Ideas About Right-Sizing

Ideas About Right-Sizing

What follows is a summary of what one right-sizing journey looked like. While no two processes would ever be the same, there are generalizable learnings from it. This document tries to capture those learnings.

Step 1: Listen to the Community to Identify Goals & Guardrails

• Description: If the board hasn't adopted student outcome goals that are the focus of all its efforts, do that first. There’s only one reason a school board should ever consider right-sizing: it’s a path to improving student outcomes. If it’s not clear to you what that looks like, then STOP talking about right-sizing; it’s not appropriate for your school system. Always remain focused on the results we're trying to create for students. Student outcomes -- what the community wants its students to know and be able to do -- should always be the first and last talking point no matter what the topic. Neither saving money nor balancing the budget are compelling reasons to engage in right-sizing; only improving student outcomes is. If the school board hasn’t adopted SMART goals about student outcomes, it’s failing children and should start there first. Goal setting is the school board’s job, not the superintendent’s job. If, for whatever reason, the school board fails to serve students by adopting goals, then the superintendent has an obligation to fill the leadership vacuum created by the school board and adopt a set of SMART goals that describe what students should know or be able to do. This is step 1. Always.
• Timeline: ~2-9 months
• Board Work: Conduct community outreach & engagement sessions in which the board primarily listens rather than speaks; review synthesized feedback from the community engagement process, first declaring what the board members heard and what they think about what they heard; identify goals that reflect the vision of the community; identify guardrails that reflect the values of the community; adopt goals & guardrails after confirming that the superintendent’s interpretation (interim goals & interim guardrails) is aligned with the vision and values of the community.
• Superintendent Work: Support the board with logistics as requested; develop student data analysis summary; develop community feedback summary; develop interim goals & interim guardrails; report how interim goals and guardrails align with community vision and values.

Step 2: Share with the Community the District’s Strategies to Accomplish the Goals

• Description: Go over the different options for how the school system might operationalize the goals. Get people fired up about what's possible and what it might look like.
  • As any consensus emerges around ideal strategies, help the community get clear about the costs associated with the strategies.
  • Strategic abandonment and standards of completion are essential topics during this step. It’s just as important to get clear about what the school system will stop doing or modify doing as it is to get clear about what it will continue or begin.
• Timeline: ~2-6 months
• Board Work: After adopting goals & guardrails, report back to the community the results with a clear explanation of how their vision and values were used to ensure that they have broad ownership of the priorities the board has articulated, how these new priorities will guide the District over their duration, and changes the community can expect to see in how the board operates - its continuous improvement toward applying behaviors most correlated with improving student outcomes.
• Superintendent Work: Develop a set of ideal strategies needed to accomplish the goals (including a 1 page summary); conduct community outreach & engagement sessions to discuss the strategies and test for community support; establish a sizable community committee that’s part of creating this plan to help socialize the ideas in it.

Step 3: Share with the Community the Options Being Considered to Finance the Strategies

• Description: Given the cost associated with implementation of the strategies, what are the ways the school system could fund the strategies. What sacrifices would have to be made to free up the funds -- and of potentially multiple options, a pure closure option should be included, a pure layoff option should be included, and perhaps a blended closure/layoff option should be included. There might also be a programmatic reduction option included (stop providing preK or stop providing football or stop providing busing, etc, etc). It needs to be clear: there is no painless way to fund our aspirations for our children, it's a matter of picking the option that is least harmful/disruptive to our ability to implement the strategies we want for our students.
  • Of importance, no magical thinking can be allowed during this phase: no magical influx of money, no new taxes, no new multi-year/multi-million dollar grants, no increase in enrollment beyond the existing trend line.
  • At the end of this step, the school board needs to either agree, in principle, to proceed with a right-sizing or not.
• Timeline: ~1-3 months
• Board Work: None until the end when the board will need to signal its openness to proceed or not.
• Superintendent Work: Conduct community outreach & engagement concerning options; establish a sizable community committee that’s part of creating this plan to help socialize the ideas in it; report to the board and the community all options that should be considered

Step 4: Collaborate with the Community on a Right-Sizing Plan

• Description: With the board having chosen to pursue creation of a right-sizing plan, the superintendent must then work collaboratively with the community to develop the plan. While it is ultimately the supt's responsibility to create and propose a plan to the board, the more community is involved, the more open the board will be to considering the resulting plan.
  • The supt's process should differentiate between school effectiveness, facility quality, and facility affordability. It may well be the case that a school is highly effective but is located in a low quality/high cost facility and needs to be relocated to a new facility -- potentially displacing or absorbing parts of a less effective school in the process.
  • The process should include a sizable community planning committee. Including as representative a group of voices as possible is absolutely essential.
  • The plan should create clarity regarding how displaced students will be provided significantly better learning opportunities at their new schools. For example: if a student was attending an F-rated school and that school is being closed, it would be entirely unacceptable to relocate that student to another F-rated or D-rated school — and depending on circumstances it might be inappropriate to relocate them to a C-rated school. Students impacted by school closure deserve a significantly better chance at success to offset the potential harm created by relocation.
  • This process won’t exist in a vacuum. Actions such as previous school consolidations, previous building closures, recent new construction, and more should be taken into consideration. If certain communities were disproportionately impacted during previous actions, minimizing disproportionate impact should be a major consideration.
  • Two important rules to implement at the beginning of this phase:
    • The plan should be all or nothing; the board can't treat it like a cafeteria plan. Picking and choosing leads to gross inequities.
    • The plan should be implemented all at once; don't spread what should be one round of right-sizing out over multiple years.
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  • Timeline: ~2-6 months
  • Board Work: Debate the degree to which the right-sizing plan prioritizes accomplishment of the goals while honoring the guardrails. If it sufficiently does so in the board’s judgment, adopt the plan. If not, don’t.
  • Superintendent Work: Create the right-sizing plan in collaboration with families, staff, and community partners; provide evidence to the board that the plan prioritizes accomplishment of the goals while honoring the guardrails.
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  Step 5: Implement the Right-Sizing Plan
  
  • Description: Probably the key thing here: everyone should ideally know by September -- December at the absolute latest -- which schools will and won't be open the following August. To accomplish this, the school system should move swiftly to communicate planned changes long before they occur. A website should be created with comprehensive information about the process leading to the plan, the plan itself, where the school system is at in the implementation timeline currently, and extensive details on what will happen at each step of the process yet to come. In particular, every parent should have access to full details of how the right-size process will impact their family.
    • Part of Right-Sizing implementation should be developing a facility repurposing plan. Planning for the plan should begin during the right-sizing process.
    • Any changes in school or building should be communicated to families prior to the start of the following school year’s usual enrollment period.
  • Timeline: 9-12 months
  • Board Work: None.
  • Superintendent Work: Communicate, communicate, communicate; communicate some more; communicate as early as possible, preferably by September, for any changes going in place in the following fall; host in-person and/or online meetings to address impacts for every school community that will experience changes in facility, program, or population
  
  Step 5a: Developing & Implement the Repurposing Plan
  
  • Description: A plan will need to be created for the process by which surplused properties will be retained/reused, sold/reused, or demolished. The first phase of that planning process should include:
    • Creation of a Community Vision Report for each surplused property. This document, usually 5-10 pages in length, summarizes the result of extensive community outreach/charrette sessions to ascertain which future uses would be considered allowable, unallowable, and most desirable.
    • Creation of an Economic Viability Report for each surplused property. This document, usually 5-15 pages in length, summarizes the result of extensive expert analysis to ascertain which future uses would have the great chance of receiving financing and cash flowing over time.
    • Once the Community Vision Report and Economic Viability Report for every surplused property are completed, begin the process of finding users / partners / lessors / buyers for each facility. One option is to have all parties who have an interest in using / acquiring the properties submit proposals with the property going to the use deemed by a mixed technical expert/community resident to be most aligned to the community's vision and the most economically viable.
      • Some care may need to be given to incentivizing repurposing of less economically viable facilities or facilities in less economically viable locations.
      • A default use for economically unviable properties may be to partner with the local municipality to fund demolition / clearing of the site for use as green space / park land.
  • Timeline: 1-4 years
  • Board Work: None.*
  • Superintendent Work: Contract with or hire a person with extensive experience in real estate and property redevelopment; develop the repurposing plan; implement the repurposing plan;
  
  Step 6: The Most Important Step: Improving Student Outcomes
  
  • Description: The ONLY purpose of this entire process was to liberate the resources necessary to implement the school system's plan for improving student outcomes. Make sure that a strong implementation and change management plan is in place to ensure that the work actually gets done.
    • Report out at regular intervals (at least annually, but maybe twice per year) to share:
      • Resources captured by the right-sizing
      • How captured resources were deployed
      • Evidence of fidelity of implementation with the resources
      • Evidence of the impact being made on student outcomes
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  • Timeline: 3-5 years
  • Board Work: Monitor progress with 50% of its time each month; vote on board items in a manner that aligns resources with the goals & guardrails; communicate results regarding the goals & guardrails back to the community.
  • Superintendent Work: Implement the instructional program in a manner that leverages the resources according to what was promised to the community.
  
  * The school board should stay out of this process until the end -- most states legislatively require school boards to be the final vote on matters concerning real property. Let community voices lead this conversation, not school board members.