Episode 63: Strategic Plan Part 1

November 1st, 2024 /
Alexander Glaves /

Sup with the Sup

00:00 / 23:42

Provo City School District’s Strategic Plan

Welcome everyone to the next episode of Provo City School District’s What’s Up With The Sup’ podcast. I am Superintendent Wendy Dau. As many of you know, the district recently finalized its work on a new strategic plan. We are excited about the results of this work and look forward to using it to drive the work of the district.

I recently sat down with our school board president, Rebecca Nielsen, and vice president, Jennifer Partridge, to discuss the strategic plan. We reviewed the process that was followed and dove into each section of the plan. You can view the strategic plan by visiting the front page of the district website at provo.edu. It will be the first thing that appears.

But before we hear from them, here are our updates.

There are several policies for review on our district website.
- Go to provo.edu, click on Policies, Forms, and Documents. You can click on Review Draft Policies Here.
- Right now you will see a draft policy for our cell phone policy that will be discussed and voted on at our November 12th meeting, as well as a new draft policy 6810 that discusses Provo City School District’s facility rentals.
Thank you to everyone that attended the community meeting and trunk retreat at Dixon Middle School. We were able to share our final three options for utilizing the space at Dixon.
- If you were not able to attend, please visit the district website to view the information that was presented and to provide feedback.
Would you like to have your voice heard on matters of the district? We have two opportunities for you to be involved with Provo City School District.
One is a Citizens Connections Committee, which will meet and provide feedback to the district on a variety of topics.
- The second committee is a Parent Advisory Committee for parents of current students within our schools.
- The purpose of this committee is for district leadership to understand the challenges and concerns that our students have as they attend our schools so that we can problem solve with you on how to make our schools welcoming spaces for all. If you would like to serve on either of these committees, please complete the application that has been emailed to all parents.
- We are excited to hear from you and to work with you.
The next school board meeting will be a study session and business meeting on Tuesday, November 12th. Please look for more information to be posted on the district website as we get closer to the date.
Continue watching for my weekly video casts in your email every Monday morning.
- These video casts provide one place for you to learn about important things happening across the district.

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’. I have here with us, Rebecca Nielsen, who is our board president and Jennifer Partridge, who is our board vice president.

Welcome to our show.

Jennifer Partridge: Thank you so much. Great to be here.

Wendy Dau: I really appreciate the two of you being willing to be on the podcast to talk about our strategic plan because I get kind of excited about this and I think you guys do too.

Jennifer Partridge: I am so excited.

Rebecca Nielsen: Absolutely.

Wendy Dau: Perfect. So let’s start by talking about what made you as a board decide that you needed a strategic plan because this was something even when I was hired you’re like what experience do you have with strategic plans because we need one.

Talk with us a little bit about that.

Rebecca Nielsen: This has been on our list so to speak for quite some time because we really felt like we needed some kind of north star to really help guide every decision we make and we felt like we were making pretty good decisions and whatnot but when you have a framework to work within that really helps guide everything you do.

It makes things a lot easier and there’s a little bit less floundering, right? And when that guidance is there, it just helps all along the way to make sure you’re going in the direction you want to go. I think we saw a need for this, I don’t know, several years ago and we just had so many things on our plate.

We finally got to the point where we had some time to do it and where we could get it done. Um, and so it’s been a long time coming, really. We definitely saw the need for it. And, and in the hiring of the new superintendent, which was you, we thought, gosh, this ought to be like top priority. And, and it was, and you were gracious enough to let us go ahead with it.

But yeah, that’s kind of where this came from. I mean, really every corporation out there, any big organization should have something like this and we did, but it had been several years since we had updated it. And so it was just time. It was time to update it to bring us up to where we are today because the last time we did it, we didn’t even have Chromebooks for every student, right?

It was quite a different environment. So it was time to update it. It was time to get to a place where it matched where we are right now and helped us kind of look to that future direction where we want to end up.

Wendy Dau: Jennifer, what about you? Like, what were some of the conversations you were having about this or what were some of the thoughts that were going through your head when you were thinking about, we need a strategic plan?

