Superintendent's Corner

Dear SAU 70 School Community,

This past August, our SAU 70 Board approved a set of strategic goals and outcome measures along with a “Portrait of a Learner.” (https://www.sau70.org/our-districts/ourstrategic-plan) This strategic plan provides a vision and direction for our school system for the next five years and creates a framework for continuous long-range planning moving forward. Hundreds of you helped us craft the plan by responding to surveys, attending public forums, and serving on committees. The plan is organized into four categories—Academic, Student Support, Organizational, and Facilities—and our school boards have set the goals and determined outcome indicators, which now leaves it to our administration and staff to develop the strategic initiatives and action steps to achieve them.

While our strategy development efforts remain an exercise in “building the airplane while in flight,” I’ve been encouraged to see decision-making teams in each building referring to the adopted goals, and in many cases, developing strategies and activities aligned with them. In fact, the boards themselves have been requesting information regarding the impact of the strategic plan goals on district spending as we near the culmination of the annual budget process. In addition to a great deal of curriculum work under the Academic section of the Plan, a number of school and district initiatives are underway that directly serve the Student Support and Facilities goals. We are currently working on implementing a project management program that will help us to develop, align, and assign corresponding tasks, and to report progress.

Once fully constructed, the Strategic Plan will help us to realize important commitments that our school boards have made that go beyond effective school system governance. In the past few years, our boards have adopted an Equity Policy, made a voter-approved commitment to environmental sustainability, and have demonstrated admirable fiscal stewardship. You will find these commitments woven throughout the Strategic Plan, and they will serve as touchstones for decision-making throughout our organization in initiatives such as curriculum development, social/emotional learning, budgeting, and capital improvement planning. While our schools always rank at or near the top statewide, no high-performing organization maintains that status without reflection, discipline, creativity, and renewal, and I am convinced that our boards and our staff are committed to that effort.

As I’ve shared in previous annual reports, if you are interested in studying student performance in both states, the links below will take you to the NH DOE and the VT AOE’s interactive school performance websites. On the NH site, you’ll find a program called iExplore that will allow you to examine school performance in the context of other relevant data, such as cost per pupil, class size, and many other reported factors.

New Hampshire School and District Report Card

Vermont Education Dashboard

While the data is impressive, our students’ performance on these assessments always leaves us room for improvement, but keep in mind that test scores are just one measure of student achievement. I am deeply grateful to all of our educators and support staff for their commitment to our students, to our students and families for entrusting us with their education, and to our entire community for your generous support of our schools.

Sincerely,

Jay D. Badams
Superintendent of Schools