Vision 2037: Community Engagement, or Consulting Theater?

Rush-Henrietta’s Vision 2037 plan (2024-2028), the district’s first strategic plan, was adopted by the Board of Education on April 23, 2024.

Today’s District website description of Vision 2037 frames this strategic plan as the product of the community. The goals are described as the result of a community-wide survey, six focus groups, a data review, and two workshops, developed “in partnership with the entire community.”

That description deserves a closer look at the order in which things actually happened.

• With outside consulting support from ILO Group, the district opened a survey that closed on November 26, 2023 and drew roughly 1,600 responses.

• A small design team then met for two workshops, and the Board approved the four goals developed by that small design team on January 23, 2024, about eight weeks after the survey closed.

• Community Design Day, where nearly 100 people contributed more than 1,200 suggestions, came after that vote. By the plan’s own account, this “workshop” refined priorities beneath goals that were already set. In other words – the broadest open-ended participation shaped the details — not the goals.

To say “the community set the goals” overstates what the record shows: the Rush-Henrietta community’s feedback was provided as an input into a small design team’s work, and the goals were approved before most of the community was invited to weigh in.

More insight about the Vision 2037 process can be gleaned by comparing the result of the process – four high-level goals – to the aspirations articulated by the District prior to the “community engagement” process.

Three of the four goals identified by the Design Team matched priorities the district had already communicated:

• Student Learning
• Safety and Wellness
• Equity and Inclusion

Those priorities were already on the district’s website, and were restated by the superintendent when she arrived – well before the survey opened. Only the workforce-pathways goal is new.

To date, the district has not published its Vision 2037 survey results, the coded analysis, the design team’s membership, or any account of how themes became goals.

Taken together, the process is better understood as ratification and refinement of existing priorities than as discovery, which is why it can fairly be called strategic planning theater.

Readers should treat Vision 2037 as a statement of what the district already intended to do, not a mandate surfaced by community input.