Welcome!

Welcome to Notes from the Strategic Plan! For over thirty years, the West Genesee School community has employed Strategic Planning for Educational Improvement. The Plan is the driving force behind every District initiative. 

During the 2021-22 school year, the district partnered with a professional development company called Solution Tree to help us transform into a Professional Learning Community with a focus on three big ideas that help us answer the four critical questions of a PLC.

Part of that transformative process has been organizing our leadership teams into Guiding Coalitions.

Think of the Strategic Planning Team as the district-wide Guiding Coalition. Rob Leo, Director of Professional Learning, and Deb Ratcliff, Assistant Principal at Stonehedge are the co-facilitators of the Strategic Planning Guiding Coalition. The coalition itself consists of over 30 members that represent all of our stakeholder groups: students, staff, teachers, administrators, and community members. Together, we follow Solution Tree's best practices for successful PLCs at Work to collaboratively set SMART Goals that impact everyone in our learning community (SMART Goals: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-based).

February 2022

When the Guiding Coalition first assembled in February 2022, our Solution Tree consultant, Barb Phillips, helped orient the team to the basic tenets of a Professional Learning Community. She guided us in establishing our coalition's purpose.

In addition to establishing our collective purpose, the Guiding Coalition worked together to develop our behavioral norms that would help to make our meetings as efficient as possible.

We use a "fist to five" protocol to help us reach consensus as a group.

April 2022

By April, it was time for the Strategic Planning Guiding Coalition to review data to help us create our SMART Goals. However, it became evident that we needed better data to help inform our decisions. The New York State Education Department (NYSED) publishes several data points for districts across the State, but the disruption due to the global pandemic revealed several gaps in the information that could help us.  We set an process goal for ourselves to find a reliable, norms-referenced survey instrument to could help us establish a baseline. After reviewing several options, we decided to partner with a company called Panorama Education to implement a School Climate Survey. The anonymous surveys will be deployed in a 2-week window in December and will cover topics that include school belonging, school climate, school safety, and diversity and inclusion. Surveys will be deployed for students in grades 3-5 and 6-12, teachers, staff, and families. Please be on the lookout for survey links in early December. We want your feedback!

June 2022

Once our Guiding Coalition had the opportunity to review the data that was available to us, we were able to collaboratively establish our SMART goals for the following district initiatives: Curriculum and Instruction; Diversity, Social-Emotional Learning; and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. You can review not only our areas of focus, but also the SMART goals and detailed action plans that will guide the work of each of our building's guiding coalitions via this link: https://sites.google.com/westgenesee.org/wgstrategicplan/home?authuser=0

• The Guiding Coalition page includes our membership matrix. Be sure to check out the 2nd page of the spreadsheet (there is a tab at the bottom) to see who is currently serving on the Strategic Planning Guiding Coalition
• The Agendas page includes all of our agendas since we adopted the Solution Tree PLCs at Work model.
• The Meeting Materials page includes the slide decks and note catchers we use at our quarterly meetings.
• The Data page has some overviews about Panorama's survey instruments as well as data from NYSED, which can be filtered by year and by building.
• The SMART Goals page contains our Strategic Plan: our mission, vision and belief statements; and our focus areas, SMART goals, and action plans.