Strategic Priorities

PRIORITY I: Clear Expectations

Mobilize all staff around a clear plan, grounded in a culture of high expectations and accountability, for how to achieve academic success for all students.

Why

We believe every child can learn and has the right to a high-quality public education.
We owe it to each one of our students to do everything we can to provide them with the tools they will need to be successful in life.
If we want to move the needle for our students in any meaningful way, we need to set high expectations for ourselves and for them and aim for dramatic gains.
We need to all be pulling in the same direction in order to achieve the board’s ambitious five-year goals.
We won’t reach those goals unless we prioritize accountability. Without it, the temptation to throw up our hands and return to business as usual will be too great.

How

We will vigorously communicate our goals and strategic plan to ensure that all 12,000 APS employees, the families of our 70,000 students, and our entire community is aware of where we’re headed and how we plan to get there. We will be clear about our expectations and upfront about everyone’s roles and responsibilities as we cultivate buy-in for the journey we are embarking on.
We will work with our schools, teachers, students, and families to refresh our vision and mission statements to reflect our commitment to high expectations for all students and staff and elevate the needs of students, especially low-income, Native, Black, and Hispanic students, English language learners, and students with disabilities.
We will create a report card to track the progress we are making on our goals and our strategic plan, and we will be transparent with staff, students, families, and our community on that progress. We will use that report card to hold ourselves accountable and to help us decide when we need to pivot because something we’re doing isn’t working.
We will continue to invest in our principals to make them stronger school leaders and we will do a better job of managing them and providing them the support they need so that they can transform their schools and get them on track to meet our goals.
We will make it clear what decisions are to be made at the district level and which ones are made at the school level. As we’re making those decisions, we will strive to give the staff at our schools a voice in decisions that impact the classroom and to ensure that we’re being responsive to the needs of schools.

PRIORITY II: Rigorous Instruction

Support leaders and teachers to provide students with rigorous, culturally sustaining, grade-level instruction that leverages high-quality instructional materials and is continually responsive to students’ progress.

Why

In 2018, a judge ruled that New Mexico isn’t providing a sufficient education to at-risk students, including Native Americans, English learners, socioeconomically disadvantaged children, and students with disabilities. The landmark Yazzie-Martinez ruling requires schools to do more to educate these at-risk students.
Most of our students aren’t at grade level in Math or English Language Arts, according to state assessments. And while that has been the case for a while, the pandemic has made the situation worse. Nationally, students lost ground in reading and math, among other subjects.
A company brought in to talk to APS students, parents, and staff to give us a sense of what we’re doing well and what we need to improve on found that our students want more rigor in their coursework. They are asking to be challenged, and we have to deliver on that. Among the company’s other findings:

We need to do a better job of using high-quality instructional materials in our classrooms to ensure that students are being challenged and that they’re doing grade-level work.
We need to provide better and more frequent professional development in order to improve student outcomes.
We need to do a better job of holding ourselves accountable.

How

We will insist that students be taught math and English Language Arts at grade level and that principals are supporting this work.
We will have high expectations for all students and ensure equitable access to high-quality instructional materials and effective instruction. We will use culturally relevant materials that reflect our diverse student body.
We will ensure that teachers have access to pacing guides in math and English Language Arts to help keep them on track so that when they reach the end of the year their students will be ready to move on to the next grade.
We will make sure that our math and English Language Arts teachers have the training they need to interpret the various assessments given to their students so that they can use those results to understand what is and isn’t working and pivot to provide students with the instruction they need to learn the material.
We will prioritize professional development for our educators to ensure they have the skills they need to get students where they should be in math and English Language Arts.
We will do a better job serving our special education students. Specifically, we will provide the services and training necessary to effectively educate students with disabilities in regular classrooms where possible. When a student’s disability prevents instruction in a regular classroom, we will provide specialized settings and programs.
We will come up with a consistent grading system that accurately measures student knowledge and skills across the district so that an A at one school means the same as an A at any other APS school.

PRIORITY III: Engaged Students

Cultivate safe schools and classrooms that keep all students engaged in their learning by ensuring they each have access to robust academic, social emotional learning, and extracurricular opportunities that meet their individual needs.

Why

A staggering 43% of our students were chronically absent in 2022. Chronic absenteeism is defined as missing 10% or more of classes or of school days for any reason. This is a huge obstacle we must overcome if we expect to improve student outcomes.
The pandemic has taken a devastating toll on children’s mental health, so much so that the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and Children’s Hospital Association have declared a national state of emergency in children’s mental health. The organizations cite soaring rates of mental health challenges among children, adolescents, and their families over the course of the pandemic, which, they say, worsened the situation that existed prior to the pandemic.
Investigations done across the U.S. and in New Mexico have found that students of color are disproportionately suspended or expelled compared to white students. An investigation by Pro Publica and New Mexico In Depth found that in this state, Native American students are expelled far more often than any other group and at least four times as often as white students.
Students deserve a voice in decisions that affect them. Penn State researchers note that leadership “instills confidence, and helps children solve problems creatively, work in a team, and work collaboratively with others.”

How

We will strive to create a welcoming, equitable, and engaging culture where students want to come to school every day. We will create that culture by challenging our students, treating them with respect, dealing with them fairly, and meeting their emotional needs.
We will prioritize social-emotional learning at APS and work with schools at all levels to integrate it into their daily routines so that students will develop those skills and be better equipped to handle life’s obstacles.
We will work with families, students, and staff to come up with a plan that outlines what the district, schools, and community partners can do to reduce student absences and meet the needs of our families.
We will work with our school leaders and teachers to come up with a disciplinary process that treats all students fairly and disciplines them in an equitable and consistent way. We will also scale up our restorative practices, which focus on repairing the harm caused by a student’s behavior rather than just punishment.
We will support school leaders and teachers as they launch student leadership programs that give students a voice in decisions made at their schools and at APS.
We will inform students and their parents of behavioral and mental health services available at APS. We will also look for ways to increase those offerings to better support our students who need help.

PRIORITY IV: Responsive and Coordinated Systems

Establish clear district systems for managing resources and communicating and supporting schools and families in a way that authentically responds to students’ needs.

Why

Everything we do at APS – from preparing budgets and communicating to the way we deploy technology – needs to be rooted in the needs of our students and schools.
Too often, schools calling Central Office with a question are receiving different answers from different departments and are left frustrated and confused.
Principals and other school leaders currently don’t have much of a say in how funding for their schools is spent.
Our district is inconsistent in messaging to families when a significant incident happens at their child’s school.
APS seized more guns on its school campuses during the 2022-2023 school year than in any prior year. Fifteen guns were reported or confiscated from an APS school last school year, leaving students and staff at those schools on edge and fearing for their safety.

How

We will do a better job of communicating and coordinating at Central Office so that we are consistent in what we are telling schools. We will strive to get to a place where a principal can call two departments at Central Office with a question and get the same answer from each department.
We will work to engage with our families on a consistent basis, alerting them promptly of any shelters in place at their child’s school and informing them of any major decisions being made that will affect their child – be it weather delays, changes to bell schedules, or changes in health policies. We will also work to give them information on actions they can take to help their child succeed in the classroom. Because not all of our families are