8 novembre 2024 /
Alexander Glaves /
Bienvenue à tous dans le prochain épisode du podcast What's Up with the Sup' du district scolaire de Provo City. Je suis la directrice de l'école, Wendy Dau. Comme beaucoup d'entre vous le savent, le district a récemment finalisé son travail sur un nouveau plan stratégique. Dans l'épisode de la semaine dernière, vous avez entendu la première partie de ma discussion sur le plan stratégique avec la présidente de notre conseil scolaire, Rebecca Nielsen, et la vice-présidente Jennifer Partridge. L'épisode de cette semaine est la deuxième partie de cette discussion. Pour rappel, vous pouvez consulter le plan stratégique en vous rendant sur la page d'accueil du site Web du district, à l'adresse provo.edu. Ce sera la première chose qui apparaîtra. Mais avant de les entendre, voici nos mises à jour.
And now let’s have a chat with Rebecca and Jennifer about our strategic plan.
Welcome everyone to this week’s episode of What’s Up with the Sup’. We are going to be talking about the strategic plan part two and Rebecca Nielsen, our board president, and Jennifer Partridge, our board vice president, have graciously decided to return.
So thank you for being here.
Rebecca Nielsen: No problem.
Wendy Dau: I’m glad you guys are as excited to talk about this because we could talk about this for a long time. I feel like that’s how passionate I am about this. Today we’re going to talk a little bit about the priorities and how we landed on these priorities. Talk a little bit about that process, like how do you focus and decide what is the most important thing. Or what are the three most important things that we want to concentrate on as a district?
Jennifer Partridge: That’s a great question. That is why we have a lot of voices included, right? It was a discussion that took place for a while about that. I do think there was an easy one though. And that was academic achievement, right? That should be our top priority. So that one we knew was going on. But then, yeah, we just listed a bunch and then talked through them and worked through them.
And we also knew, as we talked about last week, that we wanted to have clarity in what are our goals? And if we had too many priorities, it’s too hard to focus, right? When you’re trying to do too many things, then you’re not good at any of it. Right? So we felt really strongly that we wanted to narrow it down to just the three.
So once we had a list of, I think we had five. Then we went down to the three priorities. From that. I’ll let Rebecca.
Rebecca Nielsen: In the, uh, name of being succinct and and something we could regurgitate real easily. Right? We knew five priorities was gonna be too many for kind of us to handle or to be able to monitor very well.
Taking it down from five to three was really tricky. Trying to decide what that ought to be. But I do wanna say that we didn’t like just completely disregard the other priorities, right? What we kind of did was we tried to kind of marry them together into maybe a like a broader category so that it could still encompass all the things we wanted to prioritize but without it being too cumbersome.
So this is how we landed on the three that we have, academic achievement, wellness and safety, and stewardship of resources, because we felt like those three really encompassed our biggest goals, but also was like umbrella enough to even get down into the detail a little bit.
Wendy Dau: It was really fascinating when we did the surveys of the different stakeholder groups and we asked them what those priorities were.
And what’s fascinating is these three rows to the top in almost every single group. And maybe in one group, it was just, they were switched in a different order, but that was so reassuring to me because it was like, okay, I made my list. And then all of a sudden the students came in and their list was here.
And then the parents came in and their list was there. And then the teachers came and I was like, okay, Provo city, we’ve got this. We are, we are on the same page as to what’s important. And that was really reassuring to me. As a leader to see that and to see these three things in particular come to the forefront.
Absolutely. I’d want to add like board members, we have to deal with the political side of things, right? And it’s sometimes easy to get lost in the debates and the, the hard decisions and things that come up that. Sometimes, you know, you start to think, Oh my gosh, is anyone on the same page here? There’s so many competing voices.
I mean, how are we going to accomplish what we want to accomplish when there’s so many different opinions and whatnot? So, like you said, it actually was really reassuring because as a board, you know, and this is one of the reasons why we wanted this done so badly is because we think we know what our priorities are and we’re trying to go in that direction, but then to really go out there and gather data and solidify, yes, these are our actual three priorities and everyone really agrees on them to some degree.
That is so, like you say, reassuring because sometimes there are so many competing voices that these priorities can get lost, right? So this is so valuable because when we are in those kinds of situations, we can go, okay, stop. Let’s remember our priorities. Do these decisions fit within these priorities and if they do, then great.
Then we know that most people can get on board with this and we can move forward confidently. So it is super reassuring.
It can also provide a really good rationale for decision making, right? You can say the reason this was prioritized over this is because it aligns more specifically with our strategic plan.
We know this other thing is still important, but we really are using the strategic plan as a way to guide what we’re doing.
Jennifer Partridge: And that’s what I’m really excited about as a board member, because we are going to have things that we need to decide, and there are so many ways we can use our budgets and our time as a district, so many good things. But what is going to help us most to achieve our goals? Now we know what those goals are and we have something to guide us in that decision making, which will be very helpful.
