The Crookston School Board and administration staff for Crookston Public Schools met Wednesday night at the Crookston High School to work on establishing the top priorities identified by staff and community input sessions for the districts strategic plan.
One thing that became apparent as the group worked through the various priorities is how intertwined each priority is with the other. Olson said rather than working towards a new priority each year, the board is going to have to set benchmarks in each priority to be worked on simultaneously. “They really do work together,” said Olson. “I don’t think we can do one goal without the others. As we start to plan how we’re going to implement this are really going to tie together. And well I was originally thinking we could space them out with one plan year one, another one year two it really does look like we’re going to be working on several of the plans over a multitude of years and developing some benchmarks by year so we are accomplishing these plans. We want to finish these by year five or at least have significant progress.”
The top priorities identified to implement immediately were:
- Communication Plan and Process
- Training for building relationships among, staff, students, and parents
- A mentorship program within the staff
- Addressing mental health and counseling
- Behavior expectations and consequences such as cell phones, attendance, etc.
- Rigor at the High School
Additionally, the group identified a second set of priorities under a review category. Meaning they want to take some time to review best practices and possible solutions for these priorities to get them right before starting their implementation process. One of those is how to best bridge elementary and high school with a true middle school concept. “Right now we have a model with self-contained classrooms PreK-6th grade,” said Olson. “Starting in 7th grade we call it a middle school but its really not middle school concept at this point, it’s 7th-12th grade is our high school. What we’d like to further study and review is to look at what would a true middle school concept at the high school look like from a scheduling perspective, a teaming of teachers perspective. A true middle school concept is a real powerful bridge between elementary and high school to make sure we’re preparing kids in some of their more difficult years.”
The other areas of review include:
- Attendance
- Integrating a diverse student population
- Continuing training on relationship building
Two other areas that will be closely considered and developed are prepping students for future work and staff retention. Olson said the meeting displayed the need to think about its priorities cohesively as a climate change, not as individual tasks to be accomplished without the other. “Just from what we heard tonight all the things that we’re really looking at accomplishing tie together so it’s going to have to be a longitudinal approach,” said Olson. “As we move forward as a school district we’re going to have to be really intentional about putting things in front of our community so they understand what we’re working towards, what we’re accomplishing and then also for them to hold us accountable. This is probably going to take us a couple of months to work on what the benchmarks look like, how do we get this accomplished and what do we do first. It’s obviously going to be really important that we present and work on this in a longitudinal and logical method.”
Changing a climate and implementing new priorities can take time, but Olson said he feels the district has the building blocks in place to be successful in accomplishing their priorities. “If you study implementation science it says it’s a five to seven-year process,” said Olson. “Now we’re hoping to accomplish this over the next five years. I think we have a lot of the building blocks for success. We have a great staff, a wonderful parent and community body that can help us as we move forward. Implementation science says this will take a while but that doesn’t mean we wait. That means we start now and put the nose to the grindstone to be able to effect change over the next five years.”
