One Superintendent’s Take on School District Planning
When I interviewed for my current position as the superintendent in Northport-East Northport in the fall of 2023, I scoured the website for information on the district’s Strategic Plan. What I found was a site dedicated to a Strategic Plan that was adopted in 2017. The site had some of the goals that were developed and approved and links to Board presentations that led to the plan’s adoption.
The Mission, Vision and Board Beliefs
remained in various printed materials since its adoption, and the mission did largely
take root as a driver of the district’s belief system. However, there were no
subsequent presentations or updates that I could find, nor were there
established benchmarks or agreed upon monitoring systems in place. The district
did not set annual goals and the schools, while identifying broad annual goals,
had no consistent expectations related to school improvement plans.
This phenomenon is not in any way uncommon
in districts and schools across the country. Districts and schools
traditionally have invested energy in developing a Strategic Plan (often five
years in length), created lengthy documents with a large number of ambitious
goals, patted themselves on the back, and five years later, frantically
embarked upon a scavenger hunt to obtain evidence that they did anything that
they said that they were going to do.
My Board communicated discomfort with lack
of evidence of to support student growth during my onboarding process. It
actually established a committee to develop a data dashboard prior to my
arrival, which was adopted in the spring of 2024 and will almost certainly be
revised as our district continues to build out its Profile of a Graduate.
A Move to Action
Fullan (2012) cautions, “Beware of Fat
Plans.” Reeves (2009) states, “The size and the prettiness of the plan is
inversely related to the quality of action and the impact on student learning”
(p. 81). It was important for me to be cognizant of this philosophy as we moved
forward. As early as 2004, Schmoker made the case that Professional Learning
Communities were the key to overcome the flaws of traditional strategic planning.
Upon my arrival, I established an approach
to creating a coherent system in the district that focused heavily on
professional learning and building a collaborative culture with three entities:
the Board, First Team (my instructional administrators) and teachers.
Board
The focus of our first Board Retreat in
July of 2024 was Future-Focused Learning. Ray McNulty of the Successful Practices
Network, co-author of America’s Next Dream (2026) facilitated this
retreat. One actionable outcome was establishing Future-Focused Board
Priorities.
The focus of our second Board Retreat in
July of 2025 was the Professional Learning Communities Model and was
facilitated by Jason Andrews, a Solution Tree consultant and practicing
superintendent in the State of New York. By the end of this retreat, the Board
refined its priorities and also created specific district goals for the 2025-26
school year.
The focus of our most recent July 2026
Board Retreat was the development of a Strategic
Framework,
again facilitated by McNulty. The recently approved Framework followed an
intense year-long community engagement effort called COMPASS (see below). I
applaud the Board for its work in this area. I truly believe that it did an
outstanding job encapsulating and honoring the ongoing work of our educators, the
history and traditions of the district and incorporating community feedback.
McNulty set the stage by introducing the tension
among the three forces that impact school districts: The Weight of the Past,
The Push of the Present, and the Pull of the Future. He stressed the importance
of placing greater priority on the Pull of the Future over the other two,
something that is often a challenge for school districts. He also emphasized
that in a VUCA World (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous), it is
important to be clear about where one is going but flexible on how to get
there.
Northport-East Northport Strategic Framework
First Team
All of our administrative meetings are
professional learning workshops designed to build leadership and support our
organizational goals. We began our learning with First Team by establishing a
common understanding of what we mean by Future-Focused Learning. We then moved
into establishing an organizational definition of innovation and studying the
underlying principles of innovation theory. We adopted the District Management
Group’s definition of innovation: “Achievement of pattern-breaking performance
improvement that can be scaled and sustained.”
Next, we introduced change management
strategies and principles, based largely on the work of Dr. Michael Fullan, and delved into the nuts and bolts of school
improvement planning and how we were going to organize our work in
Northport-East Northport, which is through implementation of the Professional
Learning Communities Model (DuFour, et. al., 2016). Throughout, we worked to
build our internal capacity to function effectively as a true team, which
included studying Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (2002).
