As we rapidly approach the end of another school year, I hope you have experienced a true sense of success with your students. Education is often viewed by those outside the system through a factory analogy. I've always thought of it as more akin to agriculture. It strikes me that our work with students is more like nurturing plants than building widgets. From that perspective, much of your work with students this year won't fully blossom or bear fruit for many years. With that fact in mind, both farming and teaching seem to be endeavors which require faith that current efforts will pay off in the future.
In a similar vein, our staff has spent significant time and energy during the past year working on an activity that we hope will pay future benefits for the ESD, our clients and the children we serve. The focus of those efforts has been the development of a new ESD 113 strategic plan. Through this planning process we have reviewed and revised our mission statement, we have analyzed a variety of data including input from clients through both focus groups and surveys, and we have identified agency-wide priorities for the future. While we haven't finalized the wording of these goals and we still have work to do with the strategies to implement them, I can share the goal areas that we have identified. We will plan around four goals in the following areas:
- Client Satisfaction
- Student Achievement
- Staff Satisfaction
- Program Development
Client satisfaction was selected based on the belief that we can only succeed in achieving our mission if you, our clients, see added value in the services we provide. While the focus groups and survey results indicate a very high level of satisfaction in most areas, some areas were lower than we would like. We also recognized through the planning process that we need a more systematic way of regularly gathering this kind of feedback from our clients.
Assisting schools with improving student achievement is at the heart our agency mission, so it will always be a major part of why we exist. That work takes on an even higher priority within the current high stakes accountability environment facing both students and educators. This goal reflects the need to continue finding ways to support our clients as they face these new challenges.
A goal related to staff satisfaction recognizes that the quality of ESD services is directly determined by the quality and productivity of our staff. With that in mind, our staff survey indicated a need for improvement in some areas such as internal communication.The program development goal area reflects the need for an agency such as ours to constantly evaluate potential new services needed by our clients. Several potential services were included in the client survey, and that input will provide a good starting point with this goal. We also recognize a need to be more systematic in how we consider and implement any new services.
We are pleased with the results achieved thus far with our strategic planning process. The four goals seem like the right areas of focus for us during the next few years. Hopefully, our emphasis on those goals will bear fruit for the ESD, our clients and the children we serve.