By Shelby Stewart-Soldan
ssoldan@mihomepaper.com
Brandon Twp. — During the regular meeting on Monday night, Brandon school district superintendent Carly Stone provided the board of education with an update on the strategic plan.
The district circulated a survey, and held an open strategic plan forum over the past few months.
“Everyone is aware we are engaging in a strategic plan for the next many, many years here in the school district,” said Stone. “We currently have a strategic plan. It was originated in the 14-15 school year, and its set to expire in 2025, which, believe it or not, is right around the corner.”
The district is working with Michigan Leadership Institute to review all of the data and compare to school districts that are similar in size and demographics to Brandon. The survey was to find strengths currently within the district, as well as areas for improvement.
“Getting input from our community, trying to understand what our needs are here in Brandon, to ensure that we write a plan that continues improvement and really meets the needs of our students, our staff and our community,” she said. “We have a strategic advisory team which is comprised of teachers, it’s comprised of parents, building administrators, school district administrators, our athletic department, and students.”
The advisory team met recently to review all of the survey and forum data, as well as data from MLI which went to each school building to speak to students.
“We had over 278 respondents to our survey,” said Stone. “About 70 percent or so are our parents. Seventy-three pages actually came out of this stakeholder survey, some of which were multiple choice questions, we asked a lot of open ended questions and that’s where we saw a lot of comments.”
MLI put responses into categories, such as infrastructure, technology, teaching and learning, and climate and culture. Each poster highlighted responses for where the district was doing well and where there is room for improvement.
“After the whole group looked at the data, everyone was given a dot,” said Stone. “We had to get up and we had to look at all of these posters. And everyone had to put a dot on where they feel our goal area needs to be for the strategic plan, and here you see our climate and culture poster that we received a lot of feedback on from our community, from students of all levels. This was one of the posters that received the most dots, which means climate and culture is going to be one of our areas of focus moving forward for 2024, 25 and beyond. “
The poster listed strengths as lots of choices in sports and classes, strong tradition within the district, a tight-knit community, teachers, coaches and safety. Some areas of improvement listed on the poster included students’ attitudes towards each other, sportsmanship, more mental health services, and respect towards teachers and peers.
The other main focuses for the strategic plan will include teaching and learning, as well as infrastructure. The advisory team will break into three writing teams, each to write a plan for each area of focus. They will then review the old strategic plan to see what language or goals can be carried over. Following that, the team plans to research strategies for the areas of focus, and develop strategy statements to support their goal areas.
“This is a big project for us,” said Stone. “We are on track to have this all set for the end of June.”