Wendy Dau: I hope people will look at this graphic that’s on page four because we debated about this graphic quite a bit. And, um, and it was really interesting because when we rolled this out to the principals and the teachers, we asked them to take a look at the graphic and we said, this was very deliberate.
Like I don’t want to say hard fought, but like there was debate and discussion about this. And so we asked them, like, why do you think things were positioned in the way that they were? And what might be the decision making process that went behind this? And so I’d love for them to hear from you what that was.
Jennifer Partridge: Okay, so the graphic, we’ve got three priorities and they each are displayed in a beautiful little circle. And the circles, there’s one on the top and then two on the bottom. So it kind of looks like a triangle. Mm-Hmm. . And so our priority one is on the top as I think it should be ’cause it is the top priority, and that is academic achievement.
And then on the bottom left side of the triangle is priority two, which is wellness and safety, and then priority three is on the bottom right and the stewardship of resources and so I think just visually it helps us see the order of our priorities. They’re all connected. They’re all there working together, but in in the order that makes sense.
But then you’ll see encircling. Our priorities are two sets of words, I guess. Family and community engagement is one of those. And then the other is opportunity for all. Those had been in our discussions about should these be some of our priorities. At one point we had five. And those were the other two. Right?
Um, these are still very important to us as a district to engage our families, to engage our communities as we focus on academic achievement, as we focus on wellness and our stewardship of resources. But rather than setting goals in those. They are encompassing, they’re part of what we do as we approach our other goals.
So engaging with our community and families as well as providing opportunities for all, making sure that, that we’re reaching all of our students, that we’re giving opportunities for all of our teachers to be successful, that we don’t leave anybody behind, and that we’re thoughtful in our processes as we work towards our goals.
Rebecca Nielsen: Well, and I just want to add like our little marketing things that we have on this graphic. This is a fun one too. So if you look at the graphic, the priority one circle is blue, the priority two circle is orange, and the priority three circle is green. And those are the three colors we have in our logo, right?
And that we use and that represent our schools. But then also as you go through the document, you can see all of the data and the goals and whatnot from priority one are in blue and then they coordinate, right? Priority two is all in orange and priority three is all in green. So that was just kind of a fun little marketing technique we use there too to try to make sure that people understand the coordination.
If you want the detail and priority one, you’re going to go look at the blue items, right? Et cetera, et cetera.
Wendy Dau: I think one of the other things that we talked about as leaders and in board meetings was we got concerned that if family and community engagement and opportunities for all became separate priorities, we were going to miss opportunities to see how they really were connected and needed to run through everything that we really can’t do this education job of students without our community and partnering with our families.
That becomes crucial to any kind of success that we could have and that we wanted to make sure that those opportunities for our families and our students just wasn’t seen as this. Well, we’re going to do this separately over here. No, it needs to be embedded in academic achievement, needs to be embedded in how we are providing these welcoming environments that are safe and wonderful for our community and that we’re being smart with our resources so that everybody has what they need to be successful.
It’s very deliberate in the way that we went about that. And I thought that was really important that we landed there and our teachers and our administrators noticed that immediately they’re like, well, the reason this is on the outside is because it applies to everything and we didn’t want to make it assume that it was like something separate.
So good job they, they really got that. And I love the picture of the graduate because I feel like everything is trying to move students towards that lifelong learning piece and towards that engaged citizen. And really that step of high school graduation is what really signifies that it’s not the end, but it signifies us you know, kind of moving that student into that next phase, right? It’s really powerful. So-
Jennifer Partridge: I also love this could just be a poster.
Wendy Dau : Oui.
Jennifer Partridge: School, a classroom, whatever. And it’s easy to remember and to understand. And what is our focus?
Wendy Dau: Yep. Agreed. All right, let’s dive in and talk about priority one, which is academic achievement. And I think one of the things that becomes really important is we really were trained to keep the goals manageable. And we started off with a ton of goals. We got that narrowed down as well. So you guys want to talk a little bit about the academic achievement piece. One of the things that was really interesting was I had a teacher who asked me, why are you so focused on the test scores piece?
Why is that so important as the mark of academic achievement? And I thought it would be helpful for us to kind of speak to that a little bit because there’s a lot of people diss that and I think it’s an indicator. It’s not the only indicator, but why we chose that as an indicator.
Jennifer Partridge: Well, I think one important thing is if you have a goal, you have to have a way to measure it.
And we want to make sure our students are learning. And as you said, test scores is one way that we do that and really the only way we can easily see where large groups of students are right right when we have 13,000 plus students in our district. That’s one way that we can easily see that. I’m excited for this goal, um, because we do as a board, we get reports of, um, how our schools are performing overall, but we haven’t, in the time I’ve been on the board, had a clear picture of how that looks from year to year in a comprehensive way.
And are we where we want to be? And if not, how are we going to get there? And I think we always are striving for improvement, but I love how this lays out. Where do we actually want to be? And it’s important for our students to be mastering the skills we’re teaching them, right? And so I think it’s going to be very helpful for us as a district, as teachers, to better analyze. We’re doing great in some things.
