When I became the Superintendent at Three Rivers School District, I immediately worked to determine our path into the future. As detailed elsewhere, I began a year-long community engagement process to help identify the values of our community - how they viewed the schools and their role in the villages that made up the Three Rivers Local School District.

However, even before that process, I was aware of some glaring concerns in the district. To date, we had never identified our core values. Worse, we had never articulated a five-year plan for the future.

As near as I could tell from talking to staff who had worked there for a lifetime, and from reviewing Board meeting notes and the plans left to me, the district had never invested in creating a strategic planning process.

This is not to point fingers. There are plenty of well-run organizations of many sizes that manage to move forward and to achieve important goals without ever developing a five-year plan. What I knew, though, was that identifying core values and creating a strategic plan makes achieving your goals easier. Craig Hockenberry

Craig Hockenberry:A strategic plan makes it easier to achieve your goals

Imagine setting out on a car trip by announcing you are going driving, getting behind the wheel, then pulling out of the garage. Then at each intersection, you turn the way that feels right.

You’ll definitely get somewhere, but where? You’ll likely end up at a place you’ve been before. After all, if you are depending on your past experience and decisions to get you somewhere, they are likely to land you in the same places you’ve been, or with the same results you have gotten in the past..

It seems to go without saying, but it is easier to be successful when you do these important things:

Identify where you are trying to go

Make a plan for how to get there

Simple, right?

That is the goal of strategic planning, only instead of being about a trip to the grocery, it is about attaining the biggest goals your organization hold: clearly identify where you are trying to go, and then make a concrete plan for how to get there.

I initiated the work that led to our strategic plan by holding dozens of meetings with stakeholders across the Three Rivers district. I talk more about that process in this series of posts linked immediately below.

[Insert links, 1 link to each post of the listening process.]

Craig Hockenberry: Planning for a Strategic Plan

In the listening process, I learned a great deal about the past of this proud school district, and the hopes for the future. And there was one major surprise: they wanted us to bring back a community swimming pool, which had been eliminated when the high school was rebuilt.

We were able to build a partnership to get this done without adding any financial burden on the school budget.

This groundwork allowed us to invest deeply in creating our core values, a process detailed in this series of posts.

[Insert links, 1 link to each post of the core values development process.]

By engaging community stakeholders and responding to their needs, we had clarified the deep connection between the schools and the community. We - the entire community - knew the importance of the schools, and our vision for what they look like when everything was going well.

However, we had not yet addressed our academic goals in any formal, meaningful way. A third, more rigorous, process was needed to accomplish that.

We needed to develop a strategic plan.

For this, I reached out to Dr. Bobby Moore of EPIC Impact Education Group. Dr. Moore and his company lead strategic planning for schools and districts of many sizes. I knew from his reputation and past results that he would be the person who could guide us through the strategic planning process.

I knew that this was a process that could not be led from within. It is too easy for a leader to focus on his own goals and fall prey to flattering comments and suggestions in this sort of a process if the Superintendent leads it.

Three Rivers deserved a thorough, impartial, and rigorous process. Craig Hockenberry

We already knew what we wanted the school district to look like, according to our core values But we needed expertise to guide us through a process where we looked objectively at multiple factors in our district’s success:

Financial goals

< >Academic goalsHiring and personnel focusFacilities usage

Dr. Moore led us on an intensive and thorough two-year process that involved all stakeholders from students to parents to staff to the school board itself.

In the end, we had a clear vision of not just where we wanted to go, but also exactly what we needed to do to get there.

CRAIG HOCKENBERRY THREE RIVERS