GILROY
– The school district is revising its three-year Strategic Plan,
a guiding set of goals that target reform, hiring quality teachers
and improving student performance.
By Lori Stuenkel
GILROY – The school district is revising its three-year Strategic Plan, a guiding set of goals that target reform, hiring quality teachers and improving student performance.
School, community and business members are being recruited to help decide Gilroy Unified School District’s priorities for the next three school years.
“I think for us to take the next step as a district and really accelerate our improvement in student performance, we need to do another updating of our strategic direction,” Superintendent Edwin Diaz said at a recent board meeting.
The current plan runs through the end of this school year and includes student performance goals, guiding strategies and district priorities. By summer 2004, GUSD aimed to have 90 percent of students at grade level in reading, writing and mathematics and no more than a 5 percent gap in the average scores of any major subgroup.
The district will go through a “quick process” to update its goals by May, to be implemented by fall.
Trustees voted earlier this month to gather a broad-based stakeholder group to recommend goals, based on the results over the past three years. The strategic planning team could include more than 40 people, including principals, teachers, parents, students, a city council member and representatives from Gavilan College. Ex-officio members would include board trustees, members of the press and representatives of the Stupski Foundation, which has helped GUSD in its reform efforts.
“It’s not a completely new process or new direction, I think it’s learning from the work that we’ve done in the last three years,” Diaz said, “both things we need to improve on, making some modifications to our direction … and do it in a fast-paced way and move on.”
The core team will meet separately and visit other stakeholder groups, as well as hold “town hall” meetings for parents, throughout March and April. The team’s recommendations will go to the board for a first reading, likely during a study session, before formal approval.
The cost of the strategic planning process, which Diaz estimated at about $40,000, will be funded by the Stupski Foundation.
The school board included a large number of community members when developing a prior strategic plan in the early 1990s. The process lasted more than a year but there was little follow-up.
“It is a strategic plan that I think people spent a lot of time developing and yet very little of the objectives were actually implemented,” Diaz said.
To bring a measure of accountability to the plan, Diaz also wants to create an oversight team that will track the district’s progress.
