thruWORK
Kentwood Public Schools
Strategic Planning
With a new superintendent recently hired, Kentwood Public Schools (KPS) in Michgan wanted to set the new direction for the district for the next three to five years. Over the course of six months, we led a planning team of teachers, principals, administrators, parents and community members through a highly participatory and engaging process while balancing their day-to-day responsibilities. The work included multiple workshops to develop the district’s strategic direction, define aspirational goals, come up with specific initiatives aligned to those goals, and define specific metrics to measure progress on implementing the initiatives. We also developed a comprehensive plan for communicating the plan to the community and a monitoring and governance process to provide transparency and accountability for implementing the plan.
New York City Department of Education
Due Process
Due Process refers to procedures that the parents of a child with a disability (or suspected disability) can access if they think the New York City Department of Education (DOE) has not provided their child with a Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE). If parents believe the DOE has failed to ensure that their child’s special education needs have been met, the families have a right, by law, to challenge the failures by filing a “due process complaint.” It takes a multitude of complex administrative processes and business decisions internally to facilitate due process workflows. In order to streamline and connect the various steps in the processes, we were asked to assess the current state and recommend improvements to process, technology and staff. We are currently advising the DOE, a federal Court and the Plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit aimed at improving DOE's timeliness to implement due process procedures.
Ector County Independent School District
Broadband Access
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the Superintendent of Ector County Independent School District (ECISD) in Texas (Odessa) approached us because he suspected many families in the community did not have access to broadband service and were therefore excluded from learning during the shutdown. We found that 39% of district families in the county did not have high-speed internet service in their homes. We helped ECISD develop (a) a short-term strategy of partnering with SpaceX and StarLink to pilot their internet service in some remote communities and; (b) a long-term approach to the development of the necessary broadband infrastructure around the entire county. ECISD was the first school district in the country to partner with SpaceX to provide families with internet service they never had before.
