Mark Howard, chief of performance accountability for the Palm Beach County School District, reported on Superintendent Dr. Robert Avossa’s recently enacted strategic plan at the Royal Palm Beach Education Advisory Board meeting Monday, March 7.
“This has been a really historic week for the school district,” Howard said. “You’ve probably watched the transformation of the district with Dr. Avossa, the energy that has been brought into the system and the community. This past week, our school board passed our five-year strategic plan, and last Friday we had a community kickoff event with nearly 500 people to launch our strategic plan.”
He said that with Avossa’s arrival last June, the district went through an analysis phase where Avossa held listening tours and community events with more than 18,000 people participating, including community members, teachers, parents, students and district officials.
“We also did a series of surveys and other electronic information-gathering, really for Dr. Avossa and others to get the input of the community on what the strengths, what the weaknesses, what the opportunities were for our school system,” Howard said. “All that input was gathered and put into a strategy development phase. Now we’re in the action planning phase, and it’s an exciting time as the work is about to begin.”
He said that the mission plan for the school district envisions a dynamic, collaborative multicultural community where education and lifelong learning are valued and supported, and all learners reach their highest potential to succeed in the global economy.
It seeks to achieve that plan by providing a world-class education with excellence and equity to empower each student to reach that highest potential with effective staff to foster the knowledge, skills and ethics required for responsible citizenship and productive careers.
“As a result of all this unprecedented input, we identified these four long-term outcomes, which I think are pretty monumental,” Howard said.
They are to increase reading on grade level by grade three; ensure high school readiness through academic achievement, behavior and engagement; increase the high school graduation rate; and foster post-graduate success, including high school scholars, dual-enrollment degrees and industry certifications, college enrollment and military enlistment.
“We will drive that improvement through four strategic themes that organize the work: effective and relevant instruction to meet the needs of all students, a positive and supportive school climate, a high-performance culture and talent development,” Howard said. “By driving through these four strategic development themes, we will be able to reach these long-term outcomes.”
Howard said that the themes will be addressed through specific objectives defined from documented needs, and that the objectives will be improved through strategic initiatives designed with principal, teacher and student input and phased in over a three-year period. “The board has adopted what we feel is a pretty ambitious goal for each one of those long-term outcomes,” he said.
Howard pointed out that reading on grade level by grade three was part of the statewide reading assessment that now also includes a writing component. He said that currently, only 50.5 percent of third-grade children are reading at grade level.
“Obviously, that’s completely unacceptable,” Howard said. “Our philosophy is that we can’t improve something unless we shine the light on it. Even though we’re an A-rated district, this is an area where we have lagged behind the state.”
He added that third grade reading levels set the course for future academic success. “These students are in a perpetual cycle of remediation, they’re behind and they struggle to get on grade level,” Howard said. “Sometimes they are retained, and it leads to discipline issues and all kinds of other negative outcomes.”
Although the district is one of the highest-performing urban districts in the state, the performance for some of the subgroups leaves a lot to be desired, Howard said. That will be an area of great focus. The goal will be to remediate low achievers at grade three to have them at proper reading and math levels by grade eight when they enter high school.
The district will also look at student absences, which have been shown to correlate strongly with graduation. “This is another point that we will be monitoring and developing initiatives around,” Howard said.
They also found a strong correlation with suspensions and graduation: 86 percent of students with no suspensions graduated, 59 percent of students with one suspension graduated, 48 percent of students with two suspensions graduated, and 33 percent of students with three or more suspensions graduated.
“While we know that suspensions are not the cause of a student not graduating, we certainly know that it is a symptom of the other issues that students are struggling with in their lives,” Howard said.
On March 28, Avossa will host a community launch event for the strategic plan at Royal Palm Beach High School.
Details of the strategic plan are available at www.palmbeachschools.org/strategicplan.
