Board to Set Schedule for Superintendent Search

The search for a new superintendent for the Rapid City Area Schools gets underway tomorrow (Saturday, 12/19) at 8:00 a.m. The Board will meet with representatives of the search firm to discuss the recruiting process; ways to solicit citizen input; the establishment of committees of staff, parents, administrators and community members; and the overall schedule for screening candidates and interviews.

The consulting team has already prepared a survey designed to elicit some sense of the skills and qualities that the District and the community are looking for in a superintendent. The public may also be asked to comment on which qualities are most important right now given the many issues facing the District.

Framing the Search Process

In selecting a new superintendent, school districts are often faced with a chicken and egg question when it comes to strategic planning. Should the Board develop a strategic plan and then hire a superintendent with specific skills that fit with the District’s priorities? Or, should the Board hire a new superintendent with the skills needed to lead the strategic planning process and then hope that this person will also have what it takes to implement the plan once its developed? The Board in Rapid City will benefit from a number of long-range planning efforts that have been completed in recent years under Superintendent Peter Wharton, including a facilities plan, a strategic plan for Native American education, and a well-developed District Improvement Plan. But the existing overarching strategic plan is out-of-date and is not likely to provide guidance to candidates for the position.

When it gets down to recruiting and selecting candidates, the Board will also have to think about whether they want to promote from within or hire from outside the District. Often this kind of decision is influenced by the current challenges facing a school district or any organization. If a board feels that the organizational culture is strong, the vision is sharp and trust levels are high, it makes sense to promote from within to keep the plan on track. If there are problems in the culture, trust levels are low and change is needed, many organizations will look for a fresh face to lead the process of change.

At tomorrow’s meeting the Board will attempt to wrestle with these issues and more.  A copy of the agenda for the meeting is here: Board agenda 121909. Read Kayla Gahagan’s story in the Rapid City Journal.  The meeting will be held in the Community Room at CSAC at 300 Sixth Street.

Does the District Have a Strategic Plan?

Over the course of several meetings now, school board members have debated whether or not the District has a strategic plan. The answer ought to be simple. The plan either exists or it doesn’t. But the real questions are: Is the plan still relevant? Did it ever meet the District’s needs? And why isn’t it being used to help shape the current budget?

The existing Rapid City Area Schools Strategic Plan was developed six years ago to “serve as a guiding force for the energies and efforts of the Rapid City school community in the coming years.” Crafted by a task force of 40 District employees and community members, it outlines six goals for the District:

1. “Build a shared understanding among policy makers and other community members about the value, the role and the cost of education in the Rapid City Area Schools in order to achieve increased support and funding.

2. Improve communication with the community so that more public support for the Rapid City Area Schools is realized.

3. Improve the health and safety of students by reducing the level of substance abuse and other at-risk behaviors.

4. Increase the percentage of Native American students who graduate from the Rapid City Area Schools.

5. Build understanding of Community Development to increase collaborative efforts to support education in the Rapid City Area Schools.

6. Increase the clarity of roles, rules, and responsibilities within the district to improve organizational effectiveness.”

The plan includes “action steps” to achieve these six goals, but it doesn’t say how progress or success should be measured. In the absence of benchmarks, the District’s strategic plan is more of a “to do” list than a strategy. When the Administration provided the Board of Education with an update on the plan in the spring of 2007, there was no data to demonstrate whether the tasks completed had helped the District accomplish its six goals.

The six goals in the plan highlight a more fundamental deficiency in the strategy. None of the goals address the most important and expensive day-to-day activity of the District: educating all of the children attending Rapid City’s public schools. In fact, of the six goals in the strategic plan, only one addresses teaching, and that goal focuses on only one segment of the student population. Since most of the District’s annual budget is dedicated to teaching and supporting the instructional process, no wonder Board members and administrators haven’t referred to the strategic plan as they contemplated budget cuts.

In this era of economic crisis, the Rapid City Area School District desperately needs an up-to-date and meaningful strategic plan to help us stay focused on what’s most important. The goals in the new strategic plan should be tied to the fundamental vision and mission of the District: that “all Rapid City Area School students will achieve to their full potential” and that we will build “a community of lifelong learners, one student at a time.” The new plan should align action steps to this vision and mission and give us a road map for five years. It should serve as a critical tool in the allocation of resources, and it should include performance measures so we can hold the Board, the Administration and ourselves accountable for success or failure.

Fortunately, much of the work that needs to be done to create a meaningful strategic plan has been done over the last few years. It just needs to be pulled together and offered to the public for comment, development and support.  Then it needs to be ratified by a board committed to seeing it through.

More on putting the pieces together later.