There’s room for improvement. How are we going to get there? How can we focus the efforts that we as a district provide for the resources we give to our teachers? What can we do better to support them in their efforts? Because we already know they’re working so hard, right? And they love our students there.
They want to educate. They want to do wonderful at doing that job. And how can we as a board and as a district better support them in that as well? I think that will be part of our discussion with this.
Rebecca Nielsen: I also love too that we can use test scores as a way to mark our own progress, right? It’s something that’s measurable that we can say, Hey, look, last year we were at this percent and this year we’re, you know, we’re this much better and how, and that gives us something to celebrate, right?
Something to celebrate and a goal to achieve. And I think it just is really a great way for us to be able to see the progress that we’re striving for. So I know people don’t always agree with the standardized testing. It’s a big debate, right? People don’t love it. Yeah. Some people don’t care. Some people.
Yeah. But. Either way, we can see our progress with this, right? And if we are using our priorities correctly, like we were just talking about, right? If we’re really using this document to follow our mission, to follow our vision, et cetera, then we should be able to see that progress, that measurable progress.
And this is a way we can do that.
Wendy Dau: Had a teacher say, these are really ambitious goals. And I said, yup. Here we go. And I think it’s important to that I hope that the message that people get is that we set these goals because we absolutely believe we can achieve them. We believe our students are capable. We believe we have capable employees that can make this happen.
And if they need supports and resources to be able to do this, then that’s where the board comes in in my mind and district leadership comes in to help provide that so that these goals can be accomplished, but we can’t see it if we don’t have the metrics right then we don’t know where those gaps are and know appropriately where to fill that in and I think that ease their concern a little bit.
You know, I think it always is new sometimes if that hasn’t been utilized in the past and that’s going to look like, but I’m actually pretty excited about it.
Rebecca Nielsen: You know, and why not, right? If we believe we’re capable, then we can, right? I mean, if, if the belief is there and the motivation is there and the teachers are on in this, then why not?
Why not have some goals that feel a little bit, I don’t know, I don’t know what the right word is. I want to say this carefully, but- that feel achievable, but also something to be super proud of when you get there, knowing you worked super hard and that you did it, right? And if we believe we can, I think we will.
Jennifer Partridge: And you look at things like in the world of sports or fitness or performance, you know, they set goals that stretch them, right? And then it gives them something to work for. And if they don’t have something that’s going to stretch them, then they just kind of stay stagnant and don’t progress. And that’s what we want here, too.
And people can rise to the level of expectation that’s set for them, right? And so I think that’s good that we have this goal, that it might feel ambitious, but let’s go for it and reach for the moon because even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars, right? Like you at least get get somewhere with it.
Um, but I believe that we can get it too.
Wendy Dau: I also, uh, appreciate the emphasis on, on creating or setting kids up for post secondary success. That’s what our second goal really has a lot to do with making sure that we are creating the rigor that is needed, especially at that secondary level to push kids so that they’re prepared for what’s about to happen.
I don’t want any kid leaving high school and not feeling like that they don’t have the skills that they need to take on the next thing. That to me is like heart wrenching. We have high schools that are putting in place. We want to make sure kids are taking advanced courses. We want to make sure that we’re giving them the support and the help.
And so that’s where that. measure comes in. If we’re really being true to that vision statement about lifelong learners and being, you know, connected and committed citizens, that’s going to be really key to that piece.
Jennifer Partridge: And I love how that piece also, it’s college and career readiness. And I think just emphasizing that there are more avenues after high school than just going to college and that we can prepare students now for some of those other careers.
And a lot of the trades careers are very, well-
Wendy Dau: Lucrative, yes.
Jennifer Partridge: They’re great and I think there’s still a stigma out there about some of those and that we can do more to direct students who have interest in that and support them in that and let them know these are great things in college.
Wendy Dau : C'est exact.
Rebecca Nielsen: Well, and that’s reflected in the way we’re measuring this goal, right?
We’re looking at this goal by the amount of students who score 18 or above in their ACT, but also our graduation rates and also the amount of advanced courses that are taken. So there’s different measurements there on purpose because it is college and career readiness, right? So we are focusing on three different avenues of measurement there.
Wendy Dau: And a lot of those students will qualify in that area just because they’re taking career and technical education pathways. So that’s really leading to very real world skills. They have to pass skills tests to go through those courses that becomes really transferable out in to the workforce. So that is an emphasis on that career.
You know, we’re college career and work ready is what we’re about for our students. All right. Are we ready to talk about priority two?
Rebecca Nielsen: Actually, can we go back? Oh yeah, go back. I feel like we never defined our actual goal on the first goal of Priority 1, right? Let’s do it. So the goal for Priority 1 is to increase the percentage of students achieving proficiency in the core subjects by 15 percent within five years.
That can be seen as pretty lofty, right? But absolutely. I think we can do that.
Wendy Dau: I do too. I tell people all the time, they just kind of look at me and I’m like, well, it’s all right. I’m just going to believe it until you can believe it. So if I need to be the believer until you could be the believer, that’s all right. So…
As a reminder, if you would like to see a copy of the strategic plan, we have added a link to it on the podcast and you can also find it on our website, provo.edu. All right, are we ready to talk about Priority 2?
