The Healdsburg Unified School District invited the public to
review and comment on its long term vision last weekend at an
education summit at Healdsburg High School.
More than 100 educators, parents and members of the community
came together in small groups to discuss Healdsburg 20/20, a plan
designed to help guide district leaders in providing students the
best possible education in the coming decades.
Or, simply put, “that every student have a great experience
every day and get to where they want to go after high school,” said
district superintendent Jeff Harding.
“No parent should choose to go to another district,” he said.
“Our schools should be so good a parent would be crazy to send
their children anywhere else.”
How will the district get there? Harding likened the process of
developing Healdsburg 20/20 to President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt’s New Deal, a plan he said began with objectives designed
to fix the economy rather than direct courses of action. The
action, he said, came later while leaders worked toward meeting
those objectives.
Healdsburg 20/20 focuses on five priority areas to improve
education, including powerful teaching and learning, honoring the
diverse community, forward-thinking education, the staff as the
district’s greatest resource and dynamic leadership working with an
engaged community. The audience was handed a packet that listed the
district’s current and future efforts at reaching each of these
five objectives.
New classes in the culinary arts and digital photography, for
example, support powerful teaching and learning. The packet listed
more than 100 projects or practices that further the five guiding
priorities, a list Harding said should grow as the vision is
adopted and followed.
“Our mission is so important we can’t spend months and years
talking about what we need to be doing,” he said. “We need to start
now.”
The district has spent the past nine months meeting with staff
and community groups to shape and define the vision. “It was our
intention to go out into the community and listen,” said Harding.
“In creating this plan we needed to know what ideal education
looked like in Healdsburg.”
Saturday’s Education Summit was called the culmination of this
public outreach. The audience was asked to review the packets to
find areas they supported and identify what the district had
missed. Each group was handed a large pad of paper and told to get
started.
For the next two hours these groups discussed everything from
immersion to teacher evaluation to nutrition to diversity. Opinions
varied widely from group-to-group, as one discussed merit pay for
teachers while another group spoke to why the district must not pay
for test results.
At the end of the summit these lists were collected and Harding
said the suggestions would help massage Healdsburg 20/20 before it
is presented to the school board early next year.
Members of the audience spoke well of the process and reassured
the district it is planning for the future and not just handling
day-to-day operations. “I like hearing that they have a plan for
the next 15 or 20 years that will adapt to what’s needed,” said
parent Bill Conklin, who has a daughter at the high school.
“They’re really planning off what the kids are going to need and
what the community will need.”
