By Bill Leland, Dist. 241 School board

Have you noticed lately that change seems to be happening in our world at a faster and faster pace?

Yet that is the world that our children are going to inherit from us and they will need to know how to live and work in it. We want help them learn how to earn a living and how to live a life.

It’s our job in public education to do as much as we can while children are growing up in our communities to help them learn what they need to succeed later in life.

With the rate of change coming so rapidly, and so many educational rules and challenges happening at both the state and federal level, it’s hard for a school board to help lead a school district and community into that future &045; a future that the whole community embraces and wants to support.

We spent some time in 1996 making a long-term vision for our school district and community.

We involved a large community steering committee and many, many community groups, school staff, and parent groups participated in that visioning process.

1996 was seven years ago and much has already changed.

To be sure that we’re still on the right path with our &uot;Decision Screen&uot; and vision documents, the School Board of the Albert Lea Area Schools and the Teaching and Learning Council (TLC) are getting ready to revisit those 1996 documents.

We’re getting a &uot;Vision&uot; check-up, just to be sure all our policies, practices, and procedures are still in the best shape. This process is our version of Strategic Planning.

How are we going about this? Earlier this fall we started the process by finding out what the research said about the future in general and specifically how those predicted &uot;Future Trends&uot; might relate to what we do or need to be doing in education.

We asked ourselves the following kinds of questions:

What are the local, national, and global trends that will influence how and what the schools need to do?

What will become our local strengths and weaknesses in the future if we don’t change with the times?

How can we plan programs and deliver them with a flexibility that lets us as board members respond to the ever changing needs of our students and community as well as living within the economic and enrollment realities that will also be part of our future?

How can we plan for students who aren’t even in school yet?

What do we need to do now to be ready for what our district and community will look like in the years ahead?

From reading research based on these kinds of questions, we have developed a set of nine &uot;Future Trends.&uot;

Our staff’s and community’s responses to the discussions about these trends will give us the data we need to plan for our future and to revise our guiding documents &045; our vision, mission, beliefs, and guiding principles.

Building principals and TLC members will be facilitating a strategic planning process based on the future trends with their staffs. Board members, principals and others will be taking this data gathering process out into the community to capture as many ideas as possible to reflect our community at large.

The selected future trends talk about things like population shifts, workforce changes, energy and the environment, technology, industry and global interactions. Every trend could have some kind of impact on what we need to be doing in the schools in the future or how we change what we are doing in the face of other changes that will affect our kids. We need to be prepared.

My personal favorite trend talks about the changes in educational funding and state and federal mandates and how they will continue to limit the local control we think we have as well as what is taught and how it is taught.

These are interesting topics. It is important that we spend time carefully considering them as we move into thinking and planning for our local programs next year and beyond.

Do you realize that this year’s kindergarteners will graduate in May 2017? What will the world be like for them?

What will they need to succeed in life?

That’s what we hope this &uot;Vision check-up&uot; will tell us. If you’d like to be a part of a strategic planning session or organize one for a community group you are a member of, please give any of us school board members a call or call the superintendent’s office at 379-4802.

The goal of all this hard work will be to refine our guiding documents so that they can be used to make the best decisions we can make in providing an excellent educational program for the students of District 241.

(Bill Leland is District 241 (Albert Lea) School Board member.)