School District's Strategic Plan Presented

After a year of work, the Melrose School Committee reviewed on Tuesday night the final draft of the school district's strategic plan, which lays out a road map for the next five years, with committee members' voicing concerns about setting specific goals and prioritizing those goals.

The strategic plan is divided into four sections, beginning with the district's core values, mission statement and a vision statement for the next five years. That's followed by a retrospective of what the district has done over the past five years; results of an internal assessment; and results of focus group interviews that, in total, included 172 participants, from teachers and parents (including parents whose children do not attend Melrose Public Schools), to elected officials and "village elders."

Committee members questions focused on the next two sections — goals and measures of success. The strategic plan lists broad goals, such as in the area of curriculum, instruction and assessment: "Ensure that rigorous, well coordinated Pre-K-12 curricula and highly effective instruction and assessment practices are consistently implemented across levels to meet the needs of and challenge all learners and provide an academic pathway that effectively supports students' transitions from one level to the next and their preparation for post-secondary experiences."

The measures of success provide more specific achievements related to each goal, such as having 80 percent of all students achieving a student growth percentile of 40 percent or higher, with benchmarks listed for each of the next five years as a way of measuring that success.

The strategic plan would ostensibly be used each year to develop "action plans" for the coming school year, according to Superintendent Joe Casey. Those action plans would be developed by school administrators and presented to the School Committee for approval, detailing how the district plans to meet the plan's benchmarks and move towards meeting the plan's goals.

Could goals be more specific?

School Committee member J.D. LaRock asked presenter Mary Murray, senior consultant from Future Management Systems, Inc. — which the district hired for $15,000 last September to develop the strategic plan — why the broad goals were chosen in lieu of more specific goals.

"More specifically, if there were one page I was going to pull out and show to a constiuent or member of the community and say, 'This is the essence of the plan,'" LaRock said. "Relate to me what you hope the typical parents in the Melrose Public Schools would take away from reading these goal statements."

Murray responded that the strategic plan could have had multiple goals under each category, but wanted to keep the goals to a focused minimum, while incorporating all the input provided by the community during the plan's development.

"These are broad goals that we know will need to be really broken down," she said. "We looked at measures of success and on an annual basis, as Superintendent Casey mentioned, there will be action or a work plans in relationship to each one of these goals.

"I think I would hope that they (the parents) would get a sense ... that this is a road map," Murray continued, adding that financial, demographic and other changes within the district would affect more specific goals, while the broad-based goals could stay the same. "There are probably a number of different routes to take on any roadmap to get to the same point."

Committee member Christine Casatelli said the plan's goals were good in a broad sense, but that when she thinks of a goal, "I think of something you need to stretch to achieve. I'm not sure that we stretch far enough in these goals."

Murray responded that the "stretch" would come in the implementation of the plan through the develop of action plans, "under the watchful eye of the School Committee."

Committee member Carrie Kourkoumelis said she was "a little daunted" by the length and breadth of the strategic plan, adding that while she appreciated the "vast amount of input that was very meaningful" and the attempt to pull together a comprehensive document, the goals listed "seem to be something kind of basic that we would always be aiming for. I was sort of hoping to find more targeted goals."

LaRock echoed the sentiments of Casatelli and Kourkoumelis and asked if, without jettisoning or revising the strategic plan, if the committee and administrators would be open to an attempt to encapsulate more concrete goals.

"It could be, 'let's solve the math problems in the district once and for all,' 'improve our subpar facilities,' or 'improve our ranking relative to other districts,'" he said. "Those goals, to me, are more conducive to allowing our parents and families to really grab hold of what are our district's concrete priorities."

Casey responded, "I hear what you're saying."

Concerns over pace of change, setting priorities

Committee members also raised questions about the measures of success and the related benchmarks, asking why higher benchmarks weren't set — such as reducing bullying and harassment referrals by 100 percent — and why in some cases the benchmark for the first year is only setting up a committee or developing a plan to achieve the measure of success.

Murray said that benchmarks were developed keeping in mind the capacity of the school district and the ability to tackle several issues at once, while Casey said the district does not want "pie in the sky" goals, even if those goals are ideal aspirations of the district.

With regard to first year benchmarks that call for setting up a committee or developing a plan, Casey said the next year will allow teachers and administrators to take stock of what's been done so far and where the district is today before undertaking new initiatives right off the bat.

"I think this is going to be a critical year for us," he said. "When we're talking about establishing a baseline, we really want to have an understanding of where we are today. That may take a little time."

Mayor Rob Dolan said that the district must respect teachers who have been asked to undertake a number of initiatives in recent years and need time before tackling new initiatives. At the same time, parents of a bullied child "don't want to hear you're going to spend the next year studying the problem." Because of the comprehensive nature of the strategic plan, Dolan asked how the district can use "this excellent document" without "drowning in it."

Dolan also said there is a "sense of urgency," comparing the previous recurring administrative turnover in the district, from school principals to Melrose having three school superintendents in three years, to today's more stable environment with principals and administrators in place who are committed to Melrose, but have their own personal career goals that may eventually lead to them leaving the district.

"We have a time now of unprecedented flow of leadership to be able to drive some real ground-breaking achievement," he said. "I think that's also driving the feeling of urgency to get this done while, at the same time, being respectful of that staff that has to deliver. It's this window (of opportunity)."

Committee member Don Constantine told Murray that when he first looked at the strategic plan, "I could start nitpicking," but as the discussion continued, he understood why the plan included broad-based goals with more specific measures of success.

"I look at this as a strategic plan, not a tactical plan," Constantine said. "This is the strategy as to how we're going to get where we want, not a battle plan for taking over a particular objective."

The key, he continued, is keeping the strategic plan a "living document" by revisiting the strategic plan each year, using it to develop plans for each school year and setting the district's priorities.

"This is our first version of this and, in a year, we can see how that matrix will change, especially the measures of success," Constantine said. "Our prior plan might have been guilty of staying on the shelf for too long."