Education and Strategic Planning

May the blessings of our Lord be upon you and your families!

Last week, I provided a different format as compared to my previous letters. I’d like to follow suit this week and take a moment to describe a very important task that I have asked the SAC (School Advisory Council) to undertake this year.

This year, as you may know, is our year to perform a strategic planning initiative. I hope that you have received the emails with the dates and times of the upcoming focus group sessions for the strategic planning. I strongly urge you to come to one of those sessions. Your input is extremely valuable to us as we move St. John’s forward.

But you may be asking yourself: What is strategic planning and why is it so important to St. John’s?

First, some background…While St. John’s sees itself first and foremost as a school, it is considered a nonprofit educational organization. We are not reliant upon government dollars to the extent that a public educational organization is and are not bound to the restrictions mandated by such a relationship. This frees us up, as a nonprofit educational organization, to allocate our resources in a way that best serves our particular mission statement. As you recall from last year, we rewrote our mission statement, and this was a critical first step in our effort to determine our future steps when it comes to deciding how to allocate our resources.

In essence, strategic planning flows from our efforts to define who we are through our mission statement. It defines specific steps to take to reach our goals described in our mission statement, and identifies how to most efficiently and effectively allocate our resources to reach those goals in the years to come.

Strategic planning forces us to take a hard look at the current realities, the environmental forces acting upon our school, and the collective wishes of our school community. It lays bare all of the issues facing our school, and sheds light on how to best overcome them with the ultimate goal of making us the very best Catholic school we can be.

Strategic planning cannot happen with only the voices of a select few individuals – it must have the collective voices of our entire school community. If only a few voices are heard, then the goals identified are only for the select few. We really do need to have as much input as we can in order for our strategic planning to be effective!

I thank you in advance for your participation in our focus groups as part of our strategic planning. This is your school, and we want to hear from you!

I hope that you have a safe and relaxing weekend. The school families remain in my constant prayers – may God bless you and keep you safe!

Blessings,
Dr. Sara Amodio