Operational Plan

Mitch, Diane, Mohammad, Andrea and I met for two hours this afternoon to discuss next steps arising from the mini-retreat on October 3rd that Mitch, Diane, Mohammad and I had with facilitator and consultant Debbie Freed, who has worked with our admin team several times in the last three years. At the retreat we had shared stories of our personal and professional journeys to that particular moment, and co-constructed various narratives about the school's journey and experience with leadership dating back to 1989, which was the year Diane first arrived at the school community as a parent. This was looking backwards before we began to look forwards - not in order to move forwards, but because looking back allows us to honor the history, and be intentional about how our choices about how to move forward fits into various narratives operating in the community. This is a theme of Debbie's work - you can click here to read a great article that Debbie co-wrote with Al Adams, former Head of School at Lick-Wilmerding, about the need to understand the history and invisible forces at work in schools.

The history of the school we collectively wove was fascinating, and one that I would be happy to share with anyone who is willing to buy me a cup of coffee (or two, since it covers over 20 years!). At the end of the retreat, it was clear that in order to move from a reactive crisis mode (consider the last five years: arrival of a new Head from outside the community, pedagogic overhaul and grade re-alignment, name change and mission revision, medical leave and passing of the previous Head mid-year, and finally a first-time, first year Head) to a responsive and intentional mode, we need to develop an operational plan. The most recent TBS strategic plan ended last year, and unfortunately the administration, while executing on many of the items in the plan, had never created an operational plan to address all elements of that strategic plan.

The Board of Directors is now beginning the process of developing a flexible portfolio of strategic priorities, rather than a time-fixed strategic plan, as best practices dictate. But what guides the administration until that portfolio is initially established? And how can our plan for school improvement be flexible enough to mesh with the portfolio once it has been created? These are questions that framed our work.

In the first 40 minutes of the meeting, we discussed the "buckets" into which we might consider various operational objectives. We wound up defining four of these; program, site, financial sustainability, and administration. In the middle 40 minutes of the meeting, we together watched video tutorials for Smartsheet. Diane has spent some time investigating this software, and presented it to us as a potential way to manage the projects we undertake. It's basically a combination of spreadsheet and Gantt chart, with useful extensions into forms, discussions, and other tools. In the last 40 minutes of the meeting, we brainstormed potential topics for us to make happen in the next three years. These included greening the campus, hiring a Middle School division head, develop an outdoor classroom plan for the ECC, increase integration of curricular strands, identify and achieve optimal class size at each level, and create a comprehensive, mission-driven service learning program.

We'll be meeting again on Thursday to push this project forward another step; though I'm not sure what that is right now, most likely it's coming up with a way to gather more ideas, and then deciding on some process for determining the time frames along which to establish various objectives.