On Tuesday, February 2 (snow date Thursday, February 4) the Gateway Regional School District will implement the next step in the Gateway 2025 process: holding focus groups. This will start at 6:30 p.m. in the high school cafeteria with a brief presentation and explanation of how the evening will proceed. Dinner will be served during this overview and families are welcome to bring their children (childcare after dinner will be provided by students in the National Honor Society).
The district welcomes parents, students, staff, alumni and community members to participate in this event, which is intended to replicate the success of the Gateway 2015 visioning project. When it was first completed in 2005, the ‘Gateway 2015’ project yielded a great deal of information and items to consider for improving the district and most of those goals have been implemented over the past ten years. As you can imagine, many things have changed in the past decade and it’s again time to take a look at where we want the district to be by 2025, which requires having specific goals that become part of the district’s 10-year planning process.
We anticipate using some of the information garnered from the Gateway 2025 Survey (and survey results are available in the “news” dropdown on the district’s website – www.grsd.org); many of the questions from the 2015 process (this information is also available on the district’s website); plus generating new information to use in future planning. The basic process will be to have participants grouped by school to brainstorm new ideas, solicit opinions, and answer questions. We will have someone facilitate this process along with an administrator to record the findings in each group (administrators will keep the notes for a different school, not their own) At the end of the evening we’ll take some time to share general findings and see what patterns or trends emerge.
These findings will then be collated, shared with the public, and combined with other data to develop potential goals for the future. This information, and these goals, will be used as the school committee begins identifying priorities over the next several years. As GTAC is also looking at ways in which the towns can collaborate (both together and with the schools), this information may also prove useful in their ongoing work. In addition, the DESE has required that the district hire a consultant to look at district operations and financial obligations and this information may prove useful to that individual as they review the past, present, and future.
I’m pleased that Gateway can provide this opportunity for its stakeholders to have input into our collective future and enable the district to more closely match both the needs of our students and the hopes of our communities.
