D65 Meet the Candidate: Andrew Wymer
Post 11/11 (and final) in a 10 day series on District 65 Candidates for Office
This is a post in a series that will run from March 7 to March 17th where I’ve given District 65 Board Candidates the option to post whatever they want on the blog. I gave them no limitations, except to follow the standard comment section rules and I do no editing, beyond formatting.
If you have questions for the candidates, please also follow the rules on the comment section.
Finding Our North Star: Community-Centered Strategic Planning for D65
By Andrew Wymer
My name is Andrew Wymer (he, him). I am running for D65 school board, because I know that the brightest days are ahead of us. I’m an educator with over ten years of experience in higher ed and a track record of financial management, organizational and program leadership, and equity-based service in our community. You can read more about me at our website.
Thank you for this opportunity! I’ve appreciated Tom’s detailed reporting, and I know that FOIA Gras readers can handle depth and length. The issues that got us here are complex, and the solutions will be too.
The CliffsNotes of this post: 1) Strategic planning is essential to incorporating stakeholder values into a decisive, long-term action plan. 2) Strategic planning has been severely mismanaged at D65 over the past five years. 3) In the past year, the current school board administration has made some shifts back toward strategic planning best practices. 4) These practices need to be built upon and formalized in a new strategic plan. 5) We will do this together.
Throughout this campaign there has been widespread consensus across the district that good governance, transparency, and accountability have severely broken down. In this post I want to share with you a detailed analysis of a specific dimension of how these have broken down and how it can be fixed, specifically through a new community-centered strategic plan.
The strategic plan is an issue that we should all be concerned about whether you are a financial expert, someone committed to a more fair and just community, a plain old Evanston resident who just wants to have a good school district, or any blend of the three.
Our district has been operating without a “North Star,” a real, stakeholder-centered strategic plan that could have helped provide a cohesive vision as we navigated a great deal of tumult. A real 2022-2027 Strategic Plan would have forced us to address the structural deficits sooner. The fifth goal of the current strategic plan developed in 2021 and approved in 2022 was to prioritize, “Strategic Resource Allocation Practices that ensure long-term financial stability and the allocation of resources aligned to equity priorities.”1 Yet here we find ourselves three years later in a financial crisis with the real possibility of both a state takeover of the district and having to make impossibly difficult choices that will impact our most marginalized students of the district when schools are consolidated or closed or should we lose federal funding.
Strategic planning is essential to incorporating stakeholder values into a decisive, long-term action plan.
Strategic plans guide organizations toward a long-term vision even while responding to the inevitable disruptions of unexpected challenges. This is a highly practical and time-tested way to enshrine the values and perspectives of stakeholders into a cohesive, long-term vision that can be transparently assessed by the organization and stakeholders.2
The D65 Board should not approve anything—other than very basic operational issues such as HR or legal issues—that is not contributing to or guided by the strategic plan.3 Every document that comes before the board should articulate how it supports or emerges from a specific strategic goal (and ideally a specific supporting outcome).4 Our community should assess the “success” of the board, the superintendent, and the entire district through the strategic plan.
Strategic planning has been severely mismanaged at D65 over the past five years.
Over the last five years, strategic planning in D65 has not engaged best practices.5 As the 2015-2020 Strategic Plan was nearing the end of its lifespan several strategic plan-adjacent documents were introduced that functioned as bridges between it and the next strategic plan. These included:
The District 65 Priorities Memo Update presented on May 18, 2020 at the regular board meeting. In this memo, the district charted seven priorities guiding the district that referenced building upon the 2015-2020 Strategic Plan (without further detail) while noting work to be done toward a new strategic plan.
The MIRACLES Framework Public Facing approved on August 31, 2020. While this does not articulate a relationship to the strategic plan, it was later incorporated into the 2022-2027 Strategic Plan.6
A key takeaway is that during this time the school board shifted toward utilizing short-term plans as a strategic guide instead of a long-term, holistic plan.
The board did not formally move toward a new strategic plan until 2021, when they made a first formal step in developing a new strategic plan in the solicitation and approval of a consultant firm to develop a new plan.7 This process culminated in the framework of a strategic plan, the Evanston D65 Strategic Plan Draft Guide (Themes+Objectives) being presented at the May 23, 2022 regular board meeting where it was approved as the 2022-2027 Strategic Plan. This is the framework of a plan that can currently be found on the district website. Take a careful look at this plan, and you will note that it is missing several key elements of a strategic plan including extensive outcomes for each strategic goal (only five per), action plans for each outcome, benchmarks, and timelines.8
I cannot find evidence that the 2022-2027 Strategic Plan was ever completed with the district administration bringing back an extensively detailed, complete draft of the strategic plan with action plans, benchmarks, and timelines to be approved by the board.
This has also led to a significant breach of transparency and accountability. The last Strategic Plan Report on the website is from 2016. That is not a typo. We need a comprehensive and updated strategic report that has measurable benchmarks that are regularly and transparently evaluated.9
In the past year, the current administration has made some shifts back toward strategic planning best practices.
There have been some recent positive shifts that are important to note. On September 3, 2024, at the Committee of the Whole meeting the administration began monthly presentations on the work of District 65 departments as it relates to enacting the 2022-2027 Strategic Plan. These presentations have since continued every month. Additionally, I work with a community organization that has been connected to the development of a D65 draft plan that is currently receiving community input. The plan draft clearly states how each of its priorities align to specific strategic goals from the 2022-2027 Strategic Plan. These are two small but important steps that speak to the beginnings of what can continue to be a much broader culture change around strategic planning in D65.
