Schools

School Strategic Plan Prioritization Begins

Five priorities offered by superintendent to be included in bridge document; J.D. LaRock will bring draft document back to committee for discussion.

The Melrose School Committee began creating priorities for the district's five-year strategic plan at its meeting Tuesday night, voting to adopt five priorities articulated by Superintendent Joe Casey and committee member J.D. LaRock continuing to work on more priorities to bring back to the committee.

The committee voted last month to approve the strategic plan on two conditions — the committee's approval of action plans developed later this summer by school administrators, and the committee agreeing to work on adding more specific goals and priorities.

At the beginning of the discussion, Chairwoman Margaret Driscoll framed the debate by asking three questions: why the strategic plan is important, what elements would make the document meaningful and how to word those elements.

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Committee member Christine Casatelli said the strategic plan is important because it will serve as the district's roadmap to getting where it wants to be in five years, which Casatelli said, "and I'm not being glib," is to be the best school district in Massachusetts. Asked how to use the strategic plan to get there, Casatelli said it's the role of the school committee to set the broad vision, while entrusting the superintendent, principals and school administrators to develop plans that will fulfill that vision. 

"I don't think we need to be in the position of telling our superintendent and administrators how it is to be the best," Casatelli said. "They're our generals in this campaign and they're the ones who are going to get us there."

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LaRock said he agreed with Casatelli's comments that it is key the priorities are informed by the views of the district's administrative leadership. On that note, in drafting his memo on the strategic plan and suggestions for the "bridge document" containing priorities that the committee will draft, LaRock said he asked Casey what his priorities were.

Casey said his priorities were:

  • Improving mathematics performances across the board.
  • Improving the district's technology, including building out school websites where students and parents can get information and integrating technology more into classrooms.
  • Expanding the capacity to serve students who have special education needs, including using a co-teaching model so all students are exposed to the same curriculum. "(Students with special education needs) need to have the same experiences and opportunity for success and judged that same way, albeit with some additional help, but knowing they'll be held accountable," Casey said.
  • Committing to finishing the English-Language Arts movement already begun in Melrose Public Schools, particularly the literacy initiative.
  • Standardize expectations for students across schools in the district. 

"I see two things happening at once: there are issues that need to happen today," Casey said. "The other piece we're trying to do is not only address those issues for today in an open and transparent way so people understand what we're doing not only today, but tomorrow and so they can track our progress. I think there has to be a way to blend those."

Translating the strategic plan for the public

LaRock said he appreciated Casey's list of priorities because of the level of precision and specificity, compared to the broad goals enumerated within the strategic plan, which he said is a tool for educators and thus steeped in educator-speak, but not necessarily easily understood by the general public.

"Improving mathematics performance: everyone understands right off the bat what that means and why that's important," he said. "I want us to create a document — and I think we all do — that a parent can read and say, 'Ah, yes, I understand what they're doing' ... that translational piece of taking the broader goals and drilling down, as you (Casey) did, I think is very compelling."

After LaRock made a motion to adopt Casey's priorities into the bridge document, the committee unanimously approved.

In earlier comments, LaRock said that the bridge document could provide "the connective tissue" between the broad-based themes in the strategic plan and the very specific measures of success 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.

Committtee member Kristin Thorp noted that the priorities being discussed sounded similar to the superintendent's goals, which are set by the committee each year, and cautioned against having too many priorities included in the bridge document that could result in a lack of focus. Thorp also cautioned against the committee including specific measurements of success, which are already in the strategic plan, in the bridge document.

"I don't think we're going to have measurements at that high a level," she said. "I think we need to make sure that we're clear what this is going to do, how it's going to fit in with the goals we'll be developing in the coming weeks and make sure we don't make the scope too big."

LaRock said he agreed "100 percent" with Thorp, but he believed there was room for "a couple of more goals" and asked for his fellow committee members to offer their own priorities for consideration.

Thorp offered that "creating a document with eight people is a difficult thing to do," instead offering that one person create an initial draft to bring back for further discussion. LaRock offered to work on the draft for the next committee meeting.

Public comments split over discussion

During the first public comment session at the beginning of the meeting, Ted Kenney cautioned the committee against moving too quickly and said he hoped to see the bridge document tabled until a future meeting.

At the end of the meeting, Kenney thanked the committee for continuing to work on priorities for the strategic plan.

"What's really important is the folks at home who have children in the Melrose Public Schools will be able to pick up that piece of paper (the bridge document) and understand what the hopes of the district are," he said. "We have may have our differences of opinion on that paper, but its very important that it's clearly understandable to anyone and everyone.  You asked a lot of questions — I like that."

On the other hand, Gerry Mroz, a frequent speaker at School Committee meetings, criticized the committee at the end of the meeting for spending only an hour discussing the strategic plan priorities. Mroz also disagreed with the overall strategic plan process and relying on principals and administrators to develop the priorities.

"The administrative team administers the district in a limited sense," he said. "It doesn't want to engage in higher-level discussion over performance or mastery goals."

At the School Committee meeting on June 22, Mroz raised concerns that there was "no prioritizing" within the strategic plan, "no 'these are the four things we're going to direct ourselves to accomplishing ... I think that it's perfectly reasonable for this committee and steering committee to say let's go back, evaluate data from focus groups, figure out why one thing is more important than something else … let's get that down on paper of that's where we want to go in five years."

In contrast, at Tuesday night's meeting, Mroz said, "You are going to short change the students by making a limited strategic plan focus on these five things."

Mroz's volume and tone of voice continued to rise as he spoke, his speech becoming more rapid, until after about five minutes, Driscoll cut him off, thanked him for his comments and asked for a vote to close public participation, which the committee approved except for committee member Carrie Kourkoumelis, who voted against.


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