GUILDERLAND — The board of education here is proposing hiring a facilitator to lead the district in a strategic-planning initiative, with a projected cost of $45,000.

The purpose of the initiative, Superintendent Marie Wiles said at the Jan. 31 school board meeting, would be to come up with a vision — complete with practical goals and tasks intended to fulfill those goals — for “the experience that we want our children to have in the future.”

The initiative is “absolutely not,” Wiles emphasized at the meeting, a revival of the discussion about closing a school. “This is not about bricks and mortar,” she said. “This is about what happens to kids in our district in the future, although it could affect bricks and mortar the next time we’re doing a capital project.”

In 2014, as the district had empty classrooms because of declining enrollment, consultant Paul Seversky was hired to do a facilities, or capacity, study.

Seversky presented a controversial report that concluded wtih six scenarios. One would have maintained the status quo, while each of the other five proposed saving $1.2 million annually by closing an elementary school. Four scenarious would have closed Altamont Elementary, and one would have shut Lynnwood.

Months of protest followed, and the school board set aside Seversky’s recommendations and instead set up committees to look at various possible ways to use the empty space. Ultimately, a preschool program was chosen and is now using rooms at Pine Bush and Altamont elementary schools and Farnsworth Middle School.

Wiles described the focus of the initiative on Tuesday by phone as thinking about “what should our instructional format look like going forward.”

To her knowledge, Wiles said, the district has never done a formal strategic planning process. She said, “Great organizations never stop planning for the future.”

Proposal

Robert J. Hendriks III of the Educational Legacy Planning Group, who would facilitiate the initiative, made a presentation to the board at a special meeting held on Jan. 25. He outlined his experience doing strategic and long-range planning for other local school districts and discussed what would be needed and the potential benefits.

The base fee for his services would be $40,000, Hendriks said in response to a question from board member Barbara Fraterrigo. By the project’s end, he would plan to produce, he said, not a huge document that in many cases turns into what he termed “shelf art,” but a 10- or 15-minute video that articulates the findings of the initiative, together with a summary of just a few pages. The cost for the video would be an additional $500 per edited minute, with a cap of $6,000, he said.

Hendriks’s background includes, he said, working on long-range and strategic planning with schools including Saratoga, South Colonie, Duanesburg, Schenectady, North Colonie, and many others.

He said that each district’s plan evolves from the unique situation and needs of that district, and is not a blueprint that he comes up with himself. He proposes, he said, that “[we] not think about it in terms of a 770-square-foot rectilinear space, but let’s rise above that and, if we could remake it, how would we remake it? And then, once we understand how we would remake it, how can we get there, notwithstanding the challenges that stand in the way?” He said that the process of considering these issues “ends up changing people.”

Board President Christine Hayes asked Hendriks if everyone who wants to participate in the process would be able to.

He answered that they would, over time. Inviting everyone to an event is basically the same as inviting no one, he said, since, if invitations are too broad, they are ignored. He said, “All of our major meetings need to be structured, and they need to be RSVP.”

When asked about this on Tuesday, Wiles agreed with Hendriks’s assessment that too-broad invitations are unsuccessful in engaging the community.  She said that two years ago the district hosted a summit on the topic of the future and excess space and reached out to 100 people “wisely chosen from around our catchment area” and had 90 of them come to the event.

Evolution of the idea

The board held a mini-retreat this summer, Wiles said Tuesday, and one of the goals that emerged from it was to form overarching goals and set a course for the future.

After the retreat, the board asked the communications committee, Wiles said, to look into ways to do that.

At Jan. 31’s meeting, the board’s vice president, Christopher McManus, said that the committee then looked at how other districts have developed their goals through strategic planning.

The board issued a request for proposals in the fall, and approved forming a committee of teachers, parents, administrators, and board members to interview respondents to the RFP, McManus said. The board members who had served on the committee were, he said, Judy Slack and Barbara Fraterrigo.

There were five responses, Wiles said.

Two were “‘no’ out of the gate,” Wiles said, because one was priced at $200,000 and the other at $140,000. “It didn’t matter what they did, we could not get past that sticker shock,” she said.

The committee interviewed two of the remaining three applicants, Wiles said, and Hendriks rose above the other in terms of his experience and his emphasis on structuring the initiative around district needs. Hendriks’s bid was higher, she said.

There is no particular deadline for making a decision about whether to proceed, Wiles said at the Jan. 31 meeting, although when the idea was conceived, it was thought that it would be helpful to have the initiative in place to inform the board’s work of developing the 2018-19 budget.

She mentioned that the mid-March superintendent’s day would be a “built-in opportunity” to kick off the initiative “if we do go down this road,” since it is one of the few times that all faculty and staff are together in one room. Otherwise, she said, it could be done “piecemeal over the next few months,” or held off until the start of the next school year in September.  

Board responses

Fraterrigo spoke about return on investment, saying that she had looked at the website of the Saratoga school district’s strategic plan — which, she said, Hendriks had “really prided himself on” —and found, “We’ve really done about 90 percent of what was on those two or three sheets of paper. And it’s going to cost us $50,000 or more to do.” Fraterrigo said that she wondered about the need for a professional facilitator when “we have so much talent in the district.”

To that, Wiles responded, “We all have totally full days doing day-to-day stuff” and are too busy to “actually think about a process that would be comprehensive in that way.”

Wiles also had told The Enterprise on Tuesday that “An outside person is objective. They have no personal connections to the school district.” She said that someone who has done this many times, with many different districts, can bring “a lot of perspective.”

Board member Allan Simpson said that his biggest fear is that this initiative will end up “like the capacity study” that the board undertook in 2014. In the case of that earlier study, he said, “I thought we were going to be able to come up with a plan that we were going to be able to execute, and it ended up being just one big debacle that I didn’t enjoy one iota. I thought it was a total waste of time, I thought it was a total waste of money, and I am very fearful of that.”

He suggested that board members would “really need to be committed to it.” Simpson said of Seversky’s work, “We were not committed to that capacity study.”

Simpson said, “If we aren’t able to do what the guy says we need to do, which is take ownership of our plan, and be able to use him as a facilitator to make sure we stay focused on our goals, and to be able to set out a plan that’s measurable and doable, then we might just as well take the $40,000 and spread it on the parking lot out there and let the birds peck at it.”

Simpson said that not only the board, but also teachers, needed to be strongly behind the plan in order to proceed.

Wiles agreed and said that, if the board is not enthusiastic about it, the district should not undertake it.

Wiles said at the Jan. 31 meeting, “I know $40,000 is a lot, but we have nearly a $200 million budget in a single year. So, multiply that by the next five years out — to use $40,000 to make sure we use those hundreds of millions well, to me is a good investment.”