Three linchpins of Superintendent Emmanuel Caulk’s commitment to public accountability and proactive communication in Fayette County Public Schools are now live on the school district’s website.
From the front page of www.fcps.net, people can track the district’s progress on the 100 strategies in the superintendent’s Blueprint for Student Success, access a first-of-its-kind District Scorecard, and view organizational charts to see how the district office is structured to support schools.
“These tools provide an unprecedented level of transparency to our community. We want all of our stakeholders to be fully aware of and engaged in our efforts to improve the district,” Caulk said. “We hold ourselves to high expectations, and we invite our students, employees, families, and community to hold us accountable for making Fayette County Public Schools a model district where every child has a pathway to success.”
The “Blueprint for Student Success: Achieving Educational Excellence and Equity for All” outlines 100 specific strategies that – according to the external reviews conducted and stakeholder input gathered – the superintendent has identified as priorities in order to improve outcomes for all students during the 2016-17 school year.
The public can view the entire blueprint by clicking on a button on the top left of the school district home page, or use the shortcut www.fcps.net/blueprint. And because a goal without a plan is just a wish, directly below that link is a button to access the blueprint’s status tracker.
The status tracker displays whether each strategy is red to indicate no work has been done, yellow to indicate that work is in progress, or green to indicate that the task is complete. It also includes hyperlinks to email the “process owner” – a district administrator who is responsible for implementation, providing a status update, and staying within the budget we will assign to each. The launch has everything listed as red, although there has been progress on many of the strategies during the summer. The status tracker will be updated on the 17th of each month.
“Although work has been happening on the blueprint since the day we announced it, we wanted people to be able to track the work from ground zero,” Caulk said. “Each month our community will be able to see where change is happening.”
The 100 strategies do not reflect all the work taking place in the district to provide an outstanding education for students. Each of the strategies represents a new initiative that will be a key lever for driving improvement across the system.
One key strategy in the blueprint is the development and publication of a District Scorecard.
“State and federal accountability ratings were never intended to give the public the full picture of what goes on in our schools,” Caulk said. “A single score is too narrow to communicate the depth and breadth of the work our students and employees accomplish.”
By launching this new tool, our community will be able to track progress and excellence in schools beyond test scores, into the metrics that families care about most like student engagement, student progress, safety, and community and family involvement.
A button for the scorecard has also been added to the front page of the district’s website. The launch is a blank template so people can see the items that will be monitored. As data becomes available, the scorecard will be updated accordingly. The scorecard includes seven categories: student achievement; student growth and development; college and career readiness; learning culture and environment; family, student, and community engagement; additional academic indicators; and world-class operations.
“This represents a first for our district as we look at becoming a high-performing organization, building and sustaining a world-class system of great schools,” Caulk said. “We want to become a system that other school districts use as a benchmark of success.”
Another effort to increase transparency and accountability is addition of a link to the district’s organizational charts on the website. Caulk said he was surprised when he was first hired in Fayette County that organizational charts were not readily available.
“Clear organization and reporting structures are reflective of high-performing organizations,” he said. “These tools allow people to know how we’ve organized district resources to provide support for schools and who to contact when issues arise.”
To find this information, visit the Administration drop-down menu and follow the link to the organizational charts page or go straight to www.fcps.net/orgcharts. From there, people can view the overall structure of the district office and the departments led by each of the superintendent’s direct reports. This marks the first time FCPS has published organizational charts on its website in several years.
“We invite our entire community to examine these new tools and share suggestions for improvement,” Caulk said. “Keeping the public in the Fayette County Public Schools is critical if we are to achieve our mission of creating a collaborative community that ensures all students achieve at high levels and graduate prepared to excel in a global society.”