For the first time in over a decade, the WW-P School District is analyzing its goals, and it wants community input on helping to shape them.
The district has scheduled a community forum for Saturday, Oct. 29 to give residents the opportunity to help the district develop strategic goals for the next three to five years. The meeting is scheduled to go from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. in the Village School addition.
The forum is one component of the district’s Strategic Planning process, which started earlier this year, and will be hosted by former Princeton Public Schools superintendent Judith Wilson.
WW-P superintendent David Aderhold said that the last strategic plan for WW-P was set during the 2002-03 school year, and the district has used that plan for the last 14 years as a guide.
“It is time to revisit our previous plan and build upon our successes as we create a new vision for WW-P,” Aderhold said. “The strategic planning process will look at the district’s strengths and weaknesses, opportunities for the future and challenges the district may face.”
The district hired Wilson in June as the strategic planning facilitator, awarding a $29,000 contract. Wilson says she has held focus groups with PTA leaders, high school students, faculty members, support staff and administrators.
Wilson, a resident of Camden County, left the Princeton school district at the end of 2013. Since then she has worked as a consultant for school districts in the mid-Atlantic area, which includes “a lot of teaching, program evaluation, administrative professional development, and strategic and board governance,” she said.
The Oct. 29 community forum is the only one scheduled, and the general public will be able to learn about the process and voice their opinions.
“The forum will not be a decision-making process, not a product-oriented session,” Wilson said. “I’m not there to approve or disapprove. I am simply there to be sure that people’s opinions are heard, and I’ll have questions to prompt people about different aspects of school life and educational life for kids.”
The district website also has parent and community member surveys, compiled by Wilson, that will be used to inform the strategic planning process. The electronic surveys are available until noon of the forum date.
Four different surveys have been created — for parents of elementary school students, parents of students in grades 6 to 8, parents of high school students, and a community survey for residents without children in the school district.
Wilson says the purpose of the strategic planning process it is to identify multi-year critical goal areas and needs on which the the school district can focus.
“This is not necessarily out of something urgent, but to ask how do we focus a large organization so we get highest yield results for our students,” Wilson said. “And by that I hope people don’t intercept results narrowly by standardized tests or rankings. Education is so much more than that: How do our children fare after graduation? How do they experience the process of being lifelong learners? How do they experience their sense of wellness?”
Added Wilson: “In broader terms, so many districts open with a litany of goals that are too many and often not meaningful enough for people to really adopt and embrace, and willing to act upon. We don’t necessarily have them deeply embedded or don’t discuss the process of the goals.”
The nationwide one-to-one technology device initiative is a general example of how strategic planning can provide focus.
“Districts across the nation have spent a lot of resources for one-to-one technology devices,” Wilson said. “Some celebrate the fact that there is a tool in every hand. But that’s a technical goal and not the real goal, which is how we understand and embed the tool, by which I mean thinking about the instructional and learning process. How does that technology impact teaching and learning?”
Wilson said the planning process will culminate in a two-day forum in December. Then Aderhold will appoint a team to participate in the forum to finalize the strategic goals.
