NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Buhler USD 313 Superintendent Cindy Couchman told Hutch Post they are in the middle of updating the district's strategic plan.
"It has been a process," Couchman said. "We started it a couple months ago by putting together a survey and we are using the Kansas Association of School Boards and they are facilitating this process. They come in and they create a survey. They actually distribute the survey. Obviously, we help push it out to our staff and our community and our parents. It was pushed out on social media, sent through email. We gathered a bunch of data. In fact, we had a huge response. We had like 1,100 surveys returned, which is fantastic response in our community."
KASB then makes sure the data is able to be used for further work.
"We've had two focus groups where we had about 45 community members, parents, staff members," Couchman said. "We tried to make sure that we had different various factions represented on that focus group. Then they've spent two evenings in the last few weeks looking at that data, narrowing it down to themes, creating action plans, suggested action plans and suggested measurements. That's where we're at right now."
The final decisions will be at the school board level.
"We will look at it as an administrative group and also as a board of education," Couchman said. "In the end, the board of education will then kind of tweak and refine our final action plan and our themes. Right now, the four themes that they were looking at were student opportunities, operations and resources. That would be everything from budget to, I suppose, facilities would be underneath there, to upkeep, to anything having to do with that. Then we also had culture and community engagement. We'll see whether or not those stay with those four, or if we narrow it down to three."
The intent is once they have direction from the board, an administrator will take the lead on each of the remaining themes.