2023 Look Ahead: Rochester Public Schools looks forward as it continues moving its strategic plan ahead

Jordan Shearer, Post-Bulletin, Rochester, Minn.
·3 min read

Jan. 1—ROCHESTER — After a year of debating what's best for the education of nearly 18,000 students in Rochester, the obvious question that remains is "what comes next?"

In 2022, the district

adopted a brand new strategic plan.

It's a guiding document for the three years of 2022-25, filled with objectives like "improve the well-being of students" and "integrate educational equity into all RPS policies."

As of November, all the school board members who unanimously approved the document have kept their seats, meaning there's a generally agreed upon road map for the school district moving forward for at least the next two years.

But what does that actually mean for the coming year? Or the next year? Or the year after that? How does that mile-high strategy translate into the daily lives of both teachers and students?

"Developing the big picture strategy — the plan itself — was really the work of this past year," Superintendent Kent Pekel said. "And then there's really two waves of launching the change initiatives. The third year is just really full implementation."

Prior to approving the strategic plan, the senior management of the district was already putting basic building blocks in order. In February,

the district hired Peter Wruck

as the director of research and analytics. Pekel described that position — and the data-centric focus it represents for the district — as necessary for any sort of measurable advancement.

The district also has started shifting its strategies among individual schools, such as how they set goals for improvement. In recent months, representatives from the district's schools have come to the school board to speak about how they're aligning their work to match what the students need. Pekel referred to that as part of the process of "reinventing school improvement."

This year also includes developing multi-tiered systems of support and post secondary and career pathways.

Year two includes reviewing policies for equity as well as delving into finding opportunities for philanthropic support, among others.

"We have to get the year one priorities clear so that it's the academic strategy that drives the financial strategy," Pekel said.

Overall, the strategic plan has 15 objectives, which touch on all the major issues in the district: discipline disparities, mental health, diversifying its workforce, finding new funding sources and so on.

The overall question, though, is how long will it take before all the changes and strategies start to move the needle for students in the schools? How long will it take before the learning gap between students of color and their white counterparts is reduced or eliminated? How long will it take before Rochester Public Schools is no longer seen as an underperforming giant compared with the smaller school districts surrounding it?

To answer that, Pekel described this year as a baseline year.

By next year, he said he wants to see some early progress on the "leading indicators," meaning measures such as how much students feel they belong in their schools and how engaged they are with the teaching.

By two years out, Pekel said he expects to see improvement in academic performance.

"Three years out, I think we really need to be seeing some of those improvements," Pekel said. "I sometimes get frustrated because that's longer than I'd like, but if you're talking about the system level as opposed to the school level, that's kind of unavoidably the timeline you're on."