A Strategic Process

for Creating a Quality School in Every Neighborhood

Executive Summary

The San Diego Unified School District provides an education to more than 117,000 students from pre-school to high school at more than 180 schools throughout the City of San Diego. In 2009, the Board of Education adopted the Vision 2020 for Student Success. This Vision outlines five areas that are critical to give the third graders in 2011 an opportunity for future success at the time of their high school graduation in the year 2020.

Vision 2020 provides a broad outline for district goals to create quality schools in every neighborhood in the following areas:

  • Focus on Student Achievement
  • Schools as Neighborhood Learning Centers
  • Parents and Volunteers Engaged with Learning
  • Effective Teachers in Active Learning Communities
  • A Supportive District

In early 2011, the Board of Education directed the superintendent to initiate a process to translate the Vision 2020 into a collaborative plan to create a quality school in every neighborhood.

This Strategic Process is intended to be more than just another plan that will sit on shelves and computers throughout the district. The choice of the word “Process” is intentional and is meant to convey action, direction and movement rather than just a passive plan for the future.

What follows in the Strategic Process is a guideline for implementing research-based strategies that will provide for continuous improvement of our schools during the next five years. The overarching goal of the process is to identify successful schools where collaborative community based strategies are working to increase student achievement and then bring those strategies to all schools in the district.

We must create a shared sense of urgency to expand and transfer the research-based strategies that are working for students in some schools to all schools in the district. This Strategic Process seeks to build on the collaborative learning teams that are succeeding in many of our schools to transform and improve student learning in all of our schools, rather than imposing the latest popular school reform strategy from the top.
 

Kids working

Process

  1. A systematic series of actions directed to some end.
  2. A continuous action, operation, or series of changes taking places in a definite manner.
Dictionary.com

Please Note

The San Diego Unified School District – Strategic Process is a working document, a work in progress. This December, 2011 draft is the product of diverse working groups who devoted long hours during the summer of 2011 to develop the Objectives, Strategies and Benchmarks for the 12 Indicators of Quality Schools. The Superintendent thanks all of the members of the Working Groups for their dedication to this important project.

During the fall of 2011, this draft Process document will continue to evolve. The Board of Education will review this draft and provide further direction. The Strategic Process Draft will then be presented to all Cluster Groups for review and input during the following months as part of the district’s commitment to engage the community in this vision to create quality schools in every neighborhood.

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