The Complete Guide to Creating an Action Plan for School District Goals

“One of the beauties of teaching is that there is no limit to one’s growth as a teacher, just as there is no knowing beforehand how much your students can learn.” ~ Herbert Kohl

In any school district, education is most effective when everybody within the system—teachers, paraeducators, administrators, office and support staff, as well as parents and students—works together toward a common goal or set of goals. When everyone is on the same page, student outcomes are likely to be good. When there’s disagreement or dissonance, student learning is negatively impacted.

At Alludo, we know that providing teachers with training and support in the form of professional development is a key component of effective education. When teachers are afforded the opportunity to learn and grow in their jobs, they’re less likely to leave and more likely to be transformative in the classroom. Part of your strategic planning should include a budget for professional development.

Since strategic planning and budgeting can be challenging, we have created this complete guide to help you with creating an action plan for school district goals.

Table of Contents

1. What is a School District Action Plan?
   
2. What Are Models of School District Planning?
   1. Plan on a Page
   2. VMOSA
   3. Five-Step
3. How Do You Create a School District Action Plan?
4. What Does a School District Action Plan Look Like?
5. Alludo's Take
6. Create an Effective Action Plan for Your School District With Alludo

What is a School District Action Plan?

Let’s start by reviewing what a school district action plan is and what it should include. Action plans are commonly used in business and have made their way into the educational system as a useful tool for the pursuit of school district goals and initiatives.

An effective action plan for your school district should involve three things:

• Setting goals for the district and for individual schools
• Deciding on actions that will help you achieve your stated goals
• Mobilizing the necessary resources to take the chosen actions

In the business world, strategic plans might be decided and implemented by a few key people. In education, school districts are most likely to succeed if they bring the larger community into the process of strategic planning and into the pursuit of common goals. Everyone in your school district should be working together to educate students as effectively as possible. 

Stakeholders in any school district include district leaders, including the superintendent and assistant superintendent, as well as school boards, school administrators, teachers, paraeducators, office and school support staff, parents, and students. A strategic plan can’t be successful if these people aren’t involved in it in some way.

What Are Models of School District Planning?

Before you create an action plan to help you achieve your school district goals, you should know that there are three main models that can be used to create an action plan.

Plan on a Page

A plan on a page is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a one-page document that outlines your school district goals on one side of the page and the actions required to achieve them on the other. 

Each goal you list in your plan should be a SMART goal: Specific, Attainable, Measurable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. Here’s an example of a SMART goal that might appear on a school district action plan.

By June of 2023, there will be an increase of 10% in the number of students reporting that they find school to be a safe and caring environment.

With a one-page plan, you may not have room to list your current metrics in each category. The action plan for our sample goal might include creating student focus groups, conducting surveys, and implementing suggestions from students about what might make them feel safe and cared for when they’re at school.

VMOSA

VMOSA stands for Vision, Mission, Objectives, Strategies, and Action Plans. It’s a type of strategic planning that takes a big picture view of the school district, allowing everyone involved to understand your school district’s vision and break down what must happen in order for that vision to become a reality.

You can look at a VMOSA plan as a cascading plan because its name also describes the order in which information should appear. Here’s a rundown of what each of these terms means in practice:

• Vision describes your school district’s ideal scenario and should be summed up in a single, compelling statement. An example might be: A school district where every child has the opportunity to shine. It’s common for vision statements to use inspirational language.
• Mission involves a statement that indicates how your school district will bring its vision to life. An example might be: To meet every student where they are and provide them with the guidance and support they need to succeed in life. Language in your mission should be more practical but still at a high level. Specifics will come later.
• Objectives should provide details about the school district’s mission by stating clear SMART goals and objectives. An example would be: To improve student test scores by 10% by the end of the school year by providing small group tutoring and practice tests. You can name as many objectives as you want, but each should be relevant and achievable.
• Strategies involve ways to achieve your objectives and you should have at least one for each objective you identify. An example would be: To make students more comfortable with standardized tests by implementing a peer tutoring system.
• Action Plans outline specific steps in a strategy. An example would be: Recruit 15-20 peer tutoring volunteers and train them to help their fellow students.

