DIP+Comparisons

As I began to review my district improvement plan I found that it looked very similar to the year before and then even the year before that. This week I attended a workshop on Comprehensive Needs Assessment and I am going to take over our District Improvement Plan. This was the largest difference between my DIP and Austin ISD was that when there was goal set then funding and personnel was devoted to this goal. Each goal for Austin ISD was marked by how they were going to monitor the results of the plan in place. Key funding sources for many of the initiatives comes from the Compensatory Allotment, Grants, and Title 1 federal funds. My district does not have anyone that is dedicated to grant writing and I feel like this should be something that the administrative team should look in to. All of our compensatory and Title 1 funds are currently being for salaries after all of the budget cuts. I am sure that Austin ISD’s current Dip would reflect this also. In our DIP we did state the implementation of campus-wide PBS systems, but there was no money or personnel devoted to this. In Austin ISD they were hiring PBS coordinators and people to help track this data. Their implementation process was very in depth and required specifics steps for everyone in the district to easily follow. There are some areas in our district where I know that we need to focus improvement efforts on and Austin ISD left no stone unturned. They addressed everything from graduation rates to attendance to discipline referrals. In my district it is tough to see what we need to focus on looking from the outside because the dates on the DIP were just changed and we never did a formal comprehensive needs assessment. Four years ago we hired an outside agency to come in and put together our CIPs and DIPs and now we just change the dates. I pulled up other districts DIPs on their web sites if they were posted and noticed that some look pretty cookies cutter while others are a livable document used for truly working towards improvement. While I did find other DIPs that I liked better format wise than Austin ISD, I found that theirs really included a lot of meeting minutes and communication with stakeholders. I worked in Austin ISD for 3 years and know that each site based decision-making team meets once a month, which is more than the bi-annual requirements that the state mandates. This is reflected in the DIP and I think that this would benefit our district to engage in more meetings like these to get a true feel for what changes need to be made district-wide.