FY08 District Strategic Challenges
by Tom Mulligan
September 07, 2007
The following article describes the strategic challenges that were identified by the Riverton Administrative Team this year as part of their Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis. This SWOT analysis is conducted annually as part of a review of district data that helps identify strategic challenges and in turn, set the District Strategic Objectives. For more information on the SWOT analysis go to the district section of the website and click on the Baldrige tab to review the district School Improvement Process.
FY 08 Strategic Challenges and District Strategic Objectives
Strategic Challenges
Strategic Challenge – refers to those pressures that exert a decisive influence on an organization’s likelihood of future success. External strategic challenges may relate to student, stakeholder, or market needs or expectations, changes in educational programs or offerings, technological changes, or budgetary, societal, and other risks or needs. Internal strategic challenges may relate to an organization’s capabilities or its faculty, staff, and other resources
- Special Education - The growing number of special education students and lack of reading achievement of those special education students (data that drove this was enrollment trends and ISAT/PSAE test data)
- Long Term Funding Issues – this addresses the fact that we have added over 25 new staff for new programs in the last six years and a concern that we will not be able to add more programs so we must look for ways to evaluate current programs and improve those programs and processes. We also rely heavily on the general state aid as a substantial funding source because of slower EAV growth. Long term state funding is questionable (this was derived from long term financial projections)
- Curriculum and Assessment – curriculum development, alignment, implementation (including formative feedback for staff) and staff accountability in the area of curriculum. The need for benchmark assessment development that is aligned to state assessment and the alignment of classroom assessments to standards based instruction (this was derived from building level comments from staff and administrative knowledge, and staff and parent surveys)
- Transitional and Poverty Students – we are seeing a steady increase in free and reduced lunch students and a decline in reading achievement for those students. We also see a high rate of mobile students moving in and out of the district. We need more analysis to look at the impact of transitional students. (This relates to trend data in mobility and student test data)
- Increased requirement in terms of college level achievement at the high school level and how does our graduate requirements, etc. align to those requirement (this came from the state requirements, no child left behind requirements, etc.)
- Communication and marketing for the district. We are in a competitive environment in the Springfield area. Our data shows that except for Springfield, we have a higher (in most cases much higher) number of low income, special education, poverty students, and a much lower operating expenditure per student than district we are compared against and for those we compete for students with.
