Teams discuss strategies to propose for new plan for Fayetteville schools

FAYETTEVILLE -- Ten teams of volunteers are wrapping up their work to map out a proposal to guide the School District for the next five years.

The plan, once approved by the School Board, will describe how the Fayetteville School District will achieve a mission of ensuring "all students are successful in a highly competitive and rapidly changing global society."

The district's focus has been on implementing new academic standards and preparing for a new statewide standardized testing system for the past several years, said Superintendent Paul Hewitt. He thought it was time to give attention to the overall education program and how the district operates and works.

A couple hundred volunteers are participating in the initiative, including educators, business owners, parents and community members.

"The district is being driven by the people who really want to be involved in change and improvement," Hewitt said. "I love that participation. It will have total support because of that rigor people put throughout the process."

The 10 teams have been meeting since January to research and brainstorm ideas, each assigned to one of 10 strategies. A 30-member planning team developed the strategies to accomplish the new mission.

Each team is writing an action plan, said Holly Smith, an instructional facilitator for the district who is one of two leaders of the planning process.

The action plans will include specific, measurable achievements tied to the assigned strategy. Each achievement will be accompanied by a series of steps for the district to follow to reach the achievement, Smith said.

Each action plan that becomes part of the five-year plan will be assigned to a district staff member for implementation.

A meeting earlier this month of one of the teams provided an example of the detailed process. The April 6 meeting drew about 15 members, who sat at round tables inside the Washington Elementary School library.

Students were gone for the day, and the lights were dimmed to make it easier to see a document displayed on a big screen. Katie Stueart, a co-leader with Mignonne Scarbrough, explained the group had one more meeting because she and Scarbrough needed time to prepare for a presentation to the planning team on May 18.

Stueart pulled up the pages showing each achievement and corresponding steps onto the screen, giving team members time to check grammar, word choice and the content for each statement.

One sentence drew the attention of Fayetteville High School Principal Chad Scott, a member of the team.

"All new teachers?" he asked.

"When we talked about it, you said all teachers," said Stueart, addressing the entire team.

"I just asked the question," Scott said.

The conversation went back and forth about whether to propose a requirement that all newly hired middle, junior high and high school teachers receive training on techniques used to teach either pre-Advanced Placement or Advanced Placement classes. They agreed to keep the recommendation.

Stueart, who teaches 11th-grade Advanced Placement English at the high school, said she anticipated her team will propose about six action plans to the planning team to meet the goal of increasing diversity in challenging courses, including in the Advanced Placement program.

"This gives everybody a platform to share their ideas," Stueart said of the entire planning process. "It gives a lot more people a voice."

The Cambrian Group, an educational planning firm in Montgomery, Ala., trained Smith and Shay Hopper, also a teacher and co-leader, in an organizational planning model the district is following. Hopper thinks the development of a five-year strategic plan will improve communication in the school district and increase community involvement in the schools.

"It's given us time to really look at our system and evaluate where we are and where we're going to go," she said. "It's given us the vehicle to determine how we're going to continue to evolve."

NW News on 04/23/2016