Round Rock ISD hosted 275 students, staff and community members through its four Strategic Planning meetings last week as it started the process for designing a comprehensive plan for the next five-to-10 years.
Participants sat through a two-hour presentation and discussion that asked questions about expectations for schools and programs. The audience could respond to the questions by text message or through a paper form that was collected at the end of the session.
“Through these meetings, we witnessed the beginnings of a shared vision for a community’s public schools,” Superintendent of Schools Dr. Steve Flores said. “I want to thank all of our participants for investing time in their day to help us on this journey as we design world class programs and facilities to serve our students.”
Round Rock ISD partner Engage!, who is organizing the Strategic Planning process, collected the data and is using it to develop an online survey that will be distributed to all students and community members. Engage! will take the questions from the community meetings and add multiple choice options, based on trends in responses from the meetings, for the survey. The questions were as follows:
- What are your highest hopes for students?
- What skills do students need to thrive in the current context?
- What kinds of tasks, activities, and/or work do students need to be doing in the current context?
- What role does technology play in school so that students are prepared in the current context?
- What is the teacher’s role?
- What is the leader’s role?
- What role do extracurricular activities have in the current context? Fine Arts? Athletics?
- What ideas do you have for systems change?
- How would we measure if the systems were effective?
- How would we design facilities that focus on innovative environments for learning in the current context?
The district will host 14 focus groups this week, representing different stakeholder groups from the community, staff and students. The data collected from those groups and the survey will be presented to a 40-member design team, comprised of community members, staff and students. That team will then develop an action plan, comprised of projects and initiatives that can be implemented in a one-year window, spanning five-to-10 years.
Once the design team finalizes its proposed Strategic Plan, it will be presented to the Board of Trustees in the spring for adoption, revision or denial.