These need to be built upon and formalized in a new strategic plan.
To restore public trust through good governance, transparency, and accountability, we need to begin right now to plan a yearlong process for the development of a new, real strategic plan that reflects our community’s values and priorities. This cannot wait until 2027. We need a real strategic plan complete with strategic goals, significant supporting outcomes, action plans, benchmarks, and timelines that are all approved by and regularly assessed by the board.
For such a plan to succeed, we will need to:
Deeply engage district stakeholders in a sustained process of conversation at each phase of the development of the strategic plan.
Ensure consistent and sustained board engagement at every phase of the development, implementation, and assessment of the strategic plan.
Receive quarterly reports on the strategic plan, noting that each goal can be regularly reported in a previously scheduled rotation so as to limit impact on a right-sized administration.
Restructure our data and reporting office and program to prioritize gathering data and consistently reporting out data on the strategic plan progress to the public.
Revise our website to ensure that the strategic plan and its quarterly reports are transparent and communicated in ways that allow the public to hold the district and the board accountable to addressing delayed or missed benchmarks, actions, outcomes, or goals.
Reshape board culture around the strategic plan. When something comes before the board, the first question should be, “Does/how does this fit into our strategic plan?”
Explicitly align the superintendent’s job performance with the strategic plan, so that the superintendent’s success and the district’s success are one and the same.10
Good governance, transparency, and accountability aren’t just words to me. We need to get this right. We–all of us together–can rebuild public trust, in part, through a new community-centered strategic plan. The next strategic plan should be the board’s contract with you, and we must institutionalize good governance, transparency, and accountability. We can have a real strategic plan that comes from you, and this will be a crucial step as we work for a more sustainable and equitable future for our school district. Let’s do it, together. Please vote for me on April 1.
The missing corresponding action plans, benchmarks, and timelines would have surely raised this to the fore.
For those new to strategic plans, they are extensive documents that should contain very specific elements. These are:
Strategic plans typically have five stakeholder-centered strategic goals that the organization desires to work toward over a five-year period. These strategic goals and all other elements of the plan need to be SMARTIE (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, timely, inclusive, and equitable).
For each of these strategic goals, there is a comprehensive list of outcomes (oftentimes between eight and fifteen in number) that will specify how you will bring the specific strategic goal to life.
Each of these outcomes requires clear action plans laying out the necessary steps that must be taken to successfully achieve the outcome. These action lists are detailed and comprehensive.
Accompanying each of these action items will be a clear benchmark, a specific data point against which the effectiveness of the action can be assessed.
Every outcome and corresponding action plan needs to be accompanied by a five-year timeline to evaluate progress and ensure that the strategic plan can be completed in the appropriate time.
Even HR or legal decisions should still be addressed in light of the priorities of the strategic plan.
If you attend or watch D202 meetings, you will note that all presentations to the board include specific reference to how that document is situated in relationship to the strategic goals of the organization. This has provided a particularly stark contrast at the joint meetings in which the districts co-present. The D202 presentation will note how it supports specific strategic goals, while the D65 presentations do not.
I am a researcher, so I want to be clear about my methodology. To the best of my ability, I have read through the agendas and/or minutes (as available) for the past five years as available on BoardBook. I have limited this to five years due to the previous strategic plan expiring in 2020 and also to keep this post as brief as possible. The last Strategic Plan Report available on the Data and Reports page of the website is from 2016, so there is room to suspect this was an issue prior to 2020 even if the data is inconclusive.
See the first strategic goal of D65’s current strategic plan.
See Strategic Planning Recommendation Letter, vendor proposal for the strategic plan, and vendor listing for the single vendor recommended by the administration.
Further limited benchmarks were approved at the November 14, 2022 board meeting and presented in a document, D65 District Goals, providing limited details on benchmarks for attendance, discipline, and academic outcomes.
There are two reports, the November 2023 Equity Progress Indicator and Strategic Plan Report and the February 2024 Equity Progress Indicator and Strategic Plan Report. Note that these reports only report out on a portion of the outcomes of the 2022-2027 Strategic Plan. As stated previously, I can find no reports that show that the 2022-2027 Strategic Plan was ever approved beyond a framework of a plan, nor can I find any evidence that it has ever been assessed in its entirety. This represents a stark breakdown in good governance, transparency, and accountability. Compare this to Park Ridge/Niles D64’s 2021-2026 Strategic Plan Reporting Dashboard that provides one example of a bare minimum of what transparent and accountable strategic plan reporting could look like.
This should be done at the next renewal or offering of a contract.
Hi Andrew, above, you indicate that lack of a strategic plan is the reason for the current financial crisis in the district. In the CASE forum on Wednesday night you said the district’s financial issues “are caused by long term structural deficits.” Other candidates mentioned malfeasance. Do you recognize the failure of the current board to responsibly steward taxpayer money? And, how do you interpret Dr. Horton’s role in the current financial situation?
Hi Andrew, what would your ideal ‘North Star’ be? And how would this be agreed in the relatively quick time frame that is needed given our current financial state?
I ask because what you describe is a process that doesn’t really seem that different from what has happened recently / what’s happening now - at least, what the board thinks it’s doing.