Jennifer Partridge: I echo everything Rebecca said that perfectly. I would just add, I think I’m the kind of person that loves to have goals. Like, what are we working on? Where do we want to go? How are we going to get there? And I think that’s important. for our school district to have that and to know what we’re focused on.

There’s so many good things we can be doing. We have wonderful educators who are out there teaching our kids every day. But overall, what is our focus? What is our plan? There’s only so many things we can do as a district. What are the most important things? And so I’m glad that we’ve identified that as a community.

And have those things now that can be our focus.

Wendy Dau: I think one of the things that I was really excited about as we went through this process was I had suspicions from different stakeholder groups that these were priorities or these were things that people really cared about. And then when we were able to actually kind of put all of this together, we started seeing that reinforced.

And we can talk more about that as we talk about that process, but it did feel like – okay, now we have this focus. It’s pretty outstanding.

When I was going through taking over as superintendent, the previous administration had developed a district improvement plan and it hadn’t been updated since 2015.

And it was extremely comprehensive. And I remember feeling very overwhelmed reading through it. So this I love because this is something where we can dive deeper into it, but it’s still something we can explain to people pretty easily and, and help everybody access it. So it’ll be a great thing.

So tell us a little bit about the process. How did we land here? Like what were, cause it was a lot of work. So…

Rebecca Nielsen: It was a lot of work. I mean, we’re, we’re a year into this, right? So this isn’t something that happens very quickly. But I mean, if we want to go all the way back to the very beginning, it’s a process that started when we looked for a consultant, right?

Well, first of all, we decided we were going to go with this because we knew it was going to be a big project, a long project, decided we had the time finally and the funding for it. And so we, we look for a consultant. And as soon as we get that consultant in, we also put together committees and groups of people from all over the district that included staff members.

And parents, community members, teachers, I mean, everyone from every facet of the community. And we put those committees together and then we just started going step by step by step analyzing data and even wordsmithing for hours at a time.

Jennifer Partridge: A lot of wordsmithing.

Rebecca Nielsen: Throwing out ideas, right? And the committee would meet, they would send it back to the board and then the board would analyze and make some changes and then send it back to the committee and there was a lot of back and forth, a lot of wordsmithing.

And so much thinking and analyzing and gosh, even diving into data, that was actually one of my favorite parts is when we dove into data about the district and stats with test scores and demographics and anything you can think of there, but also the data we gathered from the community survey, right?

Taking all of that data and all of the ideas. And then somehow taking all those results and trying to pare it down into this one document, which you were just saying, it’s actually, if you look at it, it can be viewed in a really concise way, which was something that I think we were really adamant about in our committee meetings, making sure this was easily digestible, but at the same time with enough detail to guide, well, all the detail in the district, right?

So that was kind of the process in a nutshell. So much back and forth, and finally getting to the point where we kind of paired all those ideas down into this one document, which I don’t know, I feel pretty proud of. So…

Jennifer Partridge: As part of that discussion, we got to talk about who are we as a district and who do we want to be?

What is our mission and our vision and what are our values? And I thought that was a wonderful conversation to be able to have as a board and also to hear what the committee thought about that as well from our whole community.

Wendy Dau: I felt like when we were having that conversation, I remember we were sitting in a district leadership team meeting and the consultant was there trying to guide us through this.

And so she just threw out this question. She’s like, well, what do you want Provo City School District to be known for? And I just literally took my fist and stomped it on the table. And I was like, I want us to be a destination district. I’m like, there’s so much good here and it feels like it’s hidden. We need to unpack it and advertise it, show everybody and share it.

And I feel like we’re well on our way. So I appreciate that she pushed me. How valuable was the steering committee in this process? Because they met every month for a couple of hours. And there were different assignments and things that they had to go through. And then the steering committee would make recommendations.

And then that group would bring those recommendations to the board. And then district leadership would kind of work through some things. But why do you think that piece was important in this process because I think sometimes people discount that piece of it. And I’ve seen a couple of strategic plans be put together and that piece has been really valuable.

