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Marietta City Schools talks strategic planning

By Douglass Huxley 4 min read

Marietta City Schools held its second public input strategic planning session Thursday night in the cafeteria at Marietta Elementary.

"First step is gathering data, and hearing from people," said Brad Silvus, superintendent of Marietta City Schools. "And that's what these sessions have been about."

The session was facilitated by the Ohio School Boards Association, which is helping the school system with its strategic planning.

"Every school district in Ohio is a member of our association," said OSBA Senior Deputy Director Teri Morgan.

Morgan said OSBA helps districts with superintendent searches and treasurer searches, offers workshops to board members, and assists with strategic planning. The association helped in the search for a new superintendent, she said.

"Once we started with that process, I loved your community, and wanted to help," Morgan said. "So, we just moved into strategic planning."

Parents, student and members of the community were asked to write down what they thought were the strengths and weaknesses of the school system.

Some of the strengths the groups came up with included the engineering program and clubs at the schools; students said teachers care about their education and are very passionate about teaching; the partnership with Marietta College has been beneficial to students; and that they have a superintendent who is involved and wants to listen.

"In my opinion it (Marietta City Schools) has such great potential," Morgan said. "It needs strong leadership. And I think you have a board and superintendent who will take that role very seriously."

Some of the weaknesses mentioned were lack of employees, guidance counselors in particular; safety for school entrances and in the bathrooms was brought up; lack of mental health and substance abuse assistance for students was voiced by students and parents; and a lack of school culture.

"I think we need to build a community that incentivize people to want to stay, come back, and want to further contribute to our community," Marietta High School junior and student council member Ezra Minard said.

Minard said he heard about the strategic planning session in student council and has been in the school district for a few years now. He said he wanted to hear what other members of the community thought about the school district.

"And also give my input on how we can help the district and our community," he said.

Minard said he believes a lot of the school facilities and technology are out-dated and that the learning process could be improved if those were fixed.

Silvus said change is going to take some time and that they can't focus on too many things or it won't be successful.

"So, we want to look for two, three, four really good areas, and then once this core team establishes those areas, then the next group is we have a goal team for each of those areas," Silvus said. "And we bring in 15-20 more people per goal team to start working on 'How do we get there? What do we need to do? What is that action plan going to look like? And who is going to be doing it and when?' Some of these things we can get to right away. And some things we are going to have to build to get to in year two, or three of the plan, but they're there."

Minard said the biggest takeaway he had attending the session is realizing how many people want to positively contribute to helping the community.

"And that sort of gives me hope," Minard said. "Obviously, it will take time like the superintendent said but, together as a community we can get a lot done."

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