With the Board of School Trustees’ approval and participation, the Huntington County Community School Corporation is launching an important initiative, its 2023-2028 strategic planning process.
The goal of the strategic planning process is to build upon HCCSC’s strengths, address weaknesses, capitalize on potential opportunities and identify existing and future challenges in order to best serve current and future generations in Huntington County.
“Every large organization should periodically create, and then regularly update, a multi-year strategic plan to ensure that we have set challenging goals and to effectively allocate our resources toward those goals,” said Superintendent John Trout. “Despite our successful history, many local, state and national changes will continue to occur, requiring us to gather information about current and future operations and create strategies and action steps to ensure a smooth transition—to be proactive rather than reactive.”
Trout added that the strategic plan will recognize and continue the many wonderful aspects of HCCSC, including viable elements of past strategic plans, while also attending to needed improvements. One particular area of improvement Trout plans to focus on is raising student achievement results, which have dipped in recent years, largely due to instructional challenges caused by COVID-19.
The strategic plan will be evidence-based, meaning that as needs are identified, relevant research will be reviewed to develop approaches that have been proven to work in a wide range of settings. The strategic plan will also serve the purpose of aligning the district and creating a common, performance-based culture.
The strategic planning process officially kicked off on Wednesday night, as HCCSC held a broad-based planning team meeting at Crestview Middle School to begin identifying and discussing the various strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and challenges for the district. The meeting featured 77 attendees, including local community members and leaders, certified and classified HCCSC employees, Huntington North High School students, Board of School Trustees members and school principals.
Attendees analyzed and discussed the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and challenges in five primary areas—student learning and achievement, safe, orderly and caring environments, highly effective and motivated employees, strong parental, family and community involvement/satisfaction and effective operations/fiscal responsibility—as well as an open-ended category of other areas of operation. The five primary focuses will serve as the guiding pillars of the strategic plan.
With the initial step of gathering feedback from the meeting attendees completed, the next steps in the strategic planning process will include processing the feedback received during the meeting and forming strategic planning teams for each of the five focus areas. These strategic planning teams will feature 8–10 people drawn primarily from HCCSC teachers, administrators, directors and other knowledgeable employees and community members. Each team will feature co-chairs, who, in conjunction with HCCSC administration, will help develop targets, strategies and action steps to ultimately form the comprehensive strategic plan.
A draft of the strategic plan is expected to be prepared by August of 2023, with the final strategic plan scheduled to be completed in September of 2023 to be submitted for approval by the Board of School Trustees. Monitoring of and necessary updating to the plan will take place throughout its implementation from October of 2023 through the summer of 2028.
Updates about the progress and implementation of the strategic plan, as well as any necessary updates being made to the plan, will be shared publicly at Board of School Trustees meetings.