Provo City School District released its new Strategic Plan for 2025-2030 at the end of September and is now incorporating it into schools in the district.
The new plan outlined the district's three primary priorities: academic achievement, wellness and safety, and stewardship of resources. The plan also established core values of belonging, growth, empowerment, creativity and community.
Each priority in the plan has goals, strategies and key performance indicators set with yearly improvement projections from 2025-2030. Keeping these primary goals and values in mind, the school board plans to tie all new projects back to the strategic plan.
At a school board meeting held on Sept. 27 to finalize the plan, educators discussed some of the ways they hoped having a strategic plan would affect schools moving forward.
“This implementation plan — it’s not just a brochure, it’s a living document, it’s something that we’re actually going to be practicing," Gina Hales, a member of the Provo City School Board, said.
The plan should guide major discussions and decisions made by the schools and in district meetings, the school board said. Wendy Dau, superintendent of Provo City School District, presented the finalized plan at the school board meeting.
“With the time we spend as district leaders and the amount of money that we are spending on our expenditures, we should be able to see these strategic plan priorities and the amount of hours and money that we are spending on things,” Dau said. “As we’re making decisions about spending, I would hope that our questions come back as, ‘Which priority, which goal is this helping us accomplish?’”
Another goal of the strategic plan is to have a unifying purpose throughout the schools. Each school should be able to create their own, school-specific plans that emphasize the district’s priorities, while still focusing on the needs of their individual school, according to the plan.
“As the schools develop their school improvement plans for the following year, we want to adjust that template to make sure that they're connecting it to the three priorities. So, when you see that school improvement plan, it’s like we’re seeing our strategic plan,” Dau said. “This is what our district is doing, and this is what the school is doing to help the district accomplish their goals.”
Members of the Provo City School District hopes to be able to effectively communicate the strategic plan to the community so they can work together to accomplish the district's goals, the school board said. The district plans to make banners and signs highlighting the priorities and also to have the plan available in school offices and on their website.
The principals of each of the 18 traditional schools and five alternative schools have been educated on how they can align their school goals with the district’s strategic plan. Teachers in the district will have a meeting on Oct. 22 to learn how to incorporate those goals into their classrooms, the school board said.
“Everything is very vertically aligned, and we have to work together as a system and not as these separate siloed entities, which, traditionally, has kind of been how we have operated as a district,” Dau said.
Schools in the district already have improvement plans set in place, but with the addition of a district strategic plan, the efforts of every school in the district are more aligned.
Timpview High School had already been working on some of the proposed goals, Principal Momi Tu'ua said. She added she is excited to see more support from the district.
"It’s not so far of a shift from our school improvement plan. And that was done deliberately," she said.
The school board hopes to bring a more coordinated effort towards their goals and purposes, and the strategic plan sets forth a way to do that, Dau said.
“The goal is that we wanna create really well-educated students that have a lot of skills and a lot to contribute to our community,” Dau said. “We firmly believe our students are capable of it, our teachers are capable of it, our employees will each contribute to it. We come together to make Provo better — that’s really important to us.”