Rebecca Nielsen: We are ready.
Wendy Dau: All right. Who wants to take the first goal? Probably tell people what the goals are and then we can talk a little bit more about them.
Jennifer Partridge: I would love to. I’m very excited about Priority 2. So the first goal within Priority 2, which is wellness and safety, is increase the number of students and families who feel that our schools and district provide welcoming and supportive environments as measured by climate and stakeholder feedback surveys.
I love that we are focusing on what kind of culture we are creating in a day and age where bullying and people just, it’s hard. Life is hard, right? And so we want our students and their families to know that our schools are places where they can feel comfortable, where they can feel safe and where they belong, like you belong here.
We want you to be here. We’re happy when you’re here. We’re sad when you’re not like we miss you when you’re not. Um, and so that we as a district are focusing on how to educate and mentor employees and to create those environments. And to create family engagement opportunities as a school. I think that’s super important to who we are as a district.
Wendy Dau: I also want our employees to like wake up. I know this doesn’t happen every day, but I want them to wake up and be excited to go to work and to feel like this is a great place to be. I love my students or I love my co workers, the families that I get to work with. Of course you’re always, you know, there’s always bad days, but whatever we can do to help create that kind of magic and that awesomeness, I think is really important.
Jennifer Partridge: Absolutely.
Rebecca Nielsen: I’m just thinking too, like, safety. And feeling welcome. A lot of times people will visualize fences and locked doors and, you know, of course, we have those kinds of safety measures as well, but I love that this focuses on a welcoming environment, a supportive environment, and those kinds of things ensure safety for your students as well.
It translates into to people’s mental health and wellness and that is really the foundation of safety in our schools and where the safety, the safety conversation needs to start. And so that’s a really great thing to put first and foremost, right? Is to make sure that people feel welcomed and supported at our schools because that makes a huge world of difference.
Wendy Dau: And I think if they’re also recognizing that we’re spending resources to also make our buildings physically safe, then it creates that environment where they don’t have to worry about sending their children to our schools because they know that that physical safety is in place. And then their students are in a better place to learn as well.
And then as they’re at school, then we’re focusing on how are we treating one another? I mean, that’s the bottom line. We’re all human beings and what does that interaction look like? It should be the positive interactions that we’re focusing on there. And kind of going along with that, we have a goal about reducing the number of offenses tied to bullying, harassment, discrimination, school safety, physical aggression.
We really want all of those to be below 4 percent total by 2030. And I think that will represent that culture improving over time, right? And so we have a specific way in which we can measure our student behavior. I think the other goal is really about everybody being welcome in the school, but the school is really making sure that our kids are not being subjected to those specific types of treatment.
Jennifer Partridge: We’ve had kindness clubs in our schools for the last 10 years, and those are efforts our students have led out in creating these cultures, right? But now that it’s part of our plan, we can focus on it on a more comprehensive level with our teachers, with our administrators, with all the kids in the school, not just the members of the club, right?
And I think just take those efforts to a higher level, and that makes me very excited.
Wendy Dau: Our system has to be designed where it can create that kind of environment. And then the students get involved in that process of their understanding and being empowered to, to really bring about those results. Like this is something where I think we can really get kids on board and say, here’s our data.
Did you know this is how many kids are experiencing bullying? What if we as a school could get that number to here because of how we’re treating each other? I mean, imagine the power in that where kids could actually start tracking that and recognizing the change that they could bring about in their culture.
That’s kind of what I get excited about too. So it’s helping them see that.
Rebecca Nielsen: Some ownership in it, right?
Wendy Dau: Yeah, absolutely. And then of course we always want kids to be at school. We know that kids are often absent and this goal talks about chronic absenteeism. Chronic absenteeism is any student that’s missing more than 10 percent of school, which isn’t a lot of school to be honest.
It’s only 18 days across an entire school year, but I worry that sometimes kids are gone because of other things that are happening and then they don’t want to be at school. And so how are we developing those structures? And what do you hear from parents about why kids don’t go to school? And how can we be more proactive about that?
Rebecca Nielsen: I actually was having a conversation with a parent just today about, um, about how their child just showed up at home one day and decided they were just going to go home. And sometimes I think kids are missing school because people don’t realize the importance of actually being in school. Right. If you are not there, you just, you can’t learn.
That’s just how it is.
Wendy Dau : C'est exact.
Rebecca Nielsen: It’s just very simple. But if you’re not there, you can’t learn. And I think in our culture, we’ve gotten a little bit relaxed about school attendance and I get it. Right. We don’t wanna be ridiculous about it. Right? Right. If a kid needs to miss a day of school, totally not a big deal.
Right. We can make up things, but at the same time, we need to emphasize the importance of actually being here and. I want to say post COVID, right? I don’t want to blame everything on COVID. But post COVID, we’ve actually had a pretty big issue with chronic absenteeism in our schools. And I think a lot of people maybe even just got used to having complete flexibility with school.
