Vision Statement! Mission Statement! Step by Step Goals and Objectives! What’s so important about this process that we started developing more than two months ago? If we paint over the old vision “providing a quality education in an academically supportive and safe environment” will our students suddenly break out in song and score straight 4’s on all the WASL’s? Probably not--but working through this process is certainly forcing us to take a realistic look at the barriers to learning that our kids face. Poverty, drug abuse, and lack of motivation plague our kids and stalk our community. This is about more than some words painted on the wall. This is about our dreams and our students! This is about success for tomorrow and hope for the future.
Our staff takes this seriously. We’ve worked together and individuals have come forward with ideas. Our school improvement committee has developed a partial vision statement that came from our staff in-service day: “Building Responsibility, Respect and Resilience with inspiration; Every One! Every Day!” This is a vision that rings true for us and resonates with our community, but it says nothing about student achievement and according to the research that I looked at, it may just be too broad.
One of the best sites I found had been posted in 1995. I read through the article and discovered that at Hollibrook Elementary School in Eastbrook, Texas, the school members worked together to make the school a high-achieving learning environment where the culture of the students is valued and supported. I looked further and found the Audubon Elementary in Baton Rouge, Louisiana which has set a mission statement that includes in part that: “The school has a shared mission to serve all students with high-quality, interactive, in-depth, and engaging instructional approaches.” This work was researched and written by Kent Peterson, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
All of us worry--if we spend too long on the vision statement will we ever get to the mission? Both of the schools I read about included student learning in their statement. Perhaps the addition of those words will push our statement into life:
We’ll get out the ladders and we’ll stir up the paint–we won’t just be painting words. We’ll be painting a vision that can and should change our lives and the lives of our students.
Pamelia Valentine is a guest blogger and teacher in the Shelton School District.
Previous Blogs:
Gettin' Visionary with School Improvement
Improving My Notion of School Improvement