RCSD Five-Year Strategic Plan

At the September 30 Board of Education Meeting, Superintendent Dr. Tricia Murray shared a high-level overview of a Five-Year Strategic Plan for the Rye City School District developed over the summer with input from District administrators and Board trustees. She noted that it is a flexible living document meant to evolve based on annual progress and feedback.

Two important bases for the Plan were The Rye Commitment, the District’s promise to students, faculty, and community, and the recently-adopted New York State Portrait of a Graduate, created by the NYS Board of Regents. Dr. Murray noted that there is considerable alignment between the Portrait and The Rye Commitment; both seek to instill graduates with creativity, critical thinking, and communication skills to create responsible global citizens.

According to Dr. Murray, the Plan “builds on that vision [of The Rye Commitment] by setting clear goals, actionable steps and measurable benchmarks to track our progress” over the next five years. A key element of the plan is the development of a financial strategy to ensure the District is allocating resources effectively in support of its goals.

The Plan has five sections, the first three of which mirror the three sections of The Rye Commitment:

1. Empowering Students by…

• Expanding courses/teaching strategies to support critical thinking, collaboration, creative problem-solving, and effective communication -- for example, through growing the International Baccalaureate Programme, adding new teacher-developed interdisciplinary courses, the 5th-grade capstone project, and using AI to enhance critical thinking in teaching and learning
• Creating physical spaces that support innovative learning - classrooms should reflect the learning taking place in them
• Increasing student voice in decision-making in curriculum and within schools - finding the means to empower students to shape their school experience
• Fostering a culture of caring, because for students to feel a sense of belonging, they must know that they are cared for. The RCSD is fielding a school climate survey to students to provide some data around culture and belonging in the schools

2. Elevating Professional Growth, Engagement, and Ownership for faculty by…

• Increasing collaboration and teacher leadership - looking for ways for teachers to collaborate around curriculum and for teachers to take on informal leadership roles
• Strengthening mentorship through the new Teacher Academy and rethinking the teacher evaluation system to include a feedback mechanism
• Providing professional learning connected to the Strategic Plan. Teachers have been telling the District that they prefer workshops that offer choice and multiple points of entry

3. Strengthening Community Engagement and Communication by…

• Leveraging community strengths to enhance student learning. For example, asking community members to serve as experts, to provide feedback to students on projects, or to offer experiential learning opportunities for students
• Improve communication to ensure consistent messaging throughout the RCSD so all understand what we are doing and why. The District will be sending out a survey in the near future to the community to gauge how they want to receive information, where there are strengths, and where there might be gaps

4. Ensuring Strategic Fiscal Planning and Streamlined Operations by…

• Aligning the annual budget with strategic priorities - while this has always been the case, the goal is to make the planning more long-term
• Maintaining and improving facilities to support learning - what are the kinds of classroom spaces we want to create for students?
• Expanding awareness of the District’s food service offerings so students (new and current) and parents are aware of what is available in the cafeterias
• Empowering and building the District’s nursing staff capacity
• Continually modernizing technology and infrastructure - the District will be doing some data collection around this goal in the near term
• Ensuring established security procedures are followed consistently by students, particularly at the high school level

5. Monitoring and Continuous Improvement

• All of the goals will have performance indicators attached to them. As Dr. Murray put it, “You can’t have a plan without a way to know whether you are making progress towards it.”  Some of the data from these performance indicators will be built into presentations, and others will be discussed at the annual Board retreat

BOE President Jane Anderson said, “Over the last 8 years, there has been a lot of change in that has happened in the  District for good, and I think it is now about going from good to great, and having a long-term strategic plan that incorporates curriculum with staffing with special education with fiscal is really the path to being able to make those changes. We don’t necessarily need to make huge systemic changes; we need to make a lot of changes within the margins, and those are typically the most difficult changes to make.”  

BOE Vice President Jenn Boyle added, “having…the continuous improvement and the performance indicators tied to it…those are going to be really helpful to move us in the right direction. I think that we’ve already seen how using data in many areas where we’ve implemented new curriculum and programs has really informed how that should keep evolving.”

To watch the presentation and discussion, click here and start watching at 10:50.