Natrona County School District Starts Website Tracking Five-year Strategic Plan Progress

The Natrona County School District is launching a user-friendly website for the public to track schools’ progress with the district’s long-term strategic plan.

“Our intention is to create essentially a landing page in regards to strategic plan reporting so that all stakeholders — parents, students even if they’re interested, or community members — can go on and can really check the progress of our schools, departments and the district in relation to the strategic goal,” district spokeswoman Tanya Southerland said Monday during a board of trustees work session.

The district’s five-year plan is updated annually and quarterly with multi-hundred-page documents with data and graphs that are bureaucratically numbing and not very timely when they’re made public, Superintendent Steve Hopkins said.

So the district will offer something much simpler that will be put online in the coming weeks with easy access to 2019-2024 strategic plan itself and its components with a dashboard to links:

• “High expectations.”
• “Leading on literacy.”
• “Planning with a purpose.”
• “Safe and healthy environments.”
• “Effective and efficient operations.”

The draft of the project was presented to the board of trustees by Southerland; Mike Jennings, the district’s director of human resources and superintendent-elect Mike Jennings; and Charlotte Gilmore, executive director for school improvement, curriculum and instruction.

“This is kind of big picture," Gilmore said.

They said the new website will have just-in-time updates about progress on the strategic goals for individual schools, academics, stories from the students and teachers at individual schools, and links to media stories.

It will offer a place for people to respond, too, Southerland said.

Trustee Dave Applegate encouraged them to think about presenting the data as if they were not educators by explaining what is on the pages and putting the information in context for what that means for students, parents and school staff.

For example, Southerland said the site about “safe and healthy environments” may post an update with a school entering a partnership with a local nonprofit agency.

She cautioned that this is still a work in progress.

The district hopes to have the data collected and posted over the next few weeks, and it will be continually refined and updated.

“The intention that we’re looking at as a district leadership and with our board of trustees is to really continue to connect with our community and have them see the critical importance that they play helping us reach these goals,” Southerland said.