Cadott School District wants community input for five-year goals

By Julia Wolf

The Cadott School District is looking to the community, for feedback on the draft strategic plan’s pillars and goals, for the 2021-26 school years. The strategic plan helps the board make decisions over the five-year period.

The district held an in-person session, May 19, where people could give their input on the goals and brainstorm how to reach them, together.

Those who were unable to attend, or who would like to give feedback on more of the pillars, are encouraged to do so, by visiting cadott.k12.wi.us and clicking on the Cadott schools strategic plan meeting icon. The icon will open a document with links to a video presentation, the goals and directions for how to submit feedback. The deadline for comments is Monday, May 31.

“I’m so glad that you took some time to come help us out tonight,” said Jenny Stark, district administrator, during the presentation. “It’s really important for the future and the district.”

As a representative of the school board, Becca Blanchette, school board member, says they take the feedback and ideas seriously. She says they want the district goals to be reflective of the community’s thoughts, too.

After a brief background of the district, Starck talked about the 2016-21 strategic plan.

“It was a very broad plan,” said Starck.

She says it had a lot of goals to work on, which the board used to form annual plans for the school. Some of those goals were continued on the draft plan for 2021-26.

The draft plan contains five pillars, which are areas of focus, with two or three goals under each pillar. The pillars are student learning and achievement, student social and emotional growth, staff engagement, community engagement, and enhancing facilities and maximizing resources.

Starck also talked about the idea of continuous improvement. “This is something that I will say is new in education,” said Starck. “It’s been in business for a really long time.”

She says you can’t control all the variables in education, like you may be able to in a business.

“How can we still get better results, even if we can’t control all of the factors that happen in students’ lives?” said Starck, when explaining how continuous improvement works.

She says continuous improvement involves trying things out, to see if they get better results, and grow on them if the change works.

“The trick to that is, people have to have the opportunity to take some risks,” said Starck.

For the student learning and achievement, the goals are to improve the DPI report card from “meet expectations” to “exceed expectations,” have 95 percent of students complete an Academic and Career Plan to prepare for post-secondary options, and increase the number of students participating in at least one athletic or extra-curricualr activity from 76 percent to 85 percent.

The goals under student social and emotional growth are to improve student scores on the social emotional assessments in the district, increase the attendance rate to above 91 percent and reduce the monthly average of out-of-school suspensions from seven to below five, and in-school suspensions from 43 to below 20.

“Sometimes, it’s easier to pick out students who have mental health issues, because they act out, because they’re seeking attention,” said Starck, of the need for assessments. “But how do we find those students who aren’t acting out, but are still needing some support and might be going under the radar?”

Staff engagement looks to improve the professional learning communities (PLC), using the rubric scores for measurement. The other goals are to increase the number of staff who would recommend the district to family for their child from 4.02 to 4.6, and to have less than four staff rated as “proficient” leave for similar employment each year.

Starck says community engagement is something the district really wants to get better at. The goals for the draft plan are to develop at least two venues for communication with community members, the school board and the district administrator; provide at least one learning opportunity to the community through after-school or weekend courses each year; and increase students participating in youth apprenticeship and work-based learning by 25 percent.

Under enhancing facilities and maximizing resources, the goals are to maximize state aid and reduce the mill rate, implement facility improvement plans that reflect community pride and priorities, and increase student enrollment attendance from 754 to 850.

“By July, the board is going to review all of the feedback from the community stakeholders,” said Starck. She says by August, the plan should be finalized and presented back to the community, likely through the board meeting. The annual goals, pulled from the five-year plan, will be developed in September.