“Why would a school have a strategic plan?”

Last October, the ANCS governing board adopted a three-year strategic plan for our school.  A committee comprised of board members, teachers/staff, and parents guided the development of the plan.  This committee gathered feedback from a wide variety of people—students, parents, the full faculty/staff, external supporters—and crafted an updated mission statement as well as plan goals in a few key areas:

  • Teaching & Learning
  • Diversity
  • Faculty/Staff Development
  • Parent & Community Partnership
  • Facilities & Operations
  • Fundraising & Resource Development
  • Governance Capacity

At a school event shortly after the plan was adopted last fall, a parent asked me “So why would a school have a strategic plan?”  It’s a reasonable question.  After all, most people probably assume that the goal of schools is to help students to learn more and that any “strategy” should be in support of that goal.  That’s true, but as a non-profit public charter school tasked with being innovative, we can and should see strengthening student academic performance as the bare minimum of what we do each year.  The process of creating a multi-year strategic plan, therefore, has helped us to articulate exactly what it is we aspire to as an organization (our vision), what we do and how we are unique (our mission), and what the best use of our resources is to help us to meet our goals.  That last point is especially important in a school setting because there are so many ways we could spend our time, our money, and our energy (and so many opinions—from teachers, parents, and students—about those ways!).  Setting a strategic plan allows us to focus our resources on those goals that we consider to be most important at this time to pursue.  It doesn’t mean there aren’t other things we could be doing that are important—it simply means that we’ve very specifically chosen to place our attention on what’s in our strategic plan over those other things.

With that context, I’m excited to share the initiatives being proposed to our governing board for this school year as the tasks that will move us closer to the three year goals for our strategic plan.  Over the summer, our school leadership team examined a range of school data in relation to our plan goals and used our analysis to draft some potential initiatives for the coming school year.  Those draft initiatives were then shared with teachers and staff at our summer retreat in order to hear their feedback about what seemed most critical to tackle right now.  After that, I brought a revised version of the initiatives to our board retreat for initial discussion, and now at tonight’s board meeting, the latest version of these proposed 2015-16 strategic plan initiatives will be presented and discussed.  You can view them in more detail here.  I hope that you too will find these initiatives worthwhile uses of our school’s energy this year as we strive to live out the ANCS mission and to reach the goals of our plan in our journey to make ANCS an even better school for our students and whole school family.