News

District reviews schools strategy

By Matt Reinig | Hernando Today
Published: December 12, 2012

BROOKSVILLE - The Hernando County School District Steering Committee met with school board members Tuesday to gather input on a revised, tentative draft of the district's 2012-17 strategic plan, a final draft of which the board is expected to vote on Jan. 22.

The strategic plan has been roughly a year-and-a-half in the making, and drafted with the hopes of balancing the needs of the district and its students with foreseeable mandates being "handed down" at the state level.

"(Certain aspects of the plan) are not always things we've designed for ourselves to do," Superintendent and committee member Bryan Blavatt said, noting timeline requirements set by End of Course testing and the Race to the Top initiative, which secures funding for the district.

"It doesn't elicit a lot of confidence as a superintendent when you have people at the state level who are all over the place," he said. "It's keep your eye on the basket even with all the barriers and interference. This is learning to shoot free throws."

Director of School Improvement Eric Williams presented the fifth draft of the plan Tuesday, which consisted of 36 revisions made since Dec. 3, and were based in part on survey trends polled to almost 30 stakeholders with 92 total respondents. Of those respondents, more than a third were teachers, followed by 12 local non-profit representatives, 10 parents, nine school administrators, and seven district administrators, among others.

"Only a handful chimed in with subjective responses," Williams said, and no more than six respondents were in consistent agreement or disagreement with one another, and those that were consisted of the same four teachers and same two parents.

Williams said the most common concern was how the objectives will be achieved, but that "there are action plans out there" to assist in doing so.

Blavatt said the plan provides "the ends" of where the district needs to go, but that the means will be left to the different divisions and stakeholders.

"We don't want to be prescriptive," Blavatt said. "We want to say this is where we want to be, but there's wiggle room in terms of how we'll get there."

Key input provided in the survey included opportunities for "external" stakeholders to collaborate as a part of budgeting, curriculum review, and an annual joint meeting, as well as needed additional support for technical education programs for adults in shifting career paths.

But the "biggest barrier," Williams said, was making the more-than-200-page plan accessible to stakeholders, and removing the jargon from it in a way that could be more easily understood.