FORTVILLE – Mt. Vernon Community School Corporation superintendent Jack Parker presented the corporation’s new 2024 strategic plan at the July meeting of the corporation’s board of trustees.
The plan was formed following nearly year-long process, including a community survey sent out last September, meetings with 10 focus groups including student governments at the middle and high schools, PTOs and boosters throughout last fall, four months of meetings with a 52-person committee and a final review with school leadership teams from each school in the corporation before presenting the final plan to the board on July 22.
“We really wanted to get on the same page and understand our values,” Parker said of the process.
After entering the committee process with 63 potential goals to pursue in the plan, three objectives/key results were identified: fostering a sense of belonging, enhancing staff recruitment and retention, and enhancing student learning and college/career programming. Each OKR had two or three subgoals attached to it.
Initially, the plan was also to update Mt. Vernon’s mission statement, but, according to Parker, the committee found the existing statement, “Mt. Vernon Community School Corporation will Engage, Educate, and Empower today’s students to seize tomorrow’s opportunities”, already fit what the community survey and focus groups had expressed they wanted to see from the district moving forward.
The first objective, fostering a sense of belonging, focused on ensuring that each student in the district has at least one adult in the district who connects with them on a regular basis and providing staff with the tools and training to help foster those connections.
“We’re going to continue to lean into our trust-based relational intervention, which is the side of supporting the building of relationships with students,” Parker said. “Kids need a balance of high structure and high nurture, so we’re going to focus on that balance and lean into that.”
The second goal, enhancing staff recruitment and retention, was one that Parker believes the district was already well on its way to fulfilling, going so far as to say that “this is our first year we feel like we’re moving into the school year with really really good staffing.”
The specific goals include keeping the corporation within the top 25% of comparable schools in terms of retention, creating teacher mentorship programs, and expanding recruiting events and online marketing across platforms such as LinkedIn.
The final goal, enhancing student learning and college/career programming, was largely focused on expanding opportunities for students and making sure that students are progressing both in terms of numerical markers, such as standardized testing scores, as well as along learning objectives set by the district, teachers, and the students themselves.
Parker says this change should also help make teachers jobs easier by giving them a more focused objective for their classes.
“It’s a better focus, which makes the job more manageable,” Parker said. “Our teachers have been doing an amazing job with our professional learning communities and our central learning assessments, and the trajectory that there are already on is just amazing. We just want to keep doing great things for kids.”
Board of trustees president Chad Gray says he was excited when he saw the finalized plan at Monday’s meeting.
“I really value that the full plan addresses student learning, that it addresses staff retention, it addresses the whole child,” Gray said. “It’s not just about academic growth, but it is about developing relationships and developing that and the entire concept that we’re a community and things that we’re doing to support the community and grow up together.”
The full plan can be viewed as an attachment to the agenda for the July 22 meeting on Mt. Vernon Community School Corporation’s website.
