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INTRODUCTION
This document presents a three year strategic plan for the Lincoln, Rhode Island Public Schools. This plan establishes a long-range direction for the district and provides a clear focus for future pursuits by identifying priorities for improvement.
Strategic Planning is a process for creating an organization’s preferred future. It is a long range planning process for organizational renewal and transformation that provides a framework for improving programs, management functions, and evaluation of an organization’s progress. Strategic planning helps organizations think and act strategically, develop effective strategies, clarify future directions, establish priorities, improve organizational performance, build teamwork and expertise, and deal effectively with a rapidly changing environment. The strategic planning process involves a series of steps that moves an organization through:
- understanding relevant external trends and their implications;
- assessing organizational capacity to change and improve;
- developing a mission statement and guiding beliefs;
- establishing goals, objectives, and action plans designed to move the organization to where it wants to be;
- setting a strategic direction to follow to achieve its mission and objectives;
- communicating its mission, beliefs, and goals/objectives to all stakeholder groups;
- implementing the action plans it has developed; and
- monitoring progress, solving problems, and renewing action plans.
Organizations engage in strategic planning to effectively deal with change in a proactive rather than reactive manner by establishing a common purpose, a sense of direction, priorities for change, and a blueprint for action. This plan resulted from an analysis of the district’s strengths and weaknesses as well as the opportunities and threats anticipated by current trends and future conditions. Based on this analysis, a mission, guiding beliefs, vision, and goals and objectives were established to guide the district during the next three to five years.
This strategic plan is the culmination of analysis and work by a strategic planning committee consisting of teachers, administrators, parents, students, school committee members, business representatives, and community leaders from the Lincoln community.