East Meadow schools partner with Hanover Research to develop strategic 5-year plan

The East Meadow Union Free School District has partnered with the global information service firm, Hanover Research, to help the district develop a strategic five-year plan.

The district intends to use research results to build a roadmap that will guide it towards excellence, innovation and inclusivity, by identifying areas within the district that may need improvements.

Hanover Research representatives, Julie Shenefield, the K-12 relationship director at Hanover, and Meredith Melson, a managing director for K-12 education, formally introduced themselves to the community at the East Meadow school board’s Jan. 22 meeting. In a presentation, they walked attendees through the process of completing research within school districts, and showed possibilities of what goals may be identified. 

“The planning process is not merely about drafting documents,” Matthew Melnick, the board of education president said. “It’s about crafting a vision that reflects the aspirations and needs of our entire community.”

Shenefield said Hanover has over 200 researchers working to support the “big goals” of clients. The firm consists of qualitative teams that collect data through interviews, focus groups and surveys, and a quantitative team that can take the data and build interactive dashboards and reports.

Melson noted that there are a number of phases that Hanover will work through with the district.

“The first phase of the process that we’re going to be talking through today is really focused at the district level, because that’s important to touch on before you can get to the department or the individual school level,” she said.

The first step of the phase that Hanover will complete is an internal survey — meaning it’ll go to internal stakeholders within the district. This includes people like board members and administrators, in order to figure out the mission, vision and values of East Meadow schools.

Hanover will then administer an external community survey that goes out to students, parents and families in order to determine priorities and what they perceive to be successes and challenges within the district.

Melson said Hanover will gather all of the data and synthesize it in order to build a track, which will be complete by summer, of what a strategic plan will look like.

Some parents and board members questioned how a broader five-year plan could help identify small goals within the district. Kenneth Rosner, the superintendent of schools, explained that the “1,000-foot view” of the district will allow it to figure out smaller, strategic plans for individual schools.

“The whole idea is that this is the overall view, but in each of the buildings it’s going to look a little bit different,” Rosner said. “That’s the granular — the action planning — based off the five-year plan.”

He emphasized that East Meadow is a high-achieving district.

“We have a 98 percent graduation rate, we have AP scholars — we have a lot of great things,” he said, “but we need to continue to push that forward.”

A strategic plan developed by Hanover for Cabell County Schools in West Virginia showed that Hanover’s research helped identify key priorities — such as recruiting and retaining high-quality teachers and staff, advancing equitable opportunities and outcomes, and using data to support districtwide continuous improvement. Each key priority was then broken down into goals and action steps.

“So you have your goals, you have the actions steps, and then this will turn into the action plan for each individual school,” Rosner explained. “This is where it starts — and all that information comes from the surveys and the community meetings.”

Another question that attendees asked was just simply: why is a strategic plan important?

“I think for me, the why is that before you can have individual continuous improvement plans at the school level, before you can have department-wide action plans,” Melson said, “you have to have some sort of overall district plan that you can track and monitor progress on.”

Shenefield said Hanover has seen school district strategic plans help develop building cohesiveness.

“We all know what we want our students to achieve, we have that common goal,” she said. “What do we need to do at each level to ensure that these students are meeting those goals, meetings those visions, following up on the promise that we made for our students?”

There’s nine schools in East Meadow. Rosner said if the plan Hanover creates identify goals in the high schools, the district can backtrack and see where those goals can be achieved starting in the middle schools. He also said that he’d like to see the plan craft goals for the district’s special education students.

“We have that 98 percent graduation rate, we have a lot of things,” Rosner said. “We have the fine arts, we have the performing arts. This is a top district in Nassau County — in New York State. But we still have goals every year that we need to create in order to become even better.”