Author Spotlight
Luciana Mendy
The Shawnee Mission School District released the second cycle of its strategic plan on June 25, with six strategies to improve education and experiences in the district throughout the 2024-2029 school years. East is implementing the beginning stages of the plan this quarter.
The plan includes strategies of Learning, Belonging, People, Technology, Mental Health and Facilities, along with steps to accomplish the goals of each strategy. The plan is a way for the district to work towards its mission of creating “an inclusive culture, an engaged community and robust opportunities that challenge learners to achieve their full potential.”
The plan was brainstormed by a committee consisting of administrators, parents, teachers, students and community members from across the district. English teacher Samantha Feinberg was a part of the committee and assisted in discussing and revising the plan.
“I like to believe that the [committee] was really a microcosm, an educational sample of people in the community,” Feinberg said. “On the basis of age, race, occupation, interests, socioeconomic background, I think everybody was represented.”
The “Belonging Strategy” aims to foster a sense of belonging within the SMSD community. Actions for this strategy include streamlined district-wide communication, reviewing disciplinary policies, new staff training and strengthening minority support groups.
The district-wide professional training within the plan will be specifically on restorative practices. Restorative practice is a disciplined approach focusing on fostering a sense of community within classrooms to prevent conflict. The practice also includes reacting to misconduct by encouraging students to accept responsibility and rebuild relationships.
According to Feinberg, resolving conflicts through restorative practices will help achieve one of the strategy’s goals of reducing discipline referrals.
“A lot of the student issues lead to or are caused by [students] maybe feeling pushed out of school like ‘I’m not wanted’ or ‘I don’t belong here’, what we want to do is work on conflict resolution rather than just punitive measures,” Feinberg said. “That restoration offers a greater opportunity for inclusion and creates an increased sense of belonging.”
Another common theme throughout the action steps of the strategy is improving communication policies. According to SMSD coordinator of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Kaitlin Shulman, developing unified communications allows the district to get feedback from all perspectives and create goals that align with the community’s concerns.
“The plan is truly coming from the people in our district, and it’s their voices, and then we as administrators are the facilitators of that plan,” Shulman said. “So sometimes it feels like a lot of communication loops, but that is our way of truly making sure we have diverse voices represented.”
One of the changes to improve communication includes different feedback cycles to measure the schools’ progress in this strategy. According to Principal Jason Peres, East will be using randomly selected student focus groups to understand students’ perspectives.
Starting in September, groups of 13-15 students will meet monthly with Peres to discuss East’s belongingness — giving students a voice in the school. According to Steering Committee member, senior Hazel Ecklund-Johnson, student voice will be an important factor in any success in this strategy.
“Students are the ones who are most aware of racist comments and other things that are going on,” Ecklund-Johnson said. “Students are also more aware of current societal norms, so they could be really informative in how the staff could form plans on how to effectively deal with certain things.”
Along with enhanced communication and feedback policies, the Belonging Strategy also includes a goal of reviewing and revising disciplinary policies to ensure equitable approaches.
However, even before releasing the plan, due to community feedback, the district made changes to the disciplinary matrix by adding the language “jokes, slurs and other derogatory or demeaning comments” under the “significant disrespect” category.
According to the Chief of Student Services and DEI Dr. Christy Ziegler, the district will be flexible and continue to respond to community feedback, so the timing of implementation can be adjusted depending on the circumstance.
The change in language does not mean any change in the level of punishment. However, according to Peres, this specification will allow the school to analyze the annual disciplinary data for the frequency of derogatory comments. The data will then be used to determine whether the Belonging initiatives are working.
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