So talk a little bit about how that influenced you and helped you as you were thinking about the strategic plan.

Rebecca Nielsen: I’ll start on this one because I actually sat on both the steering committee and then worked on it as a board as well. So I got to see both sides. And the steering committee was incredibly valuable for all the diversity of opinions and perspective that it brought to the table when formulating this plan.

Like I said earlier, we tried to get a really wide array of people on the steering committee. And the one thing we didn’t want was to make this in a bubble, right? With limited perspective. And as a school district, we’re, and especially as a board, we’re tasked with being very transparent and we want that anyways.

We want the community to be involved in everything we do. We want, uh, Provo City and our school district to work together to make not only a great destination district, but a great place to live where people want to come because of the schools and because of the city, right? Because everything here is so awesome.

And so to have the perspective of all the different kinds of people that we had on that committee. We had business owners. We had parents. We had community members of all kinds. That’s just incredibly valuable. And so many times during those steering committees, you know, we’re tasked with a certain question to answer.

And I am telling you, every single group would come up with something totally different, but every last thing that was presented was valuable. And that’s just because you get different perspectives depending on who you are or where you are in life or whether you have students here or not, et cetera.

But all of that was valuable, because if we want this to be a whole community document, then we’re going to need that input from everyone. So I found that to be super valuable.

Jennifer Partridge: Well, and as a board member who didn’t attend the steering committee meetings, I really appreciated knowing that they had spent the time and really dived into some of these topics and discussed them and had all those various perspectives.

As board members, we try very diligently to represent our communities, but as seven people, we don’t have all the perspectives. And so to be able to know that we have included other community members to help us see things that maybe we weren’t able to see on our own, that’s very valuable. And so when those reports would come back to us at board meetings, I took that very seriously.

What did the steering committee think about this? Did they talk about it? How did they come to that conclusion? That’s why they said, okay, great. And usually we went with whatever the steering committee had decided because we knew they took their role very seriously and they thought very thoroughly about things.

Wendy Dau: As a reminder, if you would like to see a copy , we have added a link to it on the podcast and you can also find it on our website, provo.edu. Talk a little bit about how we arrived at our mission. Our mission is Welcome, Educate, Inspire, because this went through lots of variations and our vision as well, but let’s talk about those two specific things.

I know we also went to the National Board Conference in New Orleans. And I think the sessions that we attended on strategic planning actually helped us think about simplifying. At least that’s what got my head around some of those things. How did we come to this? And what were some of the thoughts that went through your mind as we landed on this mission and vision?

Jennifer Partridge: Gosh, it was so long ago. I don’t remember a lot of the details of what I was personally thinking through all of it. For me, what was important is the simplicity and the easy to read. We looked at samples, and a lot of them were very verbose, and I tend to be a very verbose person, but I was like, that’s not, that’s not what we need.

And so I’d love that we came to something that is three words that I can remember, and I can go to people and say, our mission is is to welcome, educate, inspire. Like, I can memorize that easily, and I think our teachers, our administrators, like, as a district, I think we can all do that, and it encapsulates very well who we are as a district and who we want to be.

Our cultures that we’re creating, as well as our role to educate our students, I think it’s very succinct.

Rebecca Nielsen: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more with just the simplicity of it. That was something we really wanted. We had seen, you know, something at the NSBA conference from another school district who had recently redone their strategic plan.

And it was simple and easy to remember and quick. And I thought that is so important because if we really want people invested in this, we want people to learn it. We want people to use it. It has to be easy to recall. Right? We can’t have some long mission statement that no one’s going to ever remember.

So that was definitely part of it. Here’s a couple fun facts about our mission statement that I think are just fun things to know. First of all, I mentioned earlier that we got survey data from the community and the top three things that came back are these three words that we have in our mission statement, right?

