WJCC Superintendent Talks Strategic Planning at Business Roundtable

By Amber Lester Kennedy Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Williamsburg-James City County Schools Superintendent Steven Constantino worked Tuesday to engage businesspeople in the school system over a lunch of pho and pork-fried rice.

Constantino was the featured speaker for this month’s Williamsburg Economic Development Authority Business Roundtable lunch at Saigon Pearl. He spoke about the need to engage the business community in the strategic planning process, which he hopes to begin by fall, with a target completion date of spring 2012.

The product will hopefully be a five-year strategic plan with measurable goals meant to track progress rather than punish. He said someone had asked if they were targets and he said, “You can call them that, but it’s not like if we miss a target, everyone gets fired.”

Constantino, who started the job in February, said the School Board invited him to inspect the school division and make recommendations. After watching and listening, he determined the division needed to envision its ideal future and work toward that.

“I am concerned that while we understand where we need to go, we didn’t seem to have a clear path,” he said, adding that the school division has had a tendency to bounce from issue to issue. Recently, he has posed one question before stakeholders: “Imagine what today would look like five years from now. What do we hope will be celebrated?”

Someone recently told him that considering how unique Williamsburg is, it doesn’t strive to have unique schools. Constantino said that statement had been “rattling around” in his brain ever since, and he wants to find a way to become a national model that other school divisions look to for inspiration.

He spoke about “collaborative impact” – what happens when people abandon their own agendas in favor of creating an agenda for the common good. As part of the strategic plan process, he hopes to meet with stakeholders, including businesspeople, to get a sense of what they would like to see in the schools, whether they could form partnerships and to identify workforce needs in the community.

To remind the businesspeople why they should feel invested, he noted that schools and school systems labeled as “failing” by the federal government hurt communities trying to attract business and homebuyers.

The school board has already agreed to put out a request for proposals to hire a contractor to assist with the strategic plan. “We shouldn’t ignore or downplay where we have challenges,” he said. “Philosophically, I don’t think we should do it alone.”

He also said he hopes to talk to employees, parents and his customers – the students – about their requirements. “We’ll take the collective wisdom,” he said, adding, “We may not see immediate results, but I think the investment we make will pay off.”

He does not want to conduct surveys, but would rather use discussions to gather raw data and identify common themes. Otherwise, he didn’t have any details about how the division will approach strategic planning.

The strategic plan for five years from now will push planners to abandon ideas of what schools currently need, he said. Constantino shared that in a recent meeting on capital improvement purchases and projects, he suggested textbooks might not even be needed in the near future, due to the rising popularity of portable readers. At the same time, he also anticipates the current budget pressures won’t go away any time soon and the division must be frugal. “We hope our kids are here 20 years from now saying, ‘Boy we’re glad they did what they did in 2011,’” he said.