WPCNR SCHOOL DAYS. By John F. Bailey. January 10, 2007: Dr. Stephen Barone, the school district strategic planning consultant, challenged an intrigued audience of 31 White Plains parents, a half-dozen district personnel, including a teachers union representative, to be willing to change their system to prepare an effective long term Strategic Plan.
Dr. Stephen Barone, Transformation Systems, Ltd. Telling it Like It Is Monday Evening at the Board of Education. Photos, WPCNR News
A core group of parents and residents listened raptly to Dr. Barone’s one hour presentation will be seen on WPPS-TV, Channel 77, possibly beginning this evening. Dr. Barone appears about one hour into the meeting.
Speaking bluntly, Barone said “The people within the system are the last to see the crisis,” noting the decline of well known institutions such as General Motors, the Soviet Union, Smith Corona, Polaroid and the telephone industry, “because the people within the system are fighting to keep the system the way it is.” He challenged the district to involve their critics in the Strategic Plan Core Team, and be willing to listen and accept their ideas.
Teresa Niss, the arts coordinator for the district, Superintendent of Schools Connors said was the person to contact for any citizens wishing to be on the Strategic Core Team and supplemental planning and implementation committees. Ms. Niss may be e-mailed at [email protected] to express your interest in participation, or Michele Schoenfeld may be contacted at 422-2071, or the Superintendent’s office may be emailed at [email protected]. .
Timetable
Barone said the strategic plan process would last through November of 2007. He reported the first opportunity for the community to get into the process will be on Tuesday, January 24 at 7 P.M. at the World Café Session at White Plains High School.
He said Planning and Action groups would be formed to implement the Strategic Plan once the Strategic Plan Core Team develops the plan. The Planning and Action Groups, Superintendent of Schools Connors said would consist of school administrative personnel since they involved action on the part of district employees.
Barone described what was in store for Mr. and Mrs. and Ms. White Plains at the World Café Session January 24. He described the format as participants sitting at tables for a timed interval then moving to the next table to a new mix of people and exchanging ideas on issues facing the district to generate ideas, opinions, directions. Barone’s “facilators” would record the interplay of ideas and present them to the Strategic Core Group in February who would extrapolate “directions.”
Another device for input of the citizens will be a survey which citizens may take online beginning January 15, according to Superintendent of Schools Timothy Connors, on the City School District website, www.wpcsd.k12.ny.us.
Complacency Defeats Effective Strategic Planning
Barone has worked as a teacher, a principal and a Deputy Superintendent of Schools. His firm which he founded in 1988, Transformation Systems, Ltd., has facilitated strategic planning for schools in Italy, Spain, France, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and school districts around the country, he told the audience. He emphasized that because conditions in the district work now, is no guarantee they will stand the test of the future. He cautioned that “implementing strategic plans, is more important than having a plan,” and that “organizations that are complacent are in trouble,” noting that the basic education model in the country has not changed in 125 years.
Barone explained that the process of strategic planning “makes it possible to think outside the system.” Using his own personal weight and habits as a metaphor, Barone said his overweight was a product of his habits, and unless he is willing to change his habits of eating and exercise, he was not going to lose weight. He applied the same metaphor indirectly to the White Plains City School District, noting, “sometimes a system perpetuates a habit.”
Mindset: Nothing is Off Limits.
He encouraged citizens to get involved in the World Café night and the survey, and pleaded with administrators involved to go into the strategic planning process with the attitude that “nothing is off limits…including how we negotiate contracts,” as an example.
When two citizens brought up the notion that older teaching methods in grammar and math should not be thrown out, Barone disagreed, telling them that “you would not pass a Junior class math test today.” (This reporter would have to agree.)
The past is not the future. Leaders find the future.
“To honor the past, just because it was the past, is wrong,” Barone said, noting setting a goal is not the object of strategic planning, but in implementing steps to reach that goal, otherwise, he said “old habits (of the district) reclaim us, unless we develop new habits to replace them.”
Barone said most organizations go about business as usual unless they are confronted with “a sense of urgency” to change. He singled out General Motors as a company that suddenly has a sense of urgency, cautioning the district, “People inside the system are the last to see the crisis. To be a leader (meaning the School Board, the administration, the community) you have to be going someplace. You have to know what you’re doing to go some place. Leaders find a way to…a target so high that we won’t achieve it unless we change. That’s what leaders do. Leaders are looking long term.”
Some cautions about what Strategic Planning Can and Cannot do.
Liking the present district to a blue box, Barone said, “all current systems are designed to keep the blue box (as it is).”
Barone said the district had to throw out preconceived notions: “Let’s have a new lifestyle…you have to rethink and recycle our community. It is something done over time, otherwise you zig zag back and forth…you find common goals and reach common ground.”
Process
The “leader into the future” said the next step after a strategic plan is arrived at would be to establish a “framework for decision-making,” “align resources” for the achievement of the strategic plan, while discarding courses of action that would not fit in with that strategic plan. (“You have to be able to say no.”)
Barone pointed out how organizations change: the key is in the implementation of the Strategic Plan with Strategies, a way to measure the effect of those strategies (long a bone of contention between the White Plains Board of Education and the District Administration), and the Action to put the Strategic Plan into Effect. Barone said it was important to adjust the implementations in view of the results.
Barone said he was looking for citizens for the committees and the Strategic Plan Core Team, who “had a high degree of credibility, respected by people” and who were not “big mouths,” and “people of good will, ” without perceived positions, and persons “who feel they still have a lot to learn, and know the difference between a conversation and a debate.”
Citizens were urged to all show up at the World Cafe Meeting January 24 to begin the process.
