Nanaimo school district has a plan.
After a year of work, including an extensive public consultation process, trustees adopted the district’s newly developed draft strategic plan at a special board meeting last week.
Just two members of the public were present at the meeting – Mike Ball, first vice-president of the Nanaimo District Teachers’ Association, and Alana Cameron, president of the District Parent Advisory Council.
“This is the end of the beginning,” said Jamie Brennan, school board chairman. “We’re on the road now and there’s a lot of work to do to put some meat on the bones of the plan.”
The plan consists of three goals – meet each student’s needs; continuous improvement of instruction and assessment; and enhanced facilities for learning – and suggested strategies to achieve these goals.
It calls for development of a 10-year facilities plan by next April that takes into account optimal school sizes at the elementary level of 200-400 students and at the secondary level of 600-1,200 students and development of policies to support the first two goals. The target completion dates for the policies are late in the current school year and next fall.
The new policies and facilities plan will take into account the various reviews that the board commissioned in recent years, such as the technology and French immersion reviews, and other items the board has referred to in the strategic planning process, such as secondary schools renewal, neighbourhood learning centres and the assessment and accountability task force recommendations.
Along with adopting the plan, trustees asked staff to develop a communications strategy so that as district officials move forward with the different actions the plan calls for, people are engaged and get the opportunity to have some input, said Brennan.
Since the plan is a framework at this point with specific actions still to be developed, trustees didn’t feel there was a need for consultation at this point, he added.
A copy of the draft plan is available at www.sd68.bc.ca.