Wendy Dau : C'est vrai.
Rebecca Nielsen: Which is great, except for that it’s causing problems, right?
Wendy Dau : C'est vrai.
Rebecca Nielsen: Our kids aren’t there, and our kids aren’t learning. And it’s putting a ton of stress on teachers for when kids aren’t there, and they feel like they have to reteach lessons when really it’s kind of, it’s got to be the student’s responsibility to come back and get the information, et cetera, et cetera.
So it’s just one of those things we need to bring back into our culture, that school is important and that the kids need to be there on the regular.
Jennifer Partridge: I think one of the main reasons why we have chronic absenteeism is people not understanding what school can do for them. Like they don’t have the vision of where it can take them for their future.
Right. They’re saying today, I don’t feel like it. Things are happening out of my control, and I’m just not going to make the effort to go. Or some of our high schoolers just are bored or not engaging, right? So we can work to make our classrooms engaging and to paint that picture for them of this is where you can go, you know, what are your interests?
What do you want to do when you’re an adult, right? And this is how being in school today and tomorrow and the next day, it might feel a little mundane sometimes, right? But this is really exciting because this is where it’s going to get you. And all the things that you’re going to learn are going to help you be the person you want to be when you’re 20, 30 years old, right?
Wendy Dau: Well, and I think too, one of the things parents have talked to me about is it would be helpful for them and their children together to start seeing all of those opportunities that are available at a younger and younger age so they can start setting their kids up in those habits. So that’s been a task that we’ve assigned to a couple of our directors on our leadership team to start figuring out what does that look like?
What are the messages that we need to be sending? Because then when those opportunities are opened up, sometimes those kids are far behind and then they can’t take advantage of those opportunities. And those are exactly the things that would keep them engaged in school and really help them to the greatest degree. So I think we’re moving in the right direction for that.
Let’s talk about priority three, which is stewardship of resources. I think this is something that I think we’ve been moving in the right direction of being a lot more transparent, trying to communicate a lot more with the community about what we’re doing.
Talk a little bit about how we landed on this. As a priority. And what does it mean?
Stewardship of resources sounds a little, it can sound a little over the top, but I feel like it’s a really good description of what it is that we’re trying to convey. So tell us what you hope the community gets out of that.
Rebecca Nielsen: We’re given literal resources, right, to help educate kids, whether it’s funding through the federal government or through the state government or through property taxes, right? Those are our resources. I mean, like our physical resources. We have our buildings, we have our students, we have a lot of resources here.
But as board members and as superintendent, as, as teachers, as staff members, we have a stewardship over those resources to protect them and use them wisely, right? And this is why we want the community to be involved and why we’re trying to be more transparent, because we want people to understand exactly how we are using the resources and why we’re using them the way that we are, because we don’t want people to feel like we’re not using things correctly, right?
And there will always be debate, right? There will always be debate on how to use them and where to spend funding and whatnot. But that is actually one of the reasons we have this document, right? To help us guide us in those decisions. But we want to be more transparent. We want people to have their questions answered and for their first thoughts not to be like, Oh, what is that school district doing again?
Right. That’s not where we want people’s minds to go. We want them to know, Oh, well, you know, I don’t have questions cause I heard it on the superintendent’s podcast or on her weekly update or these emails we keep getting from the school. We want the communication to be so open that there are no questions or suspicions, right?
You know exactly what’s happening. And even if you don’t agree with that, you at least know. Right. And you can see our reasoning behind it, and you can know why we’re doing it the way we’re doing it. Right.
Wendy Dau: One of the things that I thought was really interesting was in our surveys, it became very apparent to me that our community, as well as our teachers, And our students all wanted to make sure that we kept really high quality teachers.
And one of the things I think you guys also talked about in the superintendent surveys search was that teachers needed to feel valued and feel heard and welcomed. And so I think that goes along with the school. So talk about this first goal a little bit and kind of the reasoning behind it and how we’re hoping to really accomplish this.
Jennifer Partridge: First of all, I want to say that our teachers are our biggest resource.
Wendy Dau: Yes, they are.
Jennifer Partridge: We want to take care of them. They are the ones that are with our students every day, impacting lives, educating our students and we value our teachers and we want to keep them here. We for a while as a board have been very focused on increasing salaries and finding other ways to let them know we appreciate them and we value them.
And recently, As we’ve been evaluating how can we best support our teachers, we have found the first goal is increase the retention of high quality teachers who are between years 5 and 15. That our teachers there is where we needed to put more effort into so that we can have, we have a lot of new teachers.
We have quite a few more veteran teachers, but we did not have as many in the middle. And the more experience our teachers have, the better that they can support our students. So we don’t want to have people here for a year or two and then move on to somewhere else, right? So we do want to put more effort into all of our teachers, but especially that group of them.
So some of that is with salaries, a focus on salaries, but also, um, one of our other strategies that we have listed in the plan is to provide support for all of our employees with professional development, giving them the skills to be effective in their jobs so that they know that they’re supported.
