The Becker School Board met Monday night and discussed several items including  a student visit to St. Cloud, a Becker school visit from MN Education Commissioner Brenda Cassellius last week and  stakeholder input processes for strategic planning.

 

School Supt. Dr. Stephen Malone mentioned MN Education Commissioner Brenda Cassellius’ visit to the school last Friday and what took place during her visit.

 

For a detailed report on the visit, see the full story on the visit elsewhere in this week’s Citizen-Tribune.

 

Malone said several students, staff and industry professionals visited St. Cloud Technical and Community College last week to learn more about their trade and industry programs.

 

The idea was to discuss how to communicate technical career pathways available to students, parents and to teachers. They also looked at industry student apprenticeships and tuition grants and learned how to inform and build partnerships between education, vo-tech schools and industry. 

 

Malone said he and Principal Sandy Logrono attended along with Larry Newell of Liberty Paper, Inc.  and they — along with staff at SCTCC — will coordinate efforts for the group to form a coalition. 

 

Malone mentioned he’d like to set up another tour of the school in the future where other high school staff can attend.

 

“It was an eye-opener for me and a lot of the people who attended,” said Malone.

 

Malone said the 2016 stakeholder input for strategic planning will be conducted digitally using crowdsourcing technology. He says he will be collaborating with ignite! Innovation at Optum for the use of Spigit software to facilitate the process. 

 

Malone says the district will also be working with ignite! Innovation at Optum to launch a district innovation platform this fall.

 

Malone described an outline of the process in which stakeholder group invitations would be sent to all 380 staff members, all 800 high school students, a cross section of 450 randomly-selected parents and a randomly-selected snail mail invitation to another 200 community members to participate. They also plan to advertise in the local paper, website and street signs.

 

Malone says a timeline will depict idea submissions from the four stakeholder groups to occur from Feb. 29 to March 11. The next week, from March 14-18, participants will receive a notification encouraging them to assign star ratings to the ideas submitted.

 

From March 15 – 25, data will be processed by ignite! Innovation and from March 28 to April 1, school board members will assign the top five ideas from each of the stakeholder groups to an exit outcome area. April 4, the school board will discuss placement of the ideas into exit outcome areas and  May 2, the school board will begin discussing 2017-18 goals based on the data.

 

Four questions will be in the portal and the exact wording and content of the questions is still being ironed out.

 

“A 20% response rate is considered pretty high according to ignite!,” said Malone.

 

Andrea Molus, the representative for the student council, told the board the students are excited for this year’s Snow-Days.

 

Molus said there are dress-up days and coloring contests and BINGO and snow soccer — all culminating with a pep fest Friday afternoon and a dance in the evening.

 

The next Becker School Board meeting is March 7 at 6;30 p.m. in the Teaching and Learning Center.