By Sym Posey | The Birmingham Times
Birmingham City Schools on Friday unveiled a new five-year plan to increase student achievement, improve customer service and boost accountability across the system and use yardsticks that will measure results.
“Our goal is to improve what we are doing to support the success of our students, families, and community,” said Dr. Mark Sullivan, superintendent of Birmingham City Schools.
The “Success Starts Here” plan includes five priority areas:
- Giving students the best chance to reach their potential academically.
- Enhancing students’ sense of well-being.
- Improving customer service throughout the school system, both with our families and with our community partners.
- Developing and keeping highly effective teachers.
- Boosting accountability across the district.
“These priority areas don’t reflect the totality of what we do and what we will continue to do in our schools,” Sullivan said. “But these are the core areas we identified with our stakeholders that are most critical in giving our students their best chance for success at school and in life.”
During a press conference on Friday, Sullivan also expounded on some of the priorities:
Safety
“We want to make sure that we are focusing on the sense of well-being for our students,” he said. “So, we’ll continue to track how our students feel in terms of safety. That’s extremely important and we also want to make sure that our students are connected in schools … because we know that when students feel engaged in schools they are more likely to attend.”
Staff
“We want to make sure we recruit and retain highly effective staff members and we’re going to be measuring our recruitment and retention processes as well as measuring our teachers who meet the effective and highly effective standards of evaluation.”
Customer Service
“Customer service is important for us. A few years ago we did a study with Direct Communications to find out why students were leaving Birmingham City Schools and we found a lot of interesting things. You know, we have the Birmingham Promise in the school system about 48 percent of our parents knew anything about it. This provides free college for our students who attend Birmingham City Schools. We also found out that many of our students’ parents didn’t know about the career academies that we have or the Free pre-K that we have in all of our elementary and gateway schools.”
“Our goal is to improve what we are doing to support the success of our students, families, and community,” said Dr. Mark Sullivan, superintendent of Birmingham City Schools.
Each area includes specific measurements and growth targets, and results will be regularly posted online at www.successwithbcs.com. Progress will also be reported to the community through emails, newsletters, social media and other means.
“This is not a strategic plan that will collect dust on a shelf somewhere,” Sullivan said. “We are serious about setting goals and hitting these targets.”
Sullivan said the strategic plan was developed after a months-long process that included input from parents, employees, and community partners.
The public will have four opportunities during the month of September to learn more about the plan, with events at:
- Parker High School (Sept. 9 at 6 p.m.),
- Wenonah High School (Sept. 16 at 6 p.m.),
- Huffman High School (Sept. 23 at 6 p.m.),
- Carver High School (Sept. 30 at 6 p.m.)
