Hiring a diversity coordinator, building a social studies curriculum from kindergarten to twelfth grade and tackling improvements to athletic fields are all on the Concord School District’s to-do list in the next five years, according to a new strategic plan that is almost complete after a year of focus groups, surveys and meetings.
Last fall, the Concord School Board tasked administrators with developing a three-to-five year strategic plan, a document that outlines a road map for the school district’s future. The District had no strategic plan at the time, and hadn’t had one as far back as the current administrators could remember.
“It’s a really important document for an organization to have because it impacts everything. It impacts teaching and learning, it impacts professional development and training, it impacts the budget,” said Concord Superintendent Kathleen Murphy. “The Board uses it in deciding what are the priorities we need to think about.”
Over the last year, a seven-member steering committee made up of school administrators and school board members worked to assemble the plan, based on feedback from surveys and about 20 focus groups that were held virtually with parents, community members, teachers and staff and in-person with students.
“Getting all of that input from stakeholders was incredibly important to us,” said Pam McLeod, the district’s technology director and a member of the steering committee. “We had a lot of data to go through at the end of it. The themes that came out of it – communication, diversity – were incredibly clear and consistent across all the stakeholder groups.”
A draft, which Murphy says is nearly final, was presented to the school board at their Oct. 3 meeting, and is now available on the District website. Board members will be given the chance to review and add goals to the document, and the district is planning to hold a public hearing to review the plan with parents.
Murphy said the plan offers a clear path forward after a couple of tough years in the district during the COVID-19 pandemic, including the challenges of remote learning and a decline in student motivation and attendance.
“It was difficult. How do you walk away from that in a positive way?” Murphy said. “I think the strategic plan will let us do this.”
Concord’s strategic plan document contains six priority areas – each with serveral goals – including, equity and diversity, curriculum, instruction and assessment, social and emotional learning, communication, and facilities and safety.
In the priority area of equity and diversity, for example, district officials bring on a new diversity,equity, inclusion and justice coordinator, make “significant inroads” in hiring staff that reflects the diversity of the student body, and generally work toward a school culture that eliminates barriers and stigma associated with diversity, according to the document. They also want to provide cultural competency training to staff, and cultivate an environment that allowd for difficult conversations about race and equity to occur within the school community.
When it comes to instruction, the district wants to build a social studies curriculum that is streamlined from grades K to 12.
“The teachers and the parents and the educators wanted to make sure we had a curriculum that is K through 12 and the curriculum built year after year on the foundations from the grade level before,” Murphy said.
In New Hampshire, where the only social studies curriculum framework is from 2006 despite state law requiring standards to be updated every 10 years, many school districts don’t offer social studies instruction before grade eight.
The district is planning to implement Universal Design for Learning, a flexible teaching and learning framework, for all grade levels and collect and analyze data on student performance, and redesign the staff evaluation system to provide targeted expectations around instruction.
The district is considering hiring a communications officer to handle communications for the district, and develop a branding and marketing plan that will highlight district accomplishments.
The strategic plan also reveals the district’s goal to talk with city officials and begin long-range planning about how to improve the high school athletic fields.
They also want to increase safety and security of the buildings. “Consider the addition of a school resource officer at Rundlett Middle School” is an action item on the list.
The district also plans to work toward all buildings becoming sustainable, striving for the goal of “net zero” energy.
“Sustainability is big, trying to look at how we can reach net-zero energy levels,” Murphy said. “We can’t do it all in one year, but over the next 3-5 years we hope to be able to do those things.”
Even after the plan is finalized, it will be a “living document,” edited to add new initiatives that may be required by the state, like the legislation signed by Gov. Chris Sununu last year that requires all students to pass the United States’ 128-question civics naturalization examination starting in 2023.
“The document is not carved in stone. It’s not meant to be,” Murphy said. “There will be some flexibility in it. But for the most part, we are pretty close to having that plan.”