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Education Summit examines district’s vision
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| Having their say - More than 100 educators and community members participated in an education summit last weekend at Healdsburg High School. The audience split up into small groups and wrote out suggestions on pads of paper to help the Healdsburg Unified School District tailor its vision to the ideal education for the city.- PHOTO BY Nathan wright |
Healdsburg 20/20 strategic plan designed to guide educational leaders into the future
By Nathan Wright
Staff Writer
The Healdsburg Unified School District invited the public to review and comment on its long term vision last weekend at an education summit at Healdsburg High School.
More than 100 educators, parents and members of the community came together in small groups to discuss Healdsburg 20/20, a plan designed to help guide district leaders in providing students the best possible education in the coming decades.
Or, simply put, “that every student have a great experience every day and get to where they want to go after high school,” said district superintendent Jeff Harding.
“No parent should choose to go to another district,” he said. “Our schools should be so good a parent would be crazy to send their children anywhere else.”
How will the district get there? Harding likened the process of developing Healdsburg 20/20 to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, a plan he said began with objectives designed to fix the economy rather than direct courses of action. The action, he said, came later while leaders worked toward meeting those objectives.
Healdsburg 20/20 focuses on five priority areas to improve education, including powerful teaching and learning, honoring the diverse community, forward-thinking education, the staff as the district’s greatest resource and dynamic leadership working with an engaged community. The audience was handed a packet that listed the district’s current and future efforts at reaching each of these five objectives.
New classes in the culinary arts and digital photography, for example, support powerful teaching and learning. The packet listed more than 100 projects or practices that further the five guiding priorities, a list Harding said should grow as the vision is adopted and followed.
“Our mission is so important we can’t spend months and years talking about what we need to be doing,” he said. “We need to start now.”
The district has spent the past nine months meeting with staff and community groups to shape and define the vision. “It was our intention to go out into the community and listen,” said Harding. “In creating this plan we needed to know what ideal education looked like in Healdsburg.”
Saturday’s Education Summit was called the culmination of this public outreach. The audience was asked to review the packets to find areas they supported and identify what the district had missed. Each group was handed a large pad of paper and told to get started.
For the next two hours these groups discussed everything from immersion to teacher evaluation to nutrition to diversity. Opinions varied widely from group-to-group, as one discussed merit pay for teachers while another group spoke to why the district must not pay for test results.
At the end of the summit these lists were collected and Harding said the suggestions would help massage Healdsburg 20/20 before it is presented to the school board early next year.
Members of the audience spoke well of the process and reassured the district it is planning for the future and not just handling day-to-day operations. “I like hearing that they have a plan for the next 15 or 20 years that will adapt to what’s needed,” said parent Bill Conklin, who has a daughter at the high school. “They’re really planning off what the kids are going to need and what the community will need.”
More than 100 educators, parents and members of the community came together in small groups to discuss Healdsburg 20/20, a plan designed to help guide district leaders in providing students the best possible education in the coming decades.
Or, simply put, “that every student have a great experience every day and get to where they want to go after high school,” said district superintendent Jeff Harding.
“No parent should choose to go to another district,” he said. “Our schools should be so good a parent would be crazy to send their children anywhere else.”
How will the district get there? Harding likened the process of developing Healdsburg 20/20 to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, a plan he said began with objectives designed to fix the economy rather than direct courses of action. The action, he said, came later while leaders worked toward meeting those objectives.
Healdsburg 20/20 focuses on five priority areas to improve education, including powerful teaching and learning, honoring the diverse community, forward-thinking education, the staff as the district’s greatest resource and dynamic leadership working with an engaged community. The audience was handed a packet that listed the district’s current and future efforts at reaching each of these five objectives.
New classes in the culinary arts and digital photography, for example, support powerful teaching and learning. The packet listed more than 100 projects or practices that further the five guiding priorities, a list Harding said should grow as the vision is adopted and followed.
“Our mission is so important we can’t spend months and years talking about what we need to be doing,” he said. “We need to start now.”
The district has spent the past nine months meeting with staff and community groups to shape and define the vision. “It was our intention to go out into the community and listen,” said Harding. “In creating this plan we needed to know what ideal education looked like in Healdsburg.”
Saturday’s Education Summit was called the culmination of this public outreach. The audience was asked to review the packets to find areas they supported and identify what the district had missed. Each group was handed a large pad of paper and told to get started.
For the next two hours these groups discussed everything from immersion to teacher evaluation to nutrition to diversity. Opinions varied widely from group-to-group, as one discussed merit pay for teachers while another group spoke to why the district must not pay for test results.
At the end of the summit these lists were collected and Harding said the suggestions would help massage Healdsburg 20/20 before it is presented to the school board early next year.
Members of the audience spoke well of the process and reassured the district it is planning for the future and not just handling day-to-day operations. “I like hearing that they have a plan for the next 15 or 20 years that will adapt to what’s needed,” said parent Bill Conklin, who has a daughter at the high school. “They’re really planning off what the kids are going to need and what the community will need.”
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