They know that they can feel confident in what they’re doing. They’re getting results in the student achievement aspect that we’re all focusing on. Right. And then they’re happy to be here because things are working well for them. And we’re working on their pay as well. Those kinds of things for them.
Wendy Dau: Yeah, it’s amazing if you feel or can actually see your effectiveness, then you want to stick around like that feels pretty good. So I think that’s really important.
Rebecca Nielsen: I think too, when teachers are given the support they need, and they’re able to increase their skills, that makes their job that much easier.
It’s not easy to be a teacher. If you are in a classroom all day long, right? Anyone who’s a parent or anyone who’s been with kids, like, you know, that’s a long time to be with kids. And it can be, it can be tiring. It takes so much energy, enthusiasm to keep up your happy, you know, demeanor all day long as a teacher.
Right. And if there’s any way we can make the teachers jobs easier for them, that’s going to help us keep those teachers, right? And so giving them better skills will help make their jobs easier. Any way to help, help make them feel appreciated and supported is going to make their job easier. I like that that’s a part of this goal as well, because like you say, you want them to be happy and excited to come to work every day, right? And this is plays into that. If their job is extremely difficult and draws all their energy out of them on a daily basis, that’s there’s no way teachers are going to stick around, right?
So we need to, as a board and as a district, make sure we’re understanding and helping our teachers get the environment that they need to be excited to come to school every day. So I love that this is in here as well, because like Jennifer said, I mean, we- we love our teachers, we need our teachers, and we have incredible teachers in the Provo School District.
I wish everybody could see what we see by being in the district. We see all the amazing things all the time, and it’s so hard to convey that out to the public without inundating people with information, but I wish they could see how amazing our teachers are. We want to keep them. We want to keep them all.
We want them to be supported and empowered and ready to show up to work every day. So this is a great goal to have.
Wendy Dau: It’s when somebody reaches out and they say something like I heard that these things are happening in schools. I’m like, just come with me. I’m going to take you to a classroom. You’re going to see magic happen.
We just need to get people in to see all of the work that is happening and the efforts that are there. How caring teachers are, how patient teachers are, and also how funny they are. Like, I don’t know if you’re ever having a bad day, you just got to go out to a school and sit in a few classrooms and it will make your day.
It’ll magically change it. It is incredible.
Rebecca Nielsen: Absolutely. I just have to interject. I remember the very first time I gave a board report, I had been a board member for like three months and it was my turn to give a board report. And all I could say was, I am absolutely amazed at what happens in this school district.
I mean, my eyes were opened to all the incredible things that happen here, and it’s hard to know unless you’re in.
Wendy Dau : Oui.
Rebecca Nielsen: Unless you’re here. I mean, for sure. There’s so many incredible things happening, and our teachers are the heart and soul of that important resource, right? And so they’re just, they’re great.
Wendy Dau: Our second goal is also about improving communication, particularly about decision making, about how we’re allocating our resources and facilities management, and we want to improve that by 15 percent over five years. Really just asking the public, do you feel like you’re more informed, right? About why we’re making the decisions that we are or kind of the guidelines that we use to make those decisions.
Talk more about that because I think you guys get a lot more questions about those decisions since you handle a lot of our larger budget items and they hear about those discussions in board meetings. Talk about those processes and how you hope the strategic plan will help us with that and help us with that transparency and communication piece.
Jennifer Partridge: Well, I, I’d like to give an example. So before I was on the school board, I was asked to be on the 2013/2014 Facilities Advisory Committee. And at that time they were looking at all of our buildings and evaluating them. And then the committee was tasked with giving a recommendation to the board on should we rebuild?
And as a committee, we looked at it and went, we have a lot of schools that need to be rebuilt that have not been well kept over the years and are frankly old and a lot of these should have been considered a long time ago. And why didn’t anybody do that? At the time, right? We have gotten a lot of questions from the community in the ensuing years.
Like, why are we doing all these now? What are we going to do to make sure that when these buildings age out, that that, at the time, the community doesn’t need to rebuild, you know, seven schools in 10 years or whatever, right? And, and I think that opened our eyes and went, this is really important to make sure that we do have some systems in place.
To evaluate, to look at things. So not only just for rebuilding schools, those big projects, but things like our facilities management, our overall plan, like when, what’s our schedule for replacing the roofs on the buildings and the carpet inside and, and making sure that we keep things up in a nice way so that we don’t get in a situation where all of a sudden we’re having to play catch up.
And so I think that’s one piece of this goal, an important piece. And so we’re already working on that as a district to create those management plans.
Rebecca Nielsen: I also love that this is one of our goals, improving communications about all these decisions that are being made, because really, if we want to be good stewards of these resources, we have to communicate that to people, right?
They have to know how it’s being done and communication is obviously key. And I think if you ask our communications department about what they hear all the time, it’s always like, we need more communication. We need more communication. They hear it so often. And that truly is key to, I don’t know, most things out there, right?
You have to be able to clearly articulate exactly what’s going on for people to feel satisfied, right, about what’s happening. And so I love that that’s one of our goals. And that is something we have been working on already, but this is such a good goal to have to remind us that, hey, we need to continue with this.
