for our students, and if I had not recused myself, that could have made negotiations more difficult.

What, if anything, do you think will be the big, pressing issues the council/board will be facing next year, and why is it important for residents of Enumclaw/Black Diamond to care/stay informed?

Obviously, how to balance the continued acceleration in student achievement when we are getting fewer and fewer dollars. In my tenure on the board, we’ve cut out about 8 to 10 percent of the budget from when I came in. So far, we’ve been able to do that without affecting the size of the classroom but going forward you may have to affect the size because 84 percent of the budget goes into pay, pensions and benefits for staff. So it’s like gosh, we’ve done that, look at how much we’ve cut -- the remaining 16 percent we cut in half. We’re still getting by and accelerating student achievement scores. We've done a great job managing that. But how can you cut the remaining 8 percent of the budget you had four years ago if you didn’t cut into classroom? It's the toughest thing because you don't want to slow down the acceleration.

What advice do you have for the individuals filling your positions?

Attend as many community events as possible in order to ask questions, and to the board, I’d say come on out to Black Diamond Elementary more often.