Listing attributes an S.F. schools grad should have is up next for district

Public school officials revamp their five-year strategic plan; some goals remain, others to be added

Santa Fe Public Schools in 2012 laid out an ambitious, five-year strategic plan designed to address student proficiency and graduation rates, student and staff safety and its technological needs.

Though that plan has fallen short in several areas, district leaders are determined to add a new goal as they update the objectives for the next half-decade. On Tuesday, the school board will continue reviewing and discussing the plan, which Superintendent Veronica García initially unveiled during a Feb. 27 meeting.

García said the district and board will continue to work on the plan through the spring.

“I don’t believe that a strategic plan should be static, and once we approve it, it doesn’t mean we are not going to add to it, or, if we see fit, modify it,” she told the board.

Five of the six main components of the plan play upon goals set out in the district’s 2012-17 strategic plan — initiated under former superintendent Bobbie Gutierrez and four former members of the board, as well as current member Steve Carrillo. Superintendent Joel Boyd, who succeeded Gutierrez, carried that plan forward from 2012-16.

Those five carry-over objectives

include:

Promoting high academic performance rates for all students.

Recruiting and retaining qualified employees.

Engaging parents and the community in improving the school district.

Making schools safe and using and upgrading classroom technology.

Ensure effective systems operation and technology infrastructure.

A new goal is defining what the attributes of a typical Santa Fe Public Schools high school graduate should be and then coming up with strategies to determine what those graduates need to succeed in college and careers. García has said her rationale for adding a sixth platform is that graduation rates are illusory if students don’t have the skills that allow them to thrive in the world after graduation.

One of the district’s goals in ensuring that success is upping graduation rate to 78 percent by school year 2022-23. The district’s graduation rate currently is just under 69 percent — 1 percent lower than the graduation rate goal of 70 percent set in the 2012-17 strategic plan.

While the 2012-17 plan did attain some of its objectives — upgrading technology in the classrooms and offering students and parents more programmatic choices, for example — the district was unable to earn a C or better for every one of its 30 schools in the state’s A-F grading system. A dozen of those schools received Ds or Fs in the latest round of grades.

On the other hand, some goals of that plan are difficult to measure, in part because the state switched from the old pencil-and-paper standards-based assessment tests to the new computerized PARCC exams. State educational leaders warned that grades would drop as a result, and they did, both statewide and districtwide.

Other targets of the updated plan include raising student proficiency scores in math, reading and science to at least 40 percent and, ideally, 60 percent, within five years. García told the board 60 percent is “an ambitious goal,” given

those proficiency rates, based on the most recent standardized test scores, are 16.5 percent in math, 28.3 percent in reading and 31.7 percent in science.

The current plan in discussion includes some broad tactics to address those challenges, including creating a reading initiative that ensures all students are reading to grade level by the end of the first grade.

García and her administrative team held a series of community forums and workshops late last year to solicit input and ideas. Then she and some of her team presented the first part of the updated plan to the five board members during the Feb. 27 public meeting. Board member Steve Carrillo said Monday that he does not see the board approving the plan until at least late April, given there are still a lot of questions to be answered.

“I want a clear understanding of how we are going to get there, how much it is going to cost and who is going to do it,” Carrillo said.

Many school districts in New Mexico and across the country create five-year strategic plans. Stan Rounds, executive director of the New Mexico Coalition of Educational Leaders and a former superintendent in Las Cruces, said Monday that they are “terribly important” to the success of any district.

“If you don’t begin by looking at the end of the line … three to five years, it’s hard to chart how you are going to get there and effectively coordinate resources to get there,” Rounds said. “Once you do that sort of planning you can start

creating budgets, staffing levels, policy work that coordinates with successfully getting to that end.”

Rounds echoed García’s belief that such plans need to be freshened every year. And, he said, districts working on plans now need

to take into account the fact that a new governor will take office in New Mexico next January who may have different ideas about the public education system. The national implementation of the new Every Student Succeeds Act

(ESSA) will play a role as well, he said.

But, he said, “That doesn’t excuse the need to locally make decisions about where you are going.”