Our district joined the state’s Solution
Tree Network, and, at this point, nearly all of our administrators have
attended formal training and participated in webinars to increase understanding
of PLC principles. Brian Stack is our district PLC coach, and a primary focus
this year will be to expand and cultivate greater leadership at the teacher
level.
One of the early outcomes of the work of First
Team was the Student-Centered Success Framework, which was developed to create
a visual that portrayed the roles of every member of the organization that kept
learners at the center of all decisions.
Northport-East Northport Student-Centered Success Framework
This year, the focus of our administrator
professional learning work will be Coherence (Fullan and Quinn, 2016).
According to Fullan and Quinn (2016), coherence is not structure, alignment or
strategy, but rather “a shared depth of understanding about the purpose and
nature of the work.” (p. 1) Fullan and Quinn (2016) identify four “right
drivers” for schools, districts and systems: Focusing Direction, Cultivating
Collaborative Cultures, Deepening Learning and Securing Accountability. The
purpose of utilizing Coherence as the anchor resource for the team this
year is to build off of the work that has gotten us to this point and bring the
Framework to life with intentionality.
Teachers
Simultaneously, we gradually introduced
PLC principles to our teachers. During the 2024-25 school year, we utilized
contractually agreed upon time, that had not been used intentionally or
consistently to encourage teacher collaboration. We started by introducing
teacher choice in a pseudo action research model—a baby step, but a necessary
one.
During the second half of the year, we
started to introduce SMART Goals and “PLC Lite.” The elementary school teachers
were used to a common planning period in their schedule, which accelerated
their progress through effectively utilizing time that reflected true PLC
dialogue, and the high school had a professional period per contract. Like
Mondays, this was under and inconsistently utilized. But our high school and
district office administration began to gradually increase expectations for use
of this time that more closely resembled PLC principles. The quagmire is our
middle schools. Outside of Mondays, there is no collaboration time built in to
their day.
The district administration will present a
recommendation to the Board for a revised middle school schedule that includes
dedicated time for team collaboration, but it will come at a cost. Until we have
more precise information, we cannot assume that this will become a reality.
We were intentional about identifying
keynote speakers for our opening Superintendent Conference Days. In 2024, Dr.
Bill Daggett, Founder and Executive Chair of the Successful Practices Network,
delivered a keynote address on Future-Focused Learning. In 2025, Eric Sheninger,
Founder and CEO of Aspire Change EDU, delivered a keynote address on Personalized
Learning. This fall, Stack presented to teachers by grade level, and Luis Cruz,
from Solution Tree, will address our teachers to help deepen our collective
understanding of Professional Learning Communities.
The COMPASS
Community Engagement Process
The Northport-East Northport district has
been experiencing years of declining enrollment and financial pressures due to
legal settlement with the local power plant that resulted in a shift of the
local tax burden to our homeowners. A social media warrior began to have undue
influence on community perceptions of the district, and I felt that it was
important to attempt to bring the community together and establish a path
forward that identified where we wanted to go and built trust, as opposed to
continuing to re-litigate the past. The Board supported the recommendation, and
the district partnered with Discovery Works to support the
work.
COMPASS was driven by a
Facilitating Team of community members, which delivered a report to the Board
on June 18, 2026. The Facilitating Team largely created and led the effort,
with some direction and support from the administration. COMPASS featured
student, parent and staff Focus Groups, two online community surveys, five
in-person community engagement sessions and an online engagement that
synthesized and summarized the five in-person sessions.
The Facilitating Team relayed 12 community
priorities to the Board that became the foundation of the District’s Strategic
Framework:
1)
Keep students at the core of every long-rang
decision.
2)
Protect the breadth of opportunity that makes
Northport-East Northport strong.
3)
Make future-focused learning practical and
connected to life-readiness.
4)
Continuously evaluate technology to strengthen
learning without replacing human connection.
5)
Be careful with class cuts that affect class
size, support services or student access.
6)
Use clear evidence before changing programs,
courses or staffing.