We need to make sure we are being very transparent and clearly letting people know what’s happening. So just recently we had a meeting at Dixon to help people understand the process we’re going through and where we’re at in the process with, you know, making a decision on the Dixon building and what’s going to happen at that site. And we actually received a question at that meeting, you know, why are we having this meeting before we get, you know, such and such pieces of data that we don’t have yet?
Wendy Dau : Oui.
Rebecca Nielsen: Why are we trying to, you know, look into these solutions before we have all the data? Well. Here’s the answer. The answer is because we’re trying to bring you along on this process. No, we’re not ready to make our final decision yet. And yes, we do still have missing pieces of data that we need to fill in before we can make our final decision.
Absolutely. And we will never make the, you know, the final decision until we have all those pieces of data in place. We don’t want to just make an announcement at the end and then everyone wonder, whoa, how did this come from and how on earth did we get here? No, we want to bring you along on this process, especially on these bigger decisions, right?
Facilities type things like we need you involved. We need to hear your feedback along the way. Those are things that have been lacking a little bit in the past and we want to do better. We want to be better. We want your opinions. We want your feedback because if we want the community to be happy about what happens, we need everyone to be invested, right?
And so this is why one of our goals that we’ve been working on and why we have been having trying to have more meetings. I mean, I don’t know if everyone’s noticed getting little postcards in their mail more often. Right. You’re going to get a lot of postcards from us. You’re going to be invited to a lot of meetings.
But that’s because we want you to come along on the process. And not only do we want you, but we need you. We need people in on this process.
Jennifer Partridge: And I’ll just add to that. One big reason why is because actually it’s not just those of us in leadership at the district that are stewards of these resources, but it’s our whole community.
Wendy Dau : C'est exact.
Jennifer Partridge: Right? We’re all taxpayers. We’re all the community members here. They are our students, our children, right, that we’re educating. We, as a community, are stewards of these resources, and so we do want you involved in the process, in the decision making, and want you to know why we are making the decisions that we are making.
Wendy Dau: I think sometimes we get concerned that someone might question a decision. I, I know you guys don’t get concerned about that because people question decisions all the time. I know people question my decisions all the time, but it’s okay. Like we might still disagree, but that doesn’t give us license to not talk about the process that we use to get there like, it is really important to be clear about that process when we can be like, sometimes not when it comes to how we spend money and things like that, but I probably overshare information. People always, my whole team says I over communicate. That’s all right, but I think that’s really important.
I think it’s a real strength of our board of education. So.
Rebecca Nielsen: Absolutely. And honestly, when you do communicate, and dare I say over communicate, it really does lessen the amount of questions you’re going to get anyways in the end, right? Because if you can answer those questions up front, then people are happy with that and they don’t have reason to feel worried, right?
They know the answers because we’ve clearly communicated.
Wendy Dau: We had two principals that served on the steering committee. We had Brooke Dalby from Centennial Middle School and Jamie Davis-Leite from Lakeview Elementary. And one of the things that was really interesting is they shared with all of the principals, and I just thought it would be great to share it here and share it with you, is that they loved the process of the strategic plan and that it took time. That there was a lot of feedback and back and forth and that things were very deliberate and one of the things that they both said was, we really felt like that the board listened to all of the stakeholder groups. They were very conscientious in making sure that they were incorporating what each stakeholder group valued and felt was really important in the education of the children in Provo. They asked really good questions and they and they really wanted to get at the heart of it.
And I wanted to convey that to you because I think it’s really important that you hear that. That this is a process that sometimes people feel like could just be a checkbox. And they said it absolutely felt the farthest thing from it. It felt like a very genuine way in which they could participate in the process.
And so I think that speaks volumes to the direction that you’re taking the district. So I just wanted to share that with you.
Jennifer Partridge: Well, thank you.
Rebecca Nielsen: Yeah, thank you.
Jennifer Partridge: It is not just a checkbox because this is not going to be a document that just hangs on a wall that no one looks at or goes in a drawer. But this is going to be a guiding document.
We’re going to be talking about it a lot in our district and our board meetings. It’s going to be something that really guides our work and an important thing for us for these next five years.
Wendy Dau: You as board leaders speak to our employees. How would you like us as teachers, administrators, superintendent to be utilizing this document?
What does that, what does that look like to you?
Rebecca Nielsen: That’s a fun question. Cause I remember at the- actually, at the very first steering committee meeting, someone asked, tell me what you want out of this. Like, why are we doing this? I can’t remember the exact question, but and I stood up. I remember answering the question saying, hey, this has been on our docket for a while because we want something that literally guides every decision that’s made in the district. We want people to think of this document when they’re making their own school improvement plans or when they’re trying to decide between this good thing and this other good thing and which one is better or which one is best. Right. That is what I hope and hopefully by example, as the board using it as our guiding document that people do as well, that this truly guides all the decisions that are made. Does it fit within our strategic plan? Does it fit within the goals and the priorities and the mission and the vision? Does it fit? And if it does, that’s the direction. That’s how we want you to make your decisions and your choices. So that’s what I hope for it. That’s what I really want it to be, is something that people truly think of.