And so they weren’t those exact words, but they relate to the top three results we saw in the survey, which is that people want to feel welcome and safe at school. And so that made sense that the first word in our mission statement ought to be welcome. And another fun fact with that is we all really love being part of Provo City and Provo City’s logo, I don’t know if it’s their officially their mission or motto, right, is Welcome Home. And we loved that. We didn’t want to copy it, but we kind of wanted to give a nod to the fact that we’re part of Provo City as well. And so that’s kind of where the word welcome came from, right?

And then also educate is our second word in our mission statement and that was the second big thing that came up as a big priority for our community is we want to make sure kids are getting academic education, right? So it feels very obvious, but absolutely after kids first feel welcome and safe at school, then our next thing is we are going to educate them, right?

That’s our goal to make sure that is happening. And then inspiring, making sure that again, this is kind of the third big thing that came up on that survey data is that kids are going to take this knowledge that they get. And use it in good ways. Be good community members and feel inspired to do something more with what they get here.

So those are just, I don’t know, some fun facts of how we came up with that mission. It actually correlates with data we got from the survey and kind of a nod to the city. And while it seems very simple and maybe anyone can come up with these three words, it was actually very carefully crafted to make sure we are aligning with the survey data we got and making sure we’re feeling one with our city and, and things like that.

So.

Wendy Dau: Yeah, we actually talked quite a bit about when they asked us, what are some of the things that are unique about Provo? And we talked about, well, we are a single city school district. How do we really capitalize on that? And I think that nod to it was to that welcome piece was a part of that saying, this is a unique opportunity because we’re small enough that we actually can be more personalized and do things at a level that maybe some other districts that are really big aren’t able to do.

Let’s talk about our core values for a minute. And Jennifer, I’d like you to talk about too. You helped us put these in the right order because there was a very specific order and a specific way that you thought through this, that I thought was really helpful as we were going through this. So I just like you to talk a little bit about that.

Cause I thought it was great.

Jennifer Partridge: Yeah. Well, I can’t take all the credit for it. We had a community member who actually got up at board meeting. Oh, that’s right.

Wendy Dau: I do remember that. That’s right.

Jennifer Partridge: So we want to thank her for that. So the belonging goes right along with our first part of the mission statement that we are welcoming.

As Rebecca talked about, that we need to create a good environment for everyone to feel comfortable in because that creates a good environment for the learning, right? And then the growth and the empowerment are all about the education of our students. And so that goes with the next part of the mission statement.

And then creativity goes with inspire as well. Being inspired to just keep being innovative and curious as they go, not only in our schools, but throughout life. And then community, we just want to move forward with community and building those relationships and things. Um, besides all of the work that we do within our schools, we want that to branch out to our families and throughout the community.

And as our students are inspired to move forward after they graduate and become contributing members of our community as well.

Wendy Dau: Tell us a little bit about how or maybe what your favorite value is or which of the values speak to you the most and why.

Rebecca Nielsen: This might be a little biased, but that’s okay.

When I was on the steering committee, we came up with the definition that eventually got used for empowerment. And so I love that one because we were tasked with coming up with definitions for all five of them. For some reason, we got stuck on empowerment and we really put a lot of thought into that one.

And so I love empowerment. I think that’s such a fun one. And there’s nothing like feeling empowered, right? Like that’s what education does for people. It makes you feel like you can do anything, which is not untrue, right? You can absolutely, if you are educated, do so much with your life, right? And so I just loved the idea of giving students, the tools and the resources and the opportunities they need here at school and in the school district, and honestly, I shouldn’t just say students because when we were crafting this, we were actually trying to make sure that staff members could have this apply to them as well.

Teachers could have this apply to them as well. Anyone who comes in this district works here, comes in contact with the district. This should be able to apply to any of them, right? Any of those people. So we just loved the idea of being able to provide the tools and resources and opportunities to help people build confidence and capacity and achieve great things.

And it was just so fun to really dig deep down into that definition and really kind of wordsmith and figure it out. And we just felt so proud of it. And then, you know, when we were all giving our definitions and everybody seemed to like it, we just, we were giving each other high fives because we put a lot of work into that one.

