the ASPect - American School of Paris

2/ from the board & head of school
Keeping
Promises
Keeping promises and honesty are central to all we do. Let us explain.
When the ASP strategic planning process
began with convening students, parents,
faculty and staff for the future search
seminars, the school committed to using
the data gained from these meetings to
develop a draft for a long-term school
improvement plan, our strategic plan.
Nearly 250 people were involved in the
ASP future search seminars, creating a rich
body of information and common themes
for continually improving our school.
From Ideas to a Plan
of Action
Our strategic planning group of 37 students,
teachers, staff, parents, board members
and administrators (see names below)
took our ASP community’s aspirations,
embodied within the future search data and
common themes, and after three days of
intense work, brought home a new DRAFT
document detailing ASP’s beliefs, mission,
high priority student learning objectives and
strategies to be implemented.
A Microcosm of Our
Community
Everyone on the strategic planning design
team is a volunteer. We made every
attempt to ensure that the makeup of this
group mirrors the nature of our community.
The planning team represents every
component of the school community. We
have members from our parent community,
students, alumni, faculty and staff, board
of trustees, and school administrators. We
want to emphasize that members of this
team do not represent their constituency
in any political or local sense. We have
certainly tried to ensure that membership
includes many cultural perspectives as well
as community involvement.
From Belief to Strategy
The output from the strategic planning
group was to arrive at a set of beliefs or
fundamental values for our school’s ethical
code as a first step. Essentially, these
beliefs describe the character of our school
as well as defining a target of the quality
of interactions we want in the name of
learning. As an example, one belief is stated
as, “Honesty and integrity are central to all
we do.” We need a public declaration of
our school’s heart and soul.
The belief statements helped us in our
planning session to examine our present
school mission statement and to set in
place a new DRAFT mission that defines
targets for our school’s future. We want our
mission to define the special distinctiveness
that sets us apart from all other schools.
By testifying how we are unique, we also
certainly justify our reason for existence.
Decisions, Decisions
The tough part is that our planning team
needed to identify all the possible options
for school improvement and 21 st century
programming available to us, to deliberate
on these and to agree on how we wish to be
unique now and into the future. Obviously
our strategic planning group looked at the
strengths and weaknesses and critical
issues within the current reality of ASP and
relied heavily on the data from the future
search seminars. Out of this organizational
critique we then looked at factors that
impacted the school beyond our borders.
As an example, we considered the political
and economic future of France and how this
might impact our future enrollment.
The Focus is Student
Learning
From here we looked at student learning.
We defined statements of school
improvement objectives that define our
The Aspect - November 2010