And this is one of the reasons why we tried to make it simple. Something easy to remember because when you are in the middle of that decision making, you can go, okay, Welcome, Educate, Inspire. Does it fit? It fits. Great. Let’s go with it right and so that’s that’s really what I hope that’s how I really want people to use it
Jennifer Partridge: That was great answer. I’ll just add first of all that every employee is a part of this.
Wendy Dau : Oui.
Jennifer Partridge: Like they all can make a difference in whatever sphere they are in whether they’re a principal a teacher. The nutrition worker, like we all have our role to play in this plan and we can’t do it without all of you. You’re all a part of this plan.
But I do hope that they will use all of this as a guide for themselves, right? To how can I, in my role, welcome, or how can I help either myself or the students I interact with, with growth or empowerment and right, like, pick something to start with, work with your teams, work with your school on how does this plan fit into what you do every day in our district.
Wendy Dau: It’s so easy for meetings to get caught up in like business items and, and you’re not really getting at the root of what your work is supposed to be. And sometimes those things have to happen, right? There’s a lot of management that goes into a large organization. But I do think it becomes really powerful when we can start to say of these things, which one do we believe is going to help support academic achievement?
Or what piece needs to be in place before the school can move in this direction? We’re missing something. What is that thing? It starts to change conversations. I’m hoping it will continue to do that, but it’s, uh, it’s pretty fun for me to watch that. So we’re pretty excited.
Just as a reminder, you can find a copy of our strategic plan.
It is linked in this podcast. It also can be found on our website at provo.edu. Who would you like to thank Rebecca and Jennifer for helping us with the strategic plan? Because lots of people were part of this process.
Rebecca Nielsen: There is such a big list.
Wendy Dau: So many. It actually makes me almost, it almost makes me nervous. But yes.
Rebecca Nielsen: Well, clearly, I want to go through this, the people who are on the steering committee, because we met how long over a year, right? Like, I mean, I feel like so many evening meetings, we took up people’s time away from their families. So I mean, we had, well, you were there.
Wendy Dau : Oui.
Rebecca Nielsen: And, Our business administrator, Devyn Daley.
We had several members of the district staff, such as Jason Cox and Jared Sites and Darrell Jensen and Judy Rose and Doug Finch and Jason Garrison and Michelle Eldridge and Suraj Syal. So there’s district staff, also Nate Mitchell, Caleb Price, Rebecca Rogers, Clay Bingham, John Anderson, Steve Reese, Kyle Bates, Tammy Horger, and Troy Lindloff.
That is such a huge list, but every one of those people came and participated. And then we also have our community members who came to participate in the steering committee. So we had Angela Anderson and Danny Caldwell, Carrie Crowe, Brookanne Dalby, Jamie Davis-Leite, Julia Doxey, Nancy Montero, Christy Giblon, Anthony Lugo, Tiffany McCloud, Robyn Pulhum, Sara Parrish, Angela Puertas, Shanelle Robinson, Jeff Rust, Daniel Stokes, Ethan, I’m gonna butcher this one, but –
Wendy Dau: Unklesbay.
Rebecca Nielsen: Okay, thank you so much. Mary Wade, Carmen Williams, Britney Wood, and Sarah Wursten. So I don’t know if you wanted me to like literally list them all, but for reals, I know that sounds like a lot of names and a lot of time to take up to listen to, but every last one of those people put their heart and soul into this and gave up so much time, and we are so, so grateful for that.
Wendy Dau: I also want to give a big shout out to Shauna Sprunger because she is the one that helped us design the strategic plan and get, and get everything right.
Rebecca Nielsen: Like, it’s fabulous.
Wendy Dau: Just that was really important. And Michelle Eldridge and her team, Arie LeCheminant, was also like, she’s a really good proofreader.
If you need something proofread, you give it to Aerie. She’s going to help you out. So I know that Michelle’s team, Tiffany and Tawny and Aerie, I think we were all camped out down here in communications, just going through every, every single thing with Caleb and Shauna. And so we couldn’t do this without them.
And then she nagged me about it so that Caleb and Shauna could get this to the printer in time as well for all of our professional learning. It really does take a whole team of people. I think the strategic plan for me represents not only what we hope to be, but it also shows what we already are in many ways, in the sense that this couldn’t have happened without a massive group of people coming together, figuring out a shared vision.
And people just put in the work wherever they needed to. It’s pretty incredible when you see that happen because people are passionate about the education of our kids in Provo City School District.
Nous vous remercions.
Rebecca Nielsen: Thank you.
Wendy Dau : Merci à tous de vous joindre à moi pour l'épisode de cette semaine de What's Up with the Sup'.
As always, all episodes will be posted on the district website, YouTube, and anywhere you get your podcasts. If you have any topics or questions you would like us to discuss on the podcast, please email us at podcast@provo.edu. Don’t forget to join us again next week when we are back with an all new episode of What’s up with the Sup’.
Bonne semaine à tous.
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