Strategic Planning

The school district strategic planning process empowers stakeholders, like parents, students, district employees, city officials, business partners, and more, to collaboratively shape the future of their school district. Through this process, your district and community become partners in creating a 3-5 year plan to improve or enhance your school district. This shared sense of ownership enables your district to overcome obstacles and discover new possibilities for students.

How we help

Our certified strategic planning team works with you throughout the school district strategic planning process by providing step-by-step guidance and facilitation services. We begin the process by gathering vital input from your board members and leadership teams. Through a series of meetings with diverse, representative stakeholder groups, we work together to accomplish the following:

• Craft a set of shared community beliefs and review your district’s vision and mission statement. (An optional service includes the creation or revision of a district vision and mission statement by this stakeholder group in alignment with Essential Schools Framework Prioritized Lever 3.)
• Facilitate a quality data analysis to provide a realistic picture of your school’s current state. This quality data analysis informs the strategic action plan, creating a ladder from the current state to the future vision.
• Identify objectives and strategies and create semester-by-semester action plans. Using your data, we'll work on a strategic plan that allocates all of your resources (human, time, material, and facilities) over a three to five-year period to improve student achievement.
• Create a system of strategic abandonment to ensure effective and efficient use of all district resources - human, time, material, and facilities - over a 3-5 year period to improve student achievement.
• Establish interim progress measures to facilitate progress monitoring of the plan.
• Create an electronic version of the strategic plan aligned with district branding, which can be used for implementation and progress monitoring.
• Train key staff in the process of periodic review and updating the strategic plan. A process of strategic abandonment of redundant or obsolete practices will be introduced. We will also provide a format for regular data reviews of the plan that can be used for leadership meetings or board presentations.
• Provide one additional support visit to ensure district personnel can implement the plan with fidelity. Provide a report to update the school board on implementation.
• Develop a formal presentation and materials to clearly communicate your final strategic plan.
• Optional services include community meetings prior to beginning the process to gather input from the community, climate surveys to gather input from different stakeholder groups and a video of the strategic planning process and its intended impact.

The Benefits of Strategic Planning

By bringing the community into your school district strategic planning process, you gain crucial buy-in from all of your stakeholders, while organizing them to take action around a common goal or purpose. This transparency of communication and commitment can harness new energy and resources for the district.

The district strategic plan creates a focus for all your annual improvement planning at the district and campus levels. While eliminating redundant or obsolete practices that take up precious district resources, it helps build capacity around effective systems and practices that are successful. The end result is an efficient and effective district-wide strategic plan that raises achievement for all students.