7)
If reductions are necessary, start with the
least disruptive options.
8)
Plan facilities around students, safety and
optimal use of space.
9)
Build community understanding before pursuing
major revenue or funding changes.
10) Continue improving how
decisions are explained to the community.
11) Use this report as a living guide
during the long-range planning process.
12) Continue community engagement as a part of how decisions are made.
Ensure a Common Organizational Definition of Key Terms
I am a big believer in establishing common
definitions for key organizational concepts. Without that, people will rely on
their personal understanding or experience. Not necessarily wrong or bad, a
system cannot have 100 or more different interpretations of the things that
they believe are most important to their success.
During my personal journey to deepen my understanding of what schools can do to support Future-Focused Learning, I have been fortunate to experience a range of ideas from a number of thought leaders, from Dr. Bill Daggett, Michael Horn, Mike Maddock, Michael Tuschman, and others. I synthesized what I consider to be the key components of Future-Focused Learning into a model that can be made accessible to teachers into seven constructs: Life Readiness, Skills-Focused, Teacher Collaboration, Personalized Learning, Equity, Innovation and Interdisciplinary Learning.
Seven Constructs of Future-Focused Learning
I provided an example of how Northport-East
Northport adopted a common definition of Innovation. It is obvious that we
embrace PLCs as our vehicle to support Teacher Collaboration. We operationalize
Life Readiness through our Profile of a Graduate. Another example of our
attempt to create clarity for each of the components of this model is
Personalized Learning.
Northport-East Northport has adopted Sheninger’s
Model (2021), which defines High Agency Personalized Learning as a combination
of student choice, voice, path, place and pace.
Summary
In summary, I suggest that those who are about to embark on creating or revising a district plan consider the following:
- Keep it succinct.
- Utilize an outside facilitator. The superintendent should avoid being perceived as superseding the authority of the Board or imposing a personal agenda onto the community above and beyond the scope of his/her professional responsibility.
- Focus on building a culture of collaboration and team learning at all levels of the organization. My recommendation is to embrace the Professional Learning Communities Model as the vehicle for this.
- Commit to a Future-Focused approach however you decide to define it. Fullan talks about “The Moral Imperative.” I believe that we have a moral imperative to prepare students for their futures, not our past.
- Avoid language that connotes previous and/or prevailing understanding of what a traditional strategic plan looks(ed) like. Create a guiding framework that establishes where you want to go but is flexible on how you get there.
- Ensure that a defined, comprehensive program of community engagement precedes any formal adoption of a Strategic Framework. The Board of Education needs this to publicly support future administrative recommendations. However, do not be surprised if participation in the process is not at the level hoped for. People tend not to engage unless or until they have a personal issue that affects them directly.
- Utilize visuals to represent important concepts, deepen collective understanding and promote consistent communication.
- Ensure a collective understanding of the priorities identified in the plan.
References
Dalton,
R. and McNulty, R. (2026). America’s Next Dream. Fort Worth, TX: Game
Changer Publishing.
Discovery
Works Collaborative. www.discoveryworkscollaborative.com.
District
Management Group. www.dmgroupk12.com.
DuFour,
R., et. al. (2016). Learning by Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning
Communities at Work (3rd ed.). Bloomington, IN:
Solution Tree Press.
Fullan,
M. (2011). Change Leader. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Fullan,
M. and Quinn, J. (2016). Coherence. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
Lencioni,
P. (2002). The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. San Francisco, CA:
Jossey-Bass.
Northport-East
Northport Unified Free School District. www.northport.k12.ny.us.
Reeves,
D. (2009). Leading Change in Your School. Alexandria, VA: Association
for
Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Schmoker,
M. (February, 2004). “The Tipping Point: From Feckless Reform to Substantive
Instructional Improvement.” Phi Delta Kappan (Vol.
85, No. 6, pp. 424-432).
Sheninger,
E. (2021). Disruptive Thinking in Our Classrooms. Chicago, IL: ConnectEDD.
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