A community-based approach to strategy development in the Knox County schools

Abstract

School districts, as public agencies, are responsible for producing a public value that is shared with their stakeholders. Often times, however, stakeholders – defined, as students, parents, staff, and community members – are not meaningfully engaged in co-creating a district’s strategy. One reason may be that district leaders take a primarily technical approach to soliciting, garnering, and using stakeholder feedback to inform their decision-making and future actions. Engagement tends to be seen as a product (e.g. community meeting), rather than as a consistent relationship-building process, causing districts to fall short in receiving the robust stakeholder feedback and investment they seek. The Knox County Schools (KCS), in recent years, has experienced low and inconsistent levels of stakeholder engagement. Despite this, the district’s leaders seek to incorporate stakeholder input into the development of KCS’s future strategy and next five-year strategy plan. The district, which has achieved strong student achievement gains in the past half-decade, aims to build upon this momentum by devising an improvement strategy that will further accelerate and broaden student learning for all of its 56,000 students. This Capstone provides a roadmap to other practitioners who seek a community-based approach to strategy development, which is the first and most critical component of an effective strategic planning process. It chronicles efforts at developing and implementing a stakeholder engagement process, rooted in network and organizational theory, in which over 7,500 individuals participated and provided feedback. Furthermore, it shows how the feedback was presented back to district leaders and incorporated into KCS’s strategy and strategic plan. This Capstone highlights the challenges that arise when an organization receives significant stakeholder feedback, a sizeable portion of which is critical. It reframes the strategy development process as first, a call for collective reflection, and then a call for collective action. The findings indicate that meaningful stakeholder engagement can catalyze powerful organizational learning, as leaders are asked to revisit their progress, reassess their beliefs, revise and recommit to their theory of action, and even reset portions of their strategy. Additionally, this Capstone may yield insights that inform the way Knox County Schools, similar districts, and the larger K-12 public education sector balance their urgent reform agendas with their responsibility to strategically build organizational capacity.