Michelle Whitney

Superintendent

Pasco School District

What has been your/your company’s most significant success over the last 12 months?

Over the last 12 months, our most significant success has been the strategic expansion and alignment of programs that directly prepare students for long term.

We have continued to strengthen and expand career and college pathways, increasing access to dual credit opportunities, industry certifications and career-connected learning experiences.

A particularly exciting area of growth also has been the expansion and evolution of our Dual Language program.

This year has also marked a transformational milestone for our district: the opening of two new high schools. Opening a single high school is a significant undertaking – opening two represents vision, planning and community investment at the highest level.

Name one item on your bucket list.

To write a book about breaking cycles and building hope through public education. Not a leadership manual. Not a policy book. But a story-driven reflection on what it means to grow up with complicated circumstances, find your footing through public schools and community college, and then return to lead the in the institution that helped raise you.

Name one thing about yourself you want people to know.

I care deeply.  Not in a surface-level, leadership-slogan kind of way. I genuinely carry people’s stories with me. I don’t clock out emotionally from this work.  Public education changed the trajectory of my life. So when I advocate, when I push, when I hold high expectations, it’s not about performance or optics. It’s about protecting possibility for someone else.

What is your favorite Tri-Cities restaurant and what do you order there?

My husband and I eat at Lu Lu Craft Bar and Kitchen a lot. I always order the Lu Lu White Salad with blackened steelhead.

If you had one wish for the Tri-Cities, what would it be?

That every young person in the Tri-Cities grows up believing their future can be greater than their current circumstances.