So I kind of love that.

Wendy Dau: What about for you, Jennifer?

Jennifer Partridge: I love growth, the sentence that goes with it, especially striving for academic rigor, innovative teaching methods, and continuous improvement to foster student success and achievement, and I think that should be such a huge focus for a district, for our schools, for our teachers, and for students themselves, right, to have that rigor.

That we can all do hard things, we learn, we grow, that our teachers are innovative, and that we all learn to keep improving and find that, that joy in doing so and that success. I think those are fantastic focus for us as a district.

Wendy Dau: I think it just gives such great focus to everything that we’re doing, and it really does embody what we’re trying to be about.

I think every single employee can get behind this because they recognize that everybody’s working together to help students land in a, in a great place, which kind of brings us to our vision statement. The Provo City School District is a vibrant learning environment where all students become lifelong learners and engaged community members.

Because I really do want people to understand that everything that went into this plan is very purposeful. And so talk a little bit about how we landed on that vision statement.

Rebecca Nielsen: This is kind of the fun part where you get to like envision your future. This is like, what do you want to happen because kids have come through the school district or because employees have worked here or whatnot?

And that was going to be my answer to your question. Vibrant was very deliberately picked, right? Every, honestly, every word in this, it’s why it, probably took us so darn long, but every word is very deliberate. I’m trying to remember exactly why we chose vibrant, but I want to say that because that’s what our vision is.

That’s what we want to be. We want to be a vibrant community where we stand out and people go, Oh my gosh, Provo City School District. That place is awesome. That’s a destination district, right? And so Vibrant just really described what we want people to think and feel when they think of Provo City School District.

Jennifer Partridge: And for me it also encapsulates the culture of being in the school. Like that it’s a welcoming place, a warm place, but there’s learning. There’s, like, you can just see kids engaged in projects and excited about learning. I don’t know, that word just has so much depth to it, right? The picture that it paints.

Rebecca Nielsen: Absolutely. I also really love, though, in the vision statement, the part about students becoming lifelong learners and engaged community members, because we really in so many of our meetings, we talked about how much education should have an effect on people and students, not only when they’re here, but for the rest of their lives, right?

And it ought to be positive for on there, on everything that happens to them for the rest of their lives, right? And what do we want that to look like? Well, we want people to be good citizens, man. We want people to be able to graduate from our schools and be out there doing good things, right? And that includes being a lifelong learner.

We want people to feel inspired enough to make learning a part of their daily routines forever. So, so that was fun to kind of envision that people who come through Provo City School District are learning. are going to have that result, right? They’re gonna have this vibrant experience while they’re here.

That’s gonna be how they remember their experience here is something vibrant, but also that when they think of Provo City School District and what happened here and, and the things they learned that it inspires them to be that, right? To be a lifelong learner and to be a great citizen outside in the community.

So it was a fun thing to formulate and just think about. Possibilities are kind of endless when you have a vision for the future, so kind of trying to pare that down into one sentence is actually really tricky. But exciting and fun.

Wendy Dau: It is a lot harder than people may even realize. I think one of the words we were toying with was dynamic.

And we talked about dynamic sometimes just meaning that it changes a lot. And we didn’t necessarily want that. We wanted it to be, it’s like when you’re walking into school, you’re like, what? Wow, this is incredible. What’s happening here, right? That should be the reaction that it creates and that kids are pretty excited at whatever level to be like, No, this is the place I want to be.

There’s no other place I’d rather be. Well, thank you, Rebecca and Jennifer for joining me. That kind of gives us a little bit of an overview, but I’d like us to maybe meet again if we could, if you wouldn’t mind coming back so that we could dive into the strategic plan a little bit further, especially with its priorities and goals.

Does that sound okay?

Rebecca Nielsen: Of course.

Wendy Dau: All right, let’s do it.

Thank you everyone for joining me for part one of this episode of 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.

And don’t forget to join us again next week when we are back with part two of our strategic plan discussion on What’s Up with the Sup’. Have a great weekend, everyone.