As you can see, VMOSA allows school districts to identify and carry out their vision by breaking each piece of the plan down into specific steps that may be completed in pursuit of the vision.

Five-Step

The five-step model of strategic planning involves asking questions and answering them in detail to create an achievable action plan:

• How are we doing? The response should include metrics and other detailed information that will help you understand where you are in terms of your school district goals.
• How much better do we want to be? Here, you should use your starting metrics to describe, in detail, what your goals are. For example, if you had test scores in the 70th percentile, your “how much better” statement might say, “We want to have average test scores in the 80th percentile by the end of the school year.”
• How might we achieve this? Looking at your “how much better” statement, you’ll need to brainstorm some ideas that will help you achieve your stated goal. You might conduct regular practice tests, use small group instruction to help students understand the test format, or get parents involved in helping their kids prepare for a test.
• Planning and action. This section should include detailed steps to be taken to help you achieve your goals.
• Implementation and review. During the implementation stage, you’ll need to gather necessary resources. As you launch your action plan, you’ll also need to track key metrics and use them to adjust your action plan to be sure you achieve your goals.

The five-step plan is a useful one if you’re not sure of your vision yet because answering questions can help you focus your efforts where they’re most needed.

How Do You Create a School District Action Plan?

The steps to create a school district action plan are relatively simple. We suggest starting with a plan model to use to communicate your plan, and then taking the following steps:

1. Analyze the resources you have available to achieve your goals. Your resources will certainly involve some amount of money from the school district budget. You may also have resources that include teacher professional development, dedicated parents, and enthusiastic teachers, as well as supplies and other practical resources.
2. Analyze metrics and set targets. Next, you’ll need to review your district metrics to understand where you are, and set targets for where you want to be. Remember to be specific and set a timeframe for each target.
3. Establish a plan of action. At this stage, you’ll identify a strategy to pursue your most important goals and create a high-level plan to achieve them.
4. Develop actionable tasks and activities. Here’s where you’ll break down your plan into small and specific tasks. Be sure to make each task achievable and think about who can take it on.
5. Monitor and evaluate progress. Regardless of which type of action plan you create, you’ll need to monitor your progress and track metrics to understand which tactics are working and which are not.

The process of creating an action plan isn’t complicated but it does require attention to detail and specificity.

What Does a School District Action Plan Look Like?

Let’s look at what a school district action plan might look like. For this example, we’re using the plan-on-a-page model.

This is only one option to organize a one-page action plan—and of course, you could use one of the other models we discussed. The key is to work from your vision down to make sure that you’re thinking big while planning small, actionable steps to help you achieve your vision.

Alludo’s Take

Creating an action plan for school district goals is necessary if you want to improve student learning and outcomes while reducing teacher turnover and burnout. Whichever plan model you choose, teacher professional development should have a place in your plan because you need teachers to achieve any goals you set.

The Alludo platform provides a convenient and affordable way to offer professional development opportunities to teachers, administrators, and staff in your district. With prices starting at under $5 per adult learner per month, you can provide PD for hundreds of educators each year for less than it would cost you to offer traditional PD to just a few teachers.

Keep in mind that when teachers support your district goals, you’re likely to achieve them because they’re the ones in the classrooms with students and are in the best position to provide students with the support they need to excel.

Create an Effective Action Plan for Your School District with Alludo

Creating an action plan for school district goals is the first step toward achieving your most important goals. Whether you want to improve student test scores, promote equity, or decrease teacher turnover, adding professional development to the mix can help you get to where you need to be.

Are you looking for a cost-effective way to improve professional development in your district? Alludo can help! Click here to get your free trial of Madagascar, our online asynchronous professional development platform.