The Rocky View School (RVS) Board of Trustees approved the final year of the four-year plan during the May 12 meeting.
By the end of May, school boards across the province must update the educational plan and submit it to the provincial government.
“The four-year plan remains one of our foundational documents across RVS,” Superintendent of Schools Greg Luterbach said. “Reviewing the plan annually is good practice, gaining feedback, looking at data, and deciding what alterations should occur within the plan, and revise.
The plan took 15 months to develop and was an RVS staff-led initiative.
RVS administration reviewed the plan and changed division-wide literacy and numeracy assessment implementation to a standardized approach, with performance measures.
“For the time I’ve been at RVS, we’ve really tried to tell our own story through local measures. We’re in the middle of collecting feedback from our education plan survey, hearing from staff, parents, and students,” Luterbach said.
Schools take the plan, and they build workbooks and miniature school education plans considering the goals of the four-year plan, and how to leverage the strategies RVS is using to achieve goals.
“The picture is captured in the four-year plan, but really the magic happens in schools,” Luterbach said.
The four-year plan is important as RVS staff work on bringing forward a budget to the board, where they can establish budget priorities and connect back to the four-year plan.
“The 4-year plan isn’t very far away from a lot of things in RVS, and that’s great. It shows that it lives, and it breathes in RVS, it’s not a compliance exercise. This is a document that establishes the direction of what’s happening across classrooms in RVS,” Luterbach said. “The plan itself tells our story and talks about what we want learning to look like as we move forward.”
To achieve the education plan RVS is focusing on student engagement, inclusion, instructional practices, and making learning visible.
The board has three main goals in the four-year plan including connecting students to passions, interests, and people, achieving students’ potential, and navigating as successful global citizens.
To achieve the goals, the board is using the I Can framework, of connecting, achieving, and navigating.
This year, RVS staffers have added a new section to the plan. The new key strategies category talks about what goals students can achieve, the outcomes, how to measure the outcomes, and what RVS needs to do to ensure students can reach their goals.
“We tie it back to practice guides, the key foundational practice guides that exist in RVS, that talk about the RVS way, how we help students achieve their potential, and how we create conditions, so students connect with their interests and passions,” Luterbach said.
When creating the key strategies category, RVS used reference guides from the professional learning practice guide, and inclusive education practice guide, to determine what teaching and learning should look like.
In addition to the key strategies category, RVS also added a section titled actions taken.
“We went back to the report card we gave ourselves last year and provided an update to the community with what’s actually happening in certain areas,” Luterbach said.
Going forward, the board is working to improve foundational knowledge of Indigenous ways of knowing across the system and enhance relationships with local Indigenous groups, begin gathering multi-year data on the four-year education plan survey, support the board in the development of a system-wide strategic plan, begin consultation on a new four-year plan, provide targeted support to schools related to pandemic recovery and mental health supports, and improve capacity to review and reflect on school and system data to help achieve goals of the four-year plan.
The plan is internal and external, for staff to see and use, and for parents to know what’s going on in Rocky View.
“We’re very proud of our four-year plan, and all the work that has been accomplished,” RVS Ward 5 Board Trustee Judi Hunter said. “It’s been super for our kids to have the framework of I Can, as we’ve been on school tours, we can see how it’s living in each of our schools.”
The RVS board approved the four-year plan, and it will be submitted to Alberta Education.
“We now have year four on the books,” RVS Ward 6 Board Trustee and Chair Fiona Gilbert said.
