Superintendent Michael Fulton is in the process of trying to implement a recently developed strategic plan in hopes to accomplish academic success as well as a comfortable environment for all of the students in SMSD.
The District’s strategic plan is based around the goal of preparing every student for their future by making sure every student gets the help they need and ensuring they feel included.
The plan is developed and devised through a steering committee. 30 members from all throughout the community make up that committee. In order to represent diversity within the community and hear different viewpoints, the committee is made up of teachers, students and parents from different schools throughout the district.
Junior and steering committee member Sarah Bledsoe said acceptance for all of the diverse students within SMSD is vital to the plan.
“We are trying to come up with ways so that we would never fail a student, no matter their race, gender, sexuality, or mental capabilities — no matter what we would never leave a student behind,” Bledsoe said. “That’s what we were all thinking about as a committee.”
The main goals of the plan include honoring student diversity, keeping a strong comittment to ensure all students excel academically and creating a better environment for the students. In an attempt to achieve those goals, the committee spent three days trying to refine the mission and goals for the plan.
“The three-day session was 23 hours,” Bledsoe said. “We dedicated that to perfecting the mission statement and our beliefs to make sure they were well articulated, included everything we wanted to happen and had no grammatical errors.”
Those 23 hours were meant to make sure there were developed, well-spoken beliefs, a clear mission to carry out those beliefs and certain objectives of ensuring every student thrives academically while also becoming an empathetic member of society. Before the committee met, the plan was a blank slate. But by the end of the three days, they had established who they are as a community by showing the different members that make up the community, and as that community what they want to represent for their students.
To implement the plan, there will be multiple action committees. These action committees will use strategies to carry out the objectives of accomplishing academic success throughout the district, creating an inclusive culture, qualifying educators in the district’s schools and fabricating systems that support the beliefs of the steering committee.
The action committees will include the same diversity of members as the steering committee. These strategies include guaranteed one-on-one learning for students, creating a unified culture within the schools and communities and creating a climate with qualified educators. They plan on achieving this by hiring well-certified teachers and training counselors to make sure they know how to help every student succeed.
Committee member and teacher Samantha Feinberg strongly believes in the importance of ensuring schools are in a position to offer students the best inclusion possible by not only offering personalized learning to students but creating an equitable and unified culture. She wanted to join the committee to help make sure this became possible.
“I was really enthusiastic about it,” Feinberg said. “I really care about our school district because I work here, but my kids are also students here, and I was a student here too, in the district. I want our school district to be the best it can be.”
According to Chief Communications Officer David Smith, for the plan to be successful, the diversity of the students must to be taken into consideration: how all students experience different upbringings, have different learning styles and overall different personalities. Smith expressed how the district serves over 27,000 students in 46 buildings and how, even though it may be difficult, there is no reason for a student get left behind whether it be failing a class or not graduating.
“When I was in school, we were taught in one way,” Smith said. “And it worked well for some kids and I was fortunate enough to be one of those kids. But for other kids, it didn’t work as well. Now we are talking about needing personalized learning — so that it meets the need of each kid.”
In order to get good feedback about the schools within the district, it is important to have certain representatives present at the committee meetings. It is necessary to show a true microcosm of district stakeholders in order to get an accurate response to deal with any possible student issues, according to Feinberg.
Although Fulton wasn’t the only one to strive for the plan, he was the first to suggest it to the board.
“The motivation is to work with our community and to develop a shared vision of where we want to go as a district — who we are, where we want to go, and what we want to achieve,” Fulton said.
The strategic plan is a way to reach the goals SMSD is aspiring to achieve. The committee wants the district to break away from current teaching methods, according to Fulton. The District must be progressive in the long term to improve graduation rates and better prepare students for their future.
“Planning should be an inclusive process and I think anything that we can do to get in as many voices as possible is really important,” Fulton said. “The school district belongs to everyone and we need to make sure we represent our community well. You just have to make sure a lot of voices are involved, especially student voices. At the end of the day, you are the reason that schools exist.”