This fall, the school district and Shorewood community have begun the process of updating the strategic plan, an overarching document that outlines the district’s goals and priorities over a five-year period. The strategic plan looks to improve Shorewood schools for their students by devising a clear-cut course of action based on those goals and priorities for the upcoming years.
According to superintendent Dr. Laurie Burgos, community involvement plays a major role in the strategic plan’s creation, with feedback from residents providing data for initial goals. In order to effectively gauge opinions on key issues from Shorewood residents, the district opted for a new survey format.
“We started off [the process] by looking to do some data-gathering,” Burgos said. “We kicked off a series of surveys in the month of September and tried something a little bit different. A lot of time we take a lot of surveys, long surveys, and people get tired of them, so we decided to break up the surveys into four smaller parts to try and get some more engagement from students, families, and residents.”
The district sought community feedback on a variety of issues. According to Burgos, finding solutions to financial issues facing the district will be a major aspect of the plan for the next five years.
“One [aspect] was really getting people’s take on evaluating our current educational programming for students; to think about what’s working, what’s not, what people like, what they would like to see done differently,” Burgos said. “Another key component that we folded into the strategic planning process was to consider the financial challenges that [our] school district and many school districts across the state have been facing…that’s a key component of the strategic planning process, and we asked our community members to what degree they might support future action in order to get the district to have a stronger financial position….We also had some key questions about other educational trends that are out there…and what might be of interest here in Shorewood.”
According to Emily Berry, school board president, equity and inclusion are also major guiding principles of the strategic planning process.
“Really listening to each committee member and respecting the diverse voices in the room has been [important],” Berry said. “We remain committed to what we call our collective commitments to equity. I won’t say that we’ve perfectly achieved [eliminating marginalization] or that we expect to, but I think acknowledgement that we need to make an effort there is really important. Hopefully we succeed in doing that.”
Although the strategic planning committee is still in the ‘visioning’ process, a key difference between the strategic plan currently in development and past strategic plans is more focused attention on practical issues like finances, declining enrollment, and programming.
“I assume [that financial stability] will end up being a pillar of the strategic plan itself, but we’re taking it a little bit further; we’re zooming out a bit more so we have longer-term thinking about financial sustainability,” Burgos said. “To me, that’s the biggest differentiator, and I’m glad that we’re doing that because, again, as we think about trends of flat or declining enrollment in our district, enrollment is what ultimately drives revenue, and so we have to make sure that we’re making really smart decisions about how we’re best using our resources—not just in the short term, but in the long term.”
However, there are factors outside the control of the district, like funding for education determined by the state legislature, that make the process of achieving long-term financial stability more difficult and place more pressure on Shorewood residents.
“Our residents pay high taxes and are very generous with donations and approving referendum questions, and we recognize that local communities are being forced into positions to have to do that because of the lack of revenue authority and the constraints that the state funding system has on all school districts,” Burgos said. “That is front-and-center on my mind right now because the state is going through its budget development process for the new biennium budget, so you’ll start to see some legislative advocacy that we’ll be taking part in in order to lobby our legislators to do better by our students.”
According to Berry, the state government’s budget allocations and funding formula for education further exacerbate this problem.
“Unfortunately, the state legislature has decided not to use our historic budget surplus to fund public education,” Berry said. “They would say that we made a historic investment in education, but they didn’t resolve the main issue, which is that the funding formula is really broken. It’s so complicated that even school board members don’t understand it completely, let alone normal people. That really prevents advocating for something different. Suffice to say, it’s not based on a set of values the way that money is distributed. It’s ostensibly based on enrollment and revenue, but it’s really based on their benchmarks that were set very arbitrarily. Nobody wants to tackle fixing it, so that’s a big barrier for us.”
In addition to input from community members, SHS students have the opportunity to attend the strategic planning committee and participate in focus groups.
“I like how [the District] wants to hear from students with different backgrounds…and everyone [that] comes from different walks of life [so] we’re able to contribute,” said Jenna Abu-Zahra, senior.
According to Abu-Zahra, being involved in the strategic planning committee meetings was a way to bring a diverse perspective into the planning, but also a chance to advocate for changes that administrators may not consider. This includes speaking up against certain changes the committee made in addition to promoting popular ideas among students.
“As a student, the scariest thing is when you really like something about the district, and then you see that go away,” Abu-Zahra said. “I feel like I have a voice, and I feel like I’m trying to make sure that other people can also use their voices. What they’re doing isn’t only focused on the high school, but also at the elementary schools and the middle school. As far as the elementary schools go, I actually was dissatisfied with some of the changes made…but I think that the committee is going to do great things.”