As we announced last month, Terry Johnson, who served as Open School’s Executive Director since 2017 has moved on to another career opportunity serving children in Portland. While the organization searches for another incredible leader, we have hired Yvonne Deckard as Interim Executive Director to support the transition. Yvonne had a long career in leadership at the City of Portland and served as Director of Human Resources for 12 years. While at the City, her leadership and vision was instrumental in developing an organization-wide equity and diversity program.

Yvonne served on Open School’s Board of Directors from 2000-2009, including a term as Board President, and supported the organization with coaching during our last leadership transition.

We are lucky to have an accomplished leader who is close to our community to work alongside our strong program leadership and teams. They will ensure that, throughout the transition, our kids and families will receive consistent levels of support, love, and innovative response to pandemic challenges.

Yvonne’s support allows our Board of Directors to do a comprehensive national search for our next leader. We have retained Notogroup, the same firm that led our successful search in 2017.  During that search, Notogroup proved to be aligned with our organizational values as they developed a diverse pool of highly qualified candidates and gathered valuable input from staff. We expect extraordinary results again.