“It’s probably one of the most important activities that a board-superintendent team will create,” Minnesota School Board Association Director of Strategic Planning & Board Leadership Gail Gilman told The School Perceptions Podcast. “In a lot of ways, it’s a visionary roadmap.”
In the Unified School District of De Pere, a strategic plan became one of Superintendent Chris Thompson’s top priorities when he took over the position in summer 2022. The District had a “much-loved, but a worn mission and vision,” and he knew he needed the community’s buy-in to align with what the district was doing.
“It’s just the idea of, ‘What is it that you’re looking for in a school district?’ And don’t just tell me, ‘Bring down the taxes,’” Thompson said. “What are you looking for as how the school district is going to contribute to the community?”
If the process is done right, the plan can inspire the community forward in a shared direction, said CESA 6 Executive Director and CEO Ted Neitzke
“We really suggest you bring together a diverse group of people, all generations of staff, and then you go out to the community and you say, ‘Here’s where we think we can go,’” Neitzke said. “That level of ownership supercharges a strategic plan.”
Gather input in a variety of ways
It’s important to gather information “in a variety of ways,” all three of Gilman, Neitzke, and Thompson said, including things like surveys and community listening sessions or committees.
“I believe it is important to have all the voices, all the values, all the generations at the table when you’re creating that strategic plan,” Gilman said.
But the order you ask people in matters, too, Neitzke stressed.
Where they go wrong, he said, “is they go out to non-experts and ask them what they should do strategically,” and end up with a plan focused on a small-but-vocal group’s priorities (like turf on one team’s sports field) instead of one that represents a broader vision.
He said districts first need to focus on what he calls their “legacy experts” – the people who have been around long enough to see what has worked and what hasn’t in the past, as well as the people experiencing the system daily.
“You want to improve your high school? You ask your high schoolers,” Neitzke said.
Once there’s an understanding of goals from their perspective, he said, you can move to increasingly broader groups to help make a plan for how to achieve them.
If people actually feel like they’ve been involved in creating the plan, especially through a committee, Gilman said it can pay long-term dividends outside of the plan itself when those people are talking with others in the community.
“Because they’ve learned so much in the process … the topic comes up about the school, now you’ve got these folks that can start saying, ‘Wait a minute, I was on this committee and this is what I learned about our school district and this is what the facts are,’” Gilman said.
Use the plan for every decision
But why take the time for this when there are so many other things you have to do as a school leader? Because “people really, really like structure and they like to know the rules of the game,” Neitzke said.
“Now, that doesn’t mean everybody agrees with it,” he said, “but as long as you know the speed limit, you kind of know how fast you can go past it without getting a ticket or how slow you can go before irritating everyone behind you.”
Without that structure, people create it for themselves. Eventually, that can lead to disengagement when someone comes along and tells them they’ve been doing it all wrong for a long time, despite their best efforts.
In De Pere, the plan has been in place since 2023. Thompson has found it drives their conversations and gives them something to always refer back to as they make tough decisions.
“We have started a language, started communication where we’re saying, ‘How does something that we’re going to do fit into all of this?’” Thompson explained. “Then the next question is, ‘If it doesn’t fit into it, is it worthy of us doing it?’ It’s really streamlined all of our work and we’re feeling quite strong about it.”
Once a good plan is in place, it’s important to keep it at the center of decision-making – including making sure everyone else understands how it’s being used.
Just because something is considered a “five-year plan,” it can’t move to the backburner once it’s approved, Gilman stressed. It must be a “living, breathing document that’s at all of your board meetings,” she said, where decisions that relate to any of its pillars are talked about in that context.
Thompson has found it’s important in all of his district’s communications to remind the community how they were involved in the process and what the district has done to listen to them. That type of connection can pay off in other ways, too.
“All this time, we’re building trust with our community with our communications going out, constantly saying, ‘You spoke, we responded,’” Thompson said. “This builds that trust so that they can be there for us when we need to come back for a big referendum.”
Create the right culture ahead of time
Even with a good plan, poor implementation can stifle any progress it could have made. Neitzke said districts sometimes “fail to create the culture before we deploy.” That necessary culture includes an acceptance that there will some failure and an understanding that new things won’t be abandoned as soon as the year gets busy.
It also requires an understanding that the plan tells people the goals – but is not overly prescriptive on how to accomplish them.
“Let’s just take two middle schools: I’ve got one middle school that’s got a staff with an average age of 32 years old, and I’ve got another middle school with an average age of 46 years old,” Neitzke said. “Do you think that taking the same approach to those two buildings, just from that one single data point, is a good idea?”
He immediately answered his own question: “No, it’s a horrible idea. But that’s what we do.”
Instead, district leaders need to give their school leaders the chance to be accountable for implementation at their building, knowing their staff and culture, he said. Then, those building leaders can do the same for their staff members.
“What happens in systems is we get stuck on wanting to hold people accountable and then taking their accountability away,” Neitzke said. The strategic plan can provide the “sweet spot of both autonomy and accountability.”
“We work our way around individuals instead of creating a culture of continuous improvement, getting engaged leaders who then create engaged staffs who will move mountains because they love doing what they’re doing, because they know it’s okay to screw up,” he added.
To learn more about strategic planning from Gilman, Neitzke, and Thompson, listen to episodes 6, 9, and 10 of The School Perceptions Podcast.
The School Perceptions Blog and Resource Center features the voices of our team members. This post was written by Scott Girard, Project Manager.