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The community of Unalaska is a busy place to live. Our community calendar is full of events and activities. About Town is your source for coverage of community events and sports. KUCB staff writes many of the stories, but we also accept contributions from community members for this section of our website. If you'd like to submit a story to About Town, send it to info@kucb.org.

School District Updates Vision and Goals

Brian Conwell

Last Friday and Saturday, UCSD’s Strategic Planning Committee met to revise the school district’s vision and goals for the next five years. Stakeholders from all around the community were present, offering a wide variety of perspectives. There were school board members, teachers, administrators, faculty, students, parents, and community members collaborating on this strategic plan. Facilitating it all was a representative from the Alaska Association of School Boards (AASB). The facilitator, Timi Tullis, was there to make sure discussion was productive and that the plan would be finished in time.

The first day of the meeting was where the school’s vision and mission statement was discussed and revised. The consensus of the group was that the school’s vision and mission hadn’t changed, but the mission needed to be made more readable. The current mission, although filled with good information, was too long and unapproachable. The solution was to keep most of the information, but to change the formatting to include bullet points.

The second day of the meeting started at 8 a.m. to finish work on the mission statement and begin work on the critical issues, aspirations, beliefs, and goals. To determine these four things, the group looked at the strengths of the district as well as the ways the district can improve. The group was able to build off of the previous strategic planning committee’s work and update parts of the plan that had changed over time. Some new critical issues include: staff recruitment and training, and literacy. The biggest issue remained funding, and the group recognized that funding is the issue that all other issues revolve around.

Work on aspirations began with the group looking at what an aspiration is. TimiTullis described an aspiration as a “pie in the sky” idea that our district will strive for. For example, during the last strategic planning session, an aspiration was that, “100% of Unalaska City School District’s students will graduate”. One goal that the group added this year was that “Unalaska City School District will strive to provide a quality education despite geographic and funding challenges.”

The beliefs of the school district was the longest section of the strategic plan, and covered what the district believes about students, learning, family and community, and individual rights and conduct. The group decided that the first belief should be, “We believe that students’ best interests should influence the decisions made in the school.” The updated beliefs were able to build off of the beliefs in the previous plans, with few changes.

The group looked through the school’s previous goals and again decided to build upon what previous strategic planning committees had done. The wording of the goals changed, but the intent of the goals largely stayed the same.

By the end of the planning sessions, the group was glad they finished and Timi Tullis thanked the group for the great discussion. She specifically thanked the students who came to offer their perspective. The updated strategic plan will be available soon, pending school board approval.

Brian Conwell provided student reporting for KUCB in 2016 and 2017, when he was a student at Unalaska City School District.
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