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Lake Placid school district to form new strategic plan

LAKE PLACID — The Lake Placid Central School District Board of Education is taking its first steps to replace the district’s nearly seven-year-old strategic plan.

District Superintendent Timothy Seymour first floated the idea of updating the district’s current strategic plan, created in 2015, at a board meeting this past November.

Strategic plans typically outline the missions and specific goals of an organization. The district’s current plan details goals — like developing a parent/teacher/student climate survey — related to students, education, finance, leadership, technology and community outreach.

The board reviewed quotes from a few consulting firms that could help the district form and write its new plan, and board members approved their choice for the task — PLC Associates, Inc. — at their last meeting on Jan. 18.

PLC Associates offered the lowest price tag for the job. LPCSD Business Manager and Treasurer Dana Wood estimated that the district would pay around $26,000 for the project after state aid received through the Board of Cooperative Educational Services.

The strategic planning process is expected to begin over the next month, and board members agreed that a summer ending to the project would be ideal so the plan could roll out by the time school starts this fall.

Seymour last week mentioned the possibility of assembling a core leadership team for the plan in January and February to prepare for multiple shareholder meetings in March. The “core group” of stakeholders, including district staff, students, parents and community members, would identify some of the important issues within the district. From there, according to the bid document from PLC Associates, task forces of stakeholders would be assigned to workshop the issues identified by the leadership team. The task forces would be expected to identify strategies and multi-year action plans to address any issues that are identified.

The process would result in a published strategic plan from PLC that would be presented to the school board and community, according to PLC Associates’ bid.

Wood said he was involved with the district’s last strategic planning process when he was principal of Lake Placid Middle-High School. He said that the most important thing in the current plan is putting students and their learning process first.

“They all (strategic plans) have their elements — finance and leadership — but I think number one was the topic ‘students first and foremost’ … that’s really been the guiding principle since then,” he said.

Wood didn’t want to speculate about what the new plan might include. He said the plan is still in its “very beginning stages,” and that stakeholders would be central to forming the focus of it.

“I think that’s the whole purpose of the task force groups, is for them to, you know, speak freely — ‘here are our areas of concern, here’s where we think things are going well,'” he said. “The whole idea is to kind of have an open forum based on the groups for them to share and, from that, comes out the ideas.”

There was some talk during board meetings over the past few months about how the pandemic might color the strategic planning process. Seymour mentioned last year that he knew a couple of colleagues who were creating strategic plans. He said they thought that COVID-19 seemed to put a “veil on everything,” but that the pandemic also highlights valuable issues to consider. Seymour said last week that during a meeting with PLC, it was discussed that this year would be an “opportune” time for a new plan that considers both long-term and short-term goals for the district.

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