Newcomer candidate for Russellville School Board Christina Wood said she’d prioritize preparation for enrollment growth, increasing extracurricular and elective offerings, and recruitment and retention of teachers if elected to the board.
Wood is a fiscal liaison for the Missouri Division of Youth Services, and prior to that served as a budget analyst for the Missouri House of Representatives. Wood decided to run after serving on the Continuous School Improvement Plan committee.
Wood said she’s dedicated to ensuring there are “enough resources and staffing and funding that’s available for the increased enrollment and kind of the expansion of our school district.”
She also said she wants to look at grant opportunities to expand the resource pool for the district, an area in which she has expertise because of her job.
Wood said she’d like to expand elective and extracurricular offerings, including business and life skills classes.
She also said she’d prioritize recruiting and retaining good teachers.
While serving on the CSIP committee, Wood said she talked a lot about mental health of teachers and how to support them.
“And to me, once we support our teachers, it only helps with learning for our kids and kind of the education that they get,” Wood said.
Wood said she wants to capitalize on the community and make sure it is invested in the district as well.
Wood and her husband have a seventh-grader and a third-grader in the district. She said she’s also very involved in the community through her church and her children’s participation in sports, which allows her to connect broadly with people in Russellville.
Through her job as a fiscal liaison for the Missouri Division of Youth Services, she oversees a $62 million budget for the education of children in the juvenile justice system. That, coupled with her experience as a budget analyst gives her a strong knowledge of budgeting, federal programs and legislation, which she said could prove helpful on the board.