The meetings will help the district set broad goals for the next several years.
Meeting dates have been set for the Evesham Township School District’s next round of strategic planning.
According to Superintendent John Scavelli Jr., all members of the community are welcome to join district officials at Marlton Middle School on Oct. 15, Oct. 29 and Nov. 12 from 7 to 8:30 p.m.
“This fall we plan on holding strategic planning sessions again as we prepare for the next several years of challenges that we’re going to face as a school district,” Scavelli said.
The district last engaged in a district-wide strategic planning series in the spring of 2012.
At the time, a team of 78 parents, students, community members, teachers, staff and administrators met multiple times during the course of several months to elicit feedback from Evesham’s stakeholders about the future of the district.
That strategic planning series resulted in the district’s Goals 2017 strategic alignment plan, which offered a broad set of directions for district officials to use to guide the district for five years from 2012 to 2017.
Goals 2017 focused on providing the district with an action plan to “grow and develop” core goals of curriculum, instruction and assessment, student achievement, fiscal resources and district operations, school and district culture and district communication.
At various points throughout this past year, Scavelli has briefly discussed the potential of the ETSD scheduling another round of strategic planning to create a plan to replace the now expired Goals 2017.
Scavelli also recently spoke about the need for a new round of strategic planning in July, when the ETSD Board of Education was forced to contend with a reduction of $815,000 in state aid that was already budgeted for the district’s 2018–2019 school year.
Those cuts came under an agreement by the governor and legislature to enact a new school funding bill meant to help “underfunded” school districts in the state realize more state aid monies and reduce the state aid monies going to “overfunded” school districts.
According to Scavelli, the ETSD lost funding due to the formula weighing the school district’s declining enrollment against increases in Evesham’s municipal property wealth (ratables) and increases in the personal wealth of the township’s residents.
To facilitate the upcoming strategic planning sessions in October and November, the district has hired education consultants Charles Ivory and Gerald Woehr.
According to Scavelli, Ivory was part of the district’s previous strategic planning sessions in 2012, and Woehr helped lead the board in team-building exercises around 2011.
Ivory and Woehr also recently helped guide neighboring Mt. Laurel’s kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school district through strategic planning sessions in the fall of the 2017–2018 school year.
Similar to Evesham’s upcoming strategic planning sessions, Mt. Laurel Schools invited community members to attend three community meetings last fall to help identify district goals for the future and create a plan that would help guide district officials as they moved toward achieving those goals.
According to Scavelli, further notice of the upcoming strategic planning sessions will be circulated throughout the community before the date of the first meeting.
“All are welcome to participate,” Scavelli said.
