When asked about his thoughts on the Strategic Plan, Mr. Sicoli thought that the 24 goals were too many and the school board should focus on five priority areas. They will be presenting this at Monday’s school board work session. He felt they should talk more about implementation of plans. First would be comprehensive—telling everything they do. Second would be the changes/direction we are heading.
He thought the strengths in the district are the rigorous courses and choices that are available. The Fine Arts are something to be very proud of. He thinks the diversity is a strength. He finds the strong teaching and learning department and technology department appealing.
He feels the weaknesses in the district would be the shoring up of the science curriculum, finances and communication. He would like to see the staff included more in decisions. Mr. Sicoli feels the communication is more transparent than any other district. He thinks we need to work on the marketing of the district. He would like to change the way they do business and make decisions by having agendas and materials available in a more timely manner. He thought some decisions should be speeded up while others should be slowed down and not rushed in to.
I agree with him on most of these comments. (Priorities) However I am a fan of keeping all 24 goals visible with relative priorities. I am always concerned that only having 5 visible will lead to lower priority goals being compromised unintentionally without trade off discussions. With this in mind, sounds good !!!!
Thoughts?
4 comments:
I am a fan of taking the 24 priorities and breaking them up into five overall categories. Typically things that are positive for one goal in that category are also positive for another.
The note in the minutes that saddened me was his comments on school start time (now agreed these are simply notes and not detailed) but I would love to see some movement on the school start times. We shouldn't dictate this discussion on if its good for the sports/fine arts schedules but rather what is best for student achievement. OK, don't want to rabbit hole this discussion. Time to go get some stats and post a little something to the blog.
DJ
Currently they are in categories:
1. Enrich and accelerate academic achievement.
2. Provide high quality, engaging teaching that challenges every student.
3. Cultivate learning environments characterized by mutual respect and personal responsibility.
4. Strengthen relationships among students, staff, families and community members.
5. Maximize resources and demonstrate financial accountability.
That's why it will be interesting to see what he proposes. And how measureable/SMART they will be.
A smart person mentioned to me that Middle and High schoolers should be on the same bus and have the same start times. This would let the poor HS kids sleep in a bit later. It would be interesting to see if this could work.
I think the strategic plan has resulted in a lot of spin and no results.
I agree that school start times should support achievement and not sports. Stan Mack said he didn't support a later H.S. start time because those kids needed to be home in time to babysit their siblings after school. True in some cases, I'm sure, but hardly a reason to plan around. I think the Middle/High schoolers being on the same bus makes sense.
Bus service is what drives start times. This is an unfortunate result of the Legislature folding what used to be a separate transportation fund into the general fund. Sure enough, bus service was squeezed so kids have to walk nearly 2 miles in winter so we can pay for all the fru-fru programs.
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