Granton School District Completes Strategic Plan

Monday, April 26th, 2021 -- 3:01 PM

-The Granton School District recently completed their Strategic Plan and brought it before the School Board.

I spoke with Granton’s Interim Administrator, James Kuchta, as well as a member of the Strategic Plan Committee, Kim Aumann, and they discussed some of the goals found in the plan.

Mr. Kuchta:  “Kim is serving as our Academic and Behavioral Coach for our teachers and students this year at the Granton Area School District and she’s been part of the Granton Area School District’s Strategic Plan Steering Committee and she is Chair of the Staff and Student Retention Action Team.  We had our culminating meeting a couple weeks ago and she can talk about the Strategic Objective and the work they’ve done with their action team.”

Kim:  “I am part of the Staff and Student Retention Committee.  We actually had five different committees and this is one of them that I chaired.  We met four or five times and came up with our goal and an action plan.”

“So, our goal for our committee was to ‘build a reputation as a school of choice for students and staff who desire excellence in a community environment.’  And really, our goal with this is, because we are a smaller district, we really want to focus on having a family type of atmosphere.”

“So, along with that goal, we came up with an action plan and several different steps to help us meet our goal.  The first one that we have is we would like to survey all families that open enroll into our district as well as any family that would open enroll out of the district."

"We feel this would give us some valuable information that we could use to help our district move forward.  On the same note, we would like administration to conduct exit interviews with all employees that leave the district, again just so we could gather some information from that.”

“Another one of our steps is to provide and promote community events to encourage everyone to get involved.  So, like I said, we want to have that family atmosphere.  So, our goal for next year would be to have two community wide events that we would host here at the school and invite the public to come too.”

“One other thing that we would like to do, in order to bring more little kids and families into the building, is we will be starting a story hour program.  And this is with our Community Library, which is housed right here in our school."

"This will start in September and it will be once a week, where our little community members, from ages 2 to about 6 years old, would come in with an adult, have stories read to them, do some music, and do some crafts.  So, we’re really excited to start that program for our little members of the community.”

Mr. Kuchta:  “And, in that regard, our school library happens to the Public Library in Granton, so that’s going to be a nice cooperative effort through the library and thank you for your action team for putting that together.”

Kim:  “We’re excited to work with our public library and bring that program to Granton.  Just from personal experience, when my kids were little and they were involved in the story hour in the community we lived in, it was such a positive thing for both parent and child, so we’re excited about that.”

“As far as staff, some of the things that we’re working on with the staff is we have an all staff meeting, we call it WIN, or What I Need, and this was just a meeting of staff members, there was no administration there, and we really talked as a group about things that we wanted to see, things that we wanted to change in our district, goals that we had."

"It was a good chance to give the staff some ownership as to what’s important to them and to make some goals and changes that we feel will be really effective for our students.  We already had our first couple meetings with that and it’s been a great thing so far.”

“And the last goal that we have, that we’re working toward, is next school year, we’ll have performance team meetings.  And what this will be is I will be meeting with staff members in different teams.  Now this team will have a variety of teachers."

"There might be an elementary teacher, a high school teacher, a veteran teacher with lots of years of experience, with some teachers where it might be their first year."

"We’re hoping to have this mixed group work together and have a chance to brainstorm ideas and just be supportive of one another and maybe even mentor one another.  Again, because we are so small, that’s another way we can tie in our family values.”

Mr. Kuchta:  “As I said, we had our culminating meeting a couple weeks ago and that was presented to the board.  The Strategic Plan was presented and accepted by the School Board, so that will be our guiding document now as we move forward with the Granton Area School District.”

Feel free to contact us with questions and/or comments.