The Campbell River School District (SD72) is hoping an injection of funds into new software will help them implement and track the progress of their strategic plan going forward so that they can tell if it’s actually working.
At the final public meeting of the Board of Education before the summer break, Superintendent Tom Longridge told the board about the new software and what it would do if they gave their approval for its purchase and installation. He was requesting $70,000.
“It’s not specifically for development of the strategic plan itself,” Longridge clarified. “It’s for the actual implementation and operating of the strategic plan and the accountability structures of the plan.”
Longridge says that even in the development of the Superintendent’s Report, which he prepares regularly for the board outlining much of what’s happening in the district and how the district is doing overall, “there is a lot of data that we’re not getting access to or utilizing in a way that looks at the performance of both individual schools and departments within the organization” in terms of how what’s being done aligns with the district’s longer-term goals.
Periodic reports to the board on how things align with what they are trying to acheive long-term are inefficient, in some ways, Longridge says, for knowing “where our resources are going and knowing the outcomes of that. In trying to do that, it’s difficult using the mechanisms that we are currently using. We’re looking at Excel spreadsheets and different word programs and coordinating it between different departments and we had presented to us a method of doing that in a coordinated way so as we can actually test, ‘what are we doing?’ ‘what’s working?’ and ‘how do we know?’” and be able to track that information in more of a real-time way.
The district is currently going into the last year of their current Strategic Plan, so this is the perfect time to implement such a change, Longridge says.
“When we develop the new Strategic Plan it will enable us to not only look at what we’re doing currently with the last Strategic Plan and whether it did what we wanted it to do and moving on to the next strategic plan, what adjustments need to be made and how we are going to do that.”
The $70,000 request – which did get approved by the board – was for not only the software itself but also “professional services, set-up for departments and inservice, as well as performance assessments as we move this in.”
The other upside of spending this money, Longridge says, is that it will make the entire operation of the district more efficient, leading to some cost savings down the line.
“In regards to human-time in actually building reports and putting things together, in the longer term, it should actually make us more efficient, more accessible and ultimately more productive.”
Trustee John Kerr says he supported the expenditure, especially since it will make it easier for the board to show the public – to whom they are ultimately accountable – how they are using their money to move the district forward in a structured and planned manner.
“My experience has taught me that the more people who understand what’s going on in our schools, the more likely they are to support them,” Kerr says. “If this allows us to take information [about our Strategic Plan] and present it to the public on a regular basis, not just every four years when we present the plan and say, a year down the road, ‘these are the things we are doing, this is where we’re making improvements, this is where we still have work to do and this is where we are excelling’...and allows us to explain it in understandable ways, I see this as a tool not only for us to look at the progress of the district and make decisions at the board level and the senior management level or even at the school level, it’s also a way to help us inform our public about what’s happening with the millions of dollars that they are putting into the system and show them they are getting good value for their money.”
Support for the request was unanimous.