Dear TSD Staff:
We had a very successful two-day School Community Planning Team meeting this past weekend. Thanks to this great team, which included four Board members, parents, staff, community and students, and all of the wonderful input YOU provided us through a multitude of surveys—we were able to provide the group with excellent data on staff, student, community and parent beliefs and concerns as well as interesting trend data on student demographics, enrollment, achievement and the current TSD workforce. Additionally we took a look at the economic and political conditions surrounding the school, and current happenings in deaf education and special education nationwide.
Through the very meticulous and capable work of our facilitator we were able to sort through all of this data, make some tweaks to our current mission, vision and beliefs and identify the BIG issue areas to be addressed over the next five years.
The critical issues that surfaced included:
- Communication(internal and external, transparent and fair)
- Academic and Personal Achievement(a whole child approach to student success, wrap-around services, 24 hour learning, ASL and English bilingual principles)
- Staff Support(recruitment, retention, succession, pay, workload pressures)
- Data-based Decision Making (centralized, automated, growth measure, informs instruction and provides critical agency data)
- Facilities and Master Plan (facilities to match programs, now and future, types of learning and living spaces, needs)
- Statewide Outreach(impact, collaborations, viability)
Our next steps will include expanding our stakeholder participation further by establishing Strategic Goal Teams (SGTs) to dive deep into the above issues and determine how we can best translate them into the best ideas and strategic objectives that will help us implement our vision and beliefs over the next five years.
We hope to post a lot of our work on the website in the next few weeks. We will keep you informed of our progress there.
I am very excited about advancing this new plan.
Claire Bugen
Superintendent