Board of Trustees Update - September 2025

Dear French International Community,

Welcome back to school! I hope the year is off to a great start for your family. Personally, I’m so happy to have kids back at school. I also loved kicking off the year at the Back-to-School picnic handing out popsicles to some very excited Maternelle and Lower School students (and somewhat meh Middle School students).

While summer is a little quieter for the Board of Trustees, we were still busy drafting goals for the year ahead, finalizing the annual budget in partnership with Scott and our new CFO Rebecca Brown, and welcoming and orienting our newest trustees. This fall, we’ve jumped right in with our full calendar of work.

In September, we held our annual Board Retreat, where we partnered with Scott to set our primary goal for the year: building the vision and practices for a sustainable financial future for French International. This is part of the board’s core fiduciary duty and a responsibility we take seriously. Together, we began evolving our long-term perspective—exploring our philosophy on financial aid, discussing the board’s role in fundraising, assessing progress against our current strategic plan, and setting goals that will carry forward into the year. The outputs of our work this year will be an important input into our next strategic plan for the years 2028-2032.

For those curious about how the board works day to day: we meet monthly, and the beginning of our meetings is often open for members of the community to join. If you’d like to learn more about the board or how trustees are selected, please feel free to reach out to me or to Sophia Skaar and Amy Duryea, the Co-Chairs of our Committee on Trustees. You can learn more about the Board on our page on the French International website.

Finally, one quick reminder: earlier this week, custodial parents and guardians received my email about our bylaws vote. Please take a moment to cast your “yes” vote today so that we can update our bylaws to align with the best practices recommended during our recent NWAIS reaccreditation. You can find the newly proposed bylaws and the redline of our original bylaws linked in the voting portal.

Thank you for your partnership and support as we begin another exciting school year together.

Merci à tous,

Janna
Chair, Board of Trustees
8th and 5th grade parent