Lafayette schools try planning tool

• By MARSHA SILLS
• Advocate Acadiana bureau
• Published: May 26, 2009

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LAFAYETTE — Lafayette Parish School System goals for the upcoming academic year and the strategies to attain them will be outlined Thursday during a parish School Board workshop.

The goals were formulated with the assistance of a new management tool the system has implemented known as the  “balanced scorecard,” School Superintendent Burnell Lemoine said.

The 5:30 p.m. workshop will be held in the board’s chambers.

The draft of the district’s scorecard includes five goals and nine objectives to achieve those goals.

The five goals are: improve school performance scores; improve student behavior in grades K-12; increase student engagement; increase parent and community involvement; and secure and sustain resources to support district goals.

One of the objectives focuses on data-driven decision-making, such as the creation of data rooms at each school where information on student progress, including discipline tracking, attendance and end-of-unit testing, is evaluated.

Others include professional development and better communication with the community, such as the creation of advisory boards for each school and a revamped Web site.

Other objectives focus on the instruction, such as providing highly qualified teachers in core classes, with a goal of 100 percent of core courses taught by highly qualified teachers by August; and more instructional assistance with the creation of teams for each feeder zone, with such a team to include a lead teacher, special education support teachers, a disciplinarian, a maintenance worker and an accountability person to assist with data evaluation.

“We’ll present those plans to the board to make sure that we’re all on the same page,” Lemoine said.

The school system was selected as one of four in the state to pilot the management philosophy now used primarily in the private business sector.

The scorecard philosophy cuts out unnecessary processes in order to identify goals and create strategies to achieve them.

It offers a data-driven and structured process to easily identify, set and attain goals.  

District staffers traveled to the University of Virginia last summer for a training session about the philosophy as part of the university’s Partnership for Leaders in Education’s Executive Leadership Program.