School Committee Struggles With Strategic Plan Synergy

As the Melrose School Committee wades deeper into the thicket of the five-year strategic plan, the task of bushwhacking well-defined cutback trails that lead back to the district's priorities and the means to achieve those ends has become increasingly difficult.

In June, the committee preliminarily approved the strategic plan, but withheld final approval pending its review and approval of the administrative team's action plans — the specific details of how the district will achieve the strategic plan's benchmarks and meet its goals.

In lieu of unraveling and modifying the strategic plan itself — specifically the plan's broad-based goals that concerned committee members — the committee is pursuing the creation of a 'bridge document' that bridges the perceived gap between the overarching strategic plan and finely drawn action plans. To that end, the bridge document would delineate district priorities and, in essence, translate the strategic plan's educator-speak for the general public.

At Tuesday night's meeting, the School Committee tabled discussions on the action plans, which were presented to the committee for the first time, the bridge document's priorities and the bridge document itself.

The difficulties primarily stem from the committee undertaking the comprehensive task of ensuring a synergy between the strategic plan, bridge document and action plans, as well as other district plans such as school improvement plans and the superintendent's goals. Ostensibly, the effort should allow Melrose school officials to trace every enumerated goal and undertaking — whether in the bridge document, a school improvement plan or otherwise — back to the strategic plan, which serves as the district's foundation for the next five years.

Committee member Don Constantine, who apologized for missing the last meeting when the committee adopted five bridge document priorities, said that he was trying to "main traceability" between the stacks of paperwork and documents now before the committee.

"The five priorities adopted at the last meeting, those are great things to be doing, but I have a hard time taking 50 pages of maple sap (the strategic plan), boiling it down and getting the five priorities, the syrup," Constantine said. "We're not distilling those 50 pages. Because of that, we're losing traceability of what the strategic plan is telling us and introducing some other thoughts and other foregone conclusions, perhaps, that people feel we need to be doing, and are not derived from the strategic plan activity and subsequent activities."

Action plans lacking specificity?

Speaking to the issues of complexity and specificity within the action plans, committee member J.D. LaRock, during a discussion with the elementary school principals present at Tuesday meeting, noted that in some cases — particularly in the "Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment" section of the action plans — the stated actions were concrete and a lay person could "wrap their head around" the those actions.

In other areas, LaRock found "a vagueness that matches level of vagueness in the goals of the strategic plan," adding that he had expected individual action plans from each school.

Lincoln School Principal Brent Conway responded that it is "highly difficult" to parse individual goals from the strategic plan because each area, whether curriculum or student support, is so intertwined. With regard to individual plans for each school, he said that step takes place during the development of each school's improvement plan, which must align with the strategic plan and its action plans.

Superintendent Joe Casey expounded on the necessity of the school improvement plans providing more the more narrowly defined actions at each school, due to the differences between each school.

"Brent has a Title I population, but that's not the case in the Horace Mann, per se," Casey said. "The committee has said they would like to see school improvement plans tie back to the strategic plan, so there's sort of a flow going back and forth across the district and it's something we're committed to working on, something that will have to be monitored and adjusted."

Also questioning the specificity of the action plans, committee member Christine Casatelli expressed her dissatisfaction, "maybe because I'm a journalist," with some of the listed due dates as "ongoing."

Casey equated those plans with due dates listed as "ongoing" with a journalist's beat, as opposed to a single article covering a single subject, saying that they are part of a five-year process.

"But these are year one actions," Casatelli said. "I don't want to comeback and say, Oh, we're still working on that." I'm looking for a more final deadline of when we're going to get this done. I'm hoping we can have quarterly updates so we can gauge how we're doing."

Bridge document's priorities too specific?

While concerns were raised over a perceived lack of specificity in the action plans, ironically the bridge document's priorities were questioned for being too specific, while not clearly tying back to the strategic plan.

During the public comment period before the meeting began, Gerry Mroz, a frequent speaker at School Committee meetings, clarified his remarks at the previous meeting that criticized the priorities. As an example, he pointed to the first priority adopted, to improve mathematics performances across the board.

"What I feel is that this document ends up being too specifically focused," Mroz said. "The problems in mathematics need to be dealt with this year. It's not a five-year issue. In five years we want to see better ... that doesn't mean we shouldn't be dealing with everything else at the same time. It doesn't mean don't focus on science, history or ELA (English Language-Arts) or a foreign language. It feels like this (list of priorities) is almost too minuscule."

Several committee members agreed with Mroz's assessment, including Chairwoman Margaret Driscoll, who said she was "struggling" with the priorities, both in terms of specificity and how the priorities directly relate to the strategic plan.

"I believe that we need to talk about more academic goals: science, math, ELA," Driscoll said. "I think that this priority could be expanded and would like to think more about the matching of the documents, if possible."

Committee member Kristin Thorp said that in creating the bridge document, "I would hope that that's where we would find our bridge" between the strategic plan and the action plans and suggested to LaRock, who took the initiative to create a bridge document draft, that references in the bridge document to specific numbered items in the strategic plan would be helpful.

Thorp also made a motion that whatever the final bridge document's priorities are, those should also be the superintendent's goals, which was unanimously approved by the committee.

Committee member Carrie Kourkoumelis said that aligning the priorities with the superintendent's goals is "perfectly reasonable and I'm glad we did that," but added that she felt the process of creating the bridge document was "intrinsically flawed." While she said it was "completely fine" LaRock and Casey discussed one-on-one what the priorities should be, she was concerned about drifting away from the work done by the strategic plan's steering committee and the strategic plan itself.

LaRock said that he found aligning the bridge document to the strategic plan "somewhat of a challenge" because of the vagueness of the strategic plan.

"That makes it more of a challenge to create something coherent in the bullet points in the bridge document; there are places where there is a point-to-point match and," he added with a chuckle, "other places where I just wrote something I thought would make sense."

Kourkoumelis said while she appreciated the work of the committee, she noted that she was the only School Committee member who voted against preliminarily approving the strategic plan pending approval of the actions plans, and said she believed the committee was in "very muddy water" with the addition of various clarifying documents.

"What's really wrong is that we need to have a clear document in the first place and we didn't have a clear document in the first place," she said. "If we had dealt with just the strategic plan, we shoudn't need all of this other stuff. I thank Mr. LaRock for his efforts and hope we can come up with something that will help synthesize and clarify. I'm very sad that the actual document requires so much translation and we still can't get these things off the table."

LaRock responded that "now is an opportune time" for committee members to propose any specific changes to the priorities. However, the committee voted to table the priorities and send them back to the administrative team for further work, with only LaRock voting in opposition.

Earlier in the evening, LaRock had offered to table the action plans and, in doing so, addressed the multiple-document mire that Kourkoumelis worried about.

"We're now dealing with multiple documents, all trying to do something positive," he said. "It's fair to say maybe some of us feel that none of them are doing very well. Despite our best intentions and hard work, we run risk of being so unclear about where we're going that we run the risk of continuing doing the same thing we've always done ... we're all on the same team, all trying to accomplish the same thing. We want the best for Melrose kids, no one denies that. Somehow, we're just not focusing on it in a way that's effective yet."