Warsaw Schools Look Ahead With Five-Year Strategic Plan
By Liz Shepherd
InkFreeNews
WARSAW — Warsaw Community Schools’ Board of School Trustees looked ahead during its Jan. 5 work session by discussing a five-year, four-pillar strategic plan for the school corporation.
WCS is working in collaboration with SmallBox, an agency that helps organizations create strategic plans, since late 2019. The plan’s strategic pillars are empathy, adaptability, inclusivity and experience. Each pillar was individually presented to the school board by pillar leaders and team members.
The empathy pillar will focus on helping students practice their abilities to understand others, to hear multiple perspectives and to build stronger ideas through teamwork.
“Our desired outcome for our pillar is that our students will compassionately consider the lives of others,” said Sarah Graham, Warsaw Community High School counselor. “They will acknowledge others’ feelings, emotions and experiences as valuable. These pillars really fit where our students need to be right now.”
Concepts falling underneath this pillar include more visual supports in both English and Spanish, parent nights and community events focused on de-stigmatizing mental health, and community mentorship involving empathy-driven skills.
Adaptability will help provide students with life skills through a focus on problem-solving as both individuals and teams.
“Adaptability is all about life-long skills needed in any field,” said Dr. David Robertson, assistant superintendent of elementary education. “A perfect practical example is personal finance. David Clark from the high school said it perfectly. ‘If our mission is to help students pursue their dreams to enrich the lives of others but they’re so far in debt by the age of 25, they can’t do that.’ If (personal finance) is not learned and not done well, that really cuts off the ability of our students.”
Aside from problem-solving and personal finance, stopping the micro-management of students’ schedules also falls into the adaptability pillar.
The inclusivity pillar will hone in on creating inclusive learning environments for all students.
“We want people to feel welcome at Warsaw Community Schools,” said Dani Barkey, assistant superintendent of secondary education.
Included in this pillar would be the school corporation hiring and training school staff equitably, building and strengthening relationships, and developing a conscious curriculum with more diverse perspectives.
Experience will connect students with real-world opportunities by focusing on workforce exposure and hands-on learning.
Warsaw Area Career Center Director Ronna Kawsky noted that online learning experiences in which students could virtually tour a business would be very beneficial.
Several school board members expressed their excitement for the plan, noting each pillar as strong and fantastic.
“To hear the energy and the passion behind how this was generated breathes life into all of this on paper,” said WCS Board President Heather Reichenbach. “It really feels like a community-generated strategic plan as it should be.”
The school’s strategic plan will be up for approval during the regular board meeting later in the month.
The board also heard an address from WCS Superintendent Dr. David Hoffert regarding the state of the school corporation. In his presentation, Hoffert focused on teamwork and how many within the schools and community came together in 2020 to keep students safe and keep the buildings’ doors open throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I asked my kids, ‘What’s the highlight of 2020 for you?'” said Hoffert. “They all came back and said, ‘Going back to school.’ That put it into perspective for me because I realized what an incredible peace that it was for my kids. If it was that for my kids, what is it for some of these other kids in our community when you realize that school is a safe place in-person?”
Hoffert also noted the school being consistently transparent with its COVID-19 numbers, stating that some school corporations still don’t have any statistics posted on the state’s health department dashboard due to fear of community backlash or not being able to stay open. He directed to a positive statement Kosciusko County Health Officer Dr. William Remington made in a press conference about the school corporation’s strategies in keeping the schools open.
“We’ve put an emphasis on transparency so our community knows what’s going on and also so we can make those common sense decisions,” said Hoffert. “More often than not, most of the time transmission goes back to the home and social gatherings with multiple age groups coming together. The transmission on a large scale is not happening inside our schools.”
In other business, the board also held an organizational meeting prior to the beginning of the work session. The Board of Trustees’ newest member, Matt Deuel, along with incumbents Randy Polston and Elle Turley, were sworn into office by the school corporation’s attorney, Tim Shelly.
For 2021, school board officers remained the same, with Heather Reichenbach as president, Randy Polston as vice-president and Jeremy Mullins as secretary.
The board’s next regular meeting will be at 7 p.m. Monday, Jan. 25.