SPANISH FORT, Ala. — If the recently unveiled strategic plan to improve Baldwin County Schools is going to succeed, organizers must first establish a baseline against which progress can be measured.
Terry Burkle serves as external co-chair for …
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SPANISH FORT, Ala. — If the recently unveiled strategic plan to improve Baldwin County Schools is going to succeed, organizers must first establish a baseline against which progress can be measured.
Terry Burkle serves as external co-chair for the first of five target areas identified by the Yes We Can Baldwin County action plan: Funding to Meet Community Expectations and Priorities.
Specifically, the target aims to provide the “stable, fair and adequate funding” needed to not only launch the long-term improvement strategy but to sustain it via four specific goals:
“A question came up last week about how we’re going to locate a stable funding source after the 1 (per)cent sales tax expires in 2013, and our first step with Target 1 is to conduct an efficiency audit,” Burkle said.
“We can’t just randomly say, ‘This is what the stable funding source needs to be’ or pick a number out of the sky without first knowing where we stand. We can’t expect the community to get behind anything until we can prove we are running as efficiently as we possibly can, and that audit is going to take place immediately over the summer months,” she said.
Results will be available in September and “available to anyone who wants to know,” she added.
Yes We Can Baldwin County is a grassroots educational improvement consortium that combines the efforts of the Baldwin County Education Coalition with both the school district and stakeholders in the community, from business leaders and nonprofits to churches and civic organizations. The coalition, meanwhile, represents each of the school system’s seven feeder patterns, giving all parties involved a voice.
The Baldwin County Board of Education voted unanimously Thursday to accept and implement the plan, setting a 30-day feedback period anyone can access at www.bebe.org.
Born of community input culled from some 85 conversations that attracted the participation of more than 1,300 area residents concerned about the condition and direction of public education in Baldwin County, the plan addresses five key areas, identified during that process as critical to improving the quality of education countywide:
The ultimate goal of the funding target, Burkle said, is the creation of a nonprofit foundation tasked exclusively with ensuring the process is carried out effectively and transparently.
“One of the most important aspects of our role is to ensure that everything we define in this strategic plan gets carried out, and the only way to be certain that happens is to have someone who is dedicated and waking up every day focused on follow-through and making sure things get done,” Burkle said.
Once the coalition is formalized as its own nonprofit accountability mechanism, a full-time staff will be hired, but funding must be secured to even make it to that step, she said.
That’s where the coalition’s “strength in numbers” becomes a factor, Burkle said, because following the Mobile Area Education Foundation’s model means resources can be pooled from across the county to “procure federal and private grants needed to support some substantive initiatives.”
The bottom line, she said, is that the strategic plan calls for the creation of not just one of the best school systems in the state but possibly the nation.
