The school launched their new strategic plan at the beginning of the year in order to encourage new ways of learning as well as to promote a desire for knowledge in students.
The new strategic plan in partnership with a renovated mission statement is expected to bring light into gray areas of the school’s functionality.
“I saw participating on the strategic plan committee as an opportunity to help shape the direction of the district, and I support the philosophy that the district administration is promoting,” said history teacher Tim Sermak.
With the new plan, classrooms are expected to improve their way of teaching. This includes creating a vision for graduates called Portrait of a Graduate.
“The Portrait of a Graduate tells us what improvement is supposed to look like, not that you’re going to see a total difference in the way that someone teaches calculus, but it literally provides that lense for us, that goal for us, what does that success look like for each kid? That’s what the Portrait of a Graduate tells us,” said Principal Dr. James Roscoe.
New strategic plans usually mirror the state of the school and the community surrounding it.
“Every five years we look back at what we’ve done and then we look forward to readjusting some of those goals. It’s a typical timeline and process,” said Superintendent Mikkel Storaasli.
The new plan also brings many new things to the school.
“From a building perspective, you look forward to improving the environment for our kids, bottom line. We achieved a lot of the goals we set with the previous strategic plan,” Dr. Roscoe said. “Here we are seven years from creating that previous plan, and there are new goals. I never want to be a building that sits status quo.”
Traits of Portrait of a Graduate are planned to be used as guidelines for how each teacher and student should teach and grow intellectually.
“There is no way in one lesson that a teacher will be able to hit all of those topics, but I think for example that the characteristics of Portrait of a Graduate has such as resiliency and balance are things that everyone can focus on. When students fail, they get back up again and stick with it, and that’s something we all have to figure out how to do,” Storaasli said.