EDLD 5399- Week Three Assignment, Part 2 – Part C of the Comprehensive Final Report

Describing Recommendations and District/Campus Improvement Initiative/Action Research Lessons Learned

District improvement plans are put in place to tie district goals to budgets and personnel resources.  Additionally, they are the roadmap the district uses to attain it’s stated goals.  The more articulate and clearly stated the map is, the better the change that the road map is followed.  Campus and district improvement plans help each district articulate priorities and drive how monetary/professional resources are allocated.  These plans should never be stand-alone documents, produced once annually.  Instead, they should be used to drive all campus operations and referred to frequently to ensure progress.  Additionally, district/campus improvement plans should also link together from one year to the next, through a long-range strategic plan.  District improvement initiates must be clearly articulated and over-communicated.  Each entity within the organization must state how they will work to achieve district initiatives.   Close monitoring of campus goals should occur on an annual basis.  This close monitoring will work to ensure campus goals are aligned to campus goals and each campus goal contains objectives describing how the goal will be achieved.  A needs assessment tool must be published so that all members of the organization can determine their progress towards district/campus goals.  The needs assessment should also describe when the needs assessment process should occur and meetings should be held to discuss needs assessment findings.    I recommended that campus/district administrative appraisals are tied to the success of the campus/district improvement plan.  Additional professionals with key roles in the attainment of district/campus roles should also have appraisals tied to their ability to realize campus.  This will provide the necessary accountability to realize goal attainment.  A great deal of training needs to happen when moving to this type of system so that goals are properly stated and professionals are properly redirected when a needs assessment reveals corrective action is needed. My current superintendent has been in her current role less than a year.  It is apparent that her appraisal is directly linked to the achievement of district goals.  Through conversations with her, we are looking towards aligning additional appraisals to district/campus goals.  Additionally, while only goals and objectives are part of the district and campus improvement plans, we will work towards including monetary and personnel allocations to the plan for next year.  The main focus this year was the development of consistency between the campus and district goals.  A few campuses were less explicit in their statement of objectives tied to achieving these goals.  Retraining needs to be targeted for these campuses.  Overall, I am excited about the progress we have made in less than a year under the leadership of our new superintendent.  I look forward to being a part of the additional planned development of this process and the leadership experience that I will earn while doing so.