By Jennifer Eisenbart
EDITOR
A week after the Burlington Area School District reached the decision to hire the Applied Population Laboratory to do a demographics study on the district, the BASD Long-Range Planning Committee made the choice to put that study into action when it is finished.
The committee voted unanimously to recommend to the full board hiring a group from the Wisconsin Association of School Boards to put together a series of meetings that are called Stakeholder-Driven Strategic Planning by the WASB Organizational Service.
A series of five meetings will be held, likely starting in November or January of 2015 over a five- to six-month period. The meetings will look at the proposed facilities planning, and what the community would both want and support in updating Burlington Area School District buildings.
The group, headed by Louis Birchbauer, would host the meetings and organize the committee making the recommendations to the School Board.
Birchbauer outlined the process at Monday night’s meeting, saying that community members, School Board members, administration and staff would all get involved in the process – with the end goal to have endorsement of whatever work the district decides to undertake.
“It’s amazing how much the community gets involved,” Birchbauer said.
He recommended that no more than three board members officially take part, so as to avoid a quorum at the meetings, but encouraged everyone to listen in.
He also said the district should wait to start the process until the demographics study by the Applied Population Laboratory was finished.
But once that study is done, Birchbauer predicted the community would want to get involved in the process. A community survey would go out after the first two meetings – with seven questions, two open-ended.
He expected the planning committee that would then be put together to have between 25-30 members.
The only real question Monday night was the time frame. Birchbauer advised that kicking off the process in December was not advisable, and that the planning committee would want to reconvene after a period of time to re-examine the goals – and the progress.
“If you want to make this a living document, that has the pulse of the community, you want to update it,” he said.
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