As a charter school, ANCS is committed to pursuing a number of academic and organizational goals as required by the terms of our charter agreement with the Atlanta Public Schools and the Georgia Department of Education. Yet these goals really stand as the minimum we hope to achieve. At a more aspirational level, the ANCS board and leadership team is guided by our school’s strategic plan in our efforts to reach the vision of what we hope our school can become for our students. Didn’t realize ANCS had a strategic plan? Then read on to learn more.
In 2014, a task force of parents, teachers, and board members worked closely with a consultant to facilitate a process of identifying the strengths and areas of opportunity for our school–at the time, just a couple years removed from merging an elementary and middle school to form the single K-8 school that became ANCS and at a point when local and state funding was at an all-time low for our school. Despite these challenges, the task force gathered community input and ideas and eventually presented the board with an ambitious set of goals for our school in seven key priority areas:
- Teaching & Learning
- Diversity
- Faculty & Staff Development
- Parent & Community Partnership
- Fundraising & Resource Development
- Facilities & Operations
- Governance Capacity
I’m proud to say that in the past three years we’ve accomplished many of the goals we set out to pursue as you can see from the image below that summarizes our strategic plan work through the summer of 2017.
We are in the final year of our current strategic plan and taking on initiatives such as establishing a new “diversity and equity action team”, finalizing revisions to our employee compensation policy, and deepening and expanding our farm to school program. You can find an overview of this year’s initiatives on the board page of the ANCS website, and I’ll be providing a midyear status update on each of these initiatives at tonight’s monthly board meeting.
As we move into the second half of the year, we’ll soon begin the process of drafting a new strategic plan for the coming years. Like our current plan, my hope is that these goals help focus our school on a collective vision for how we can continue to improve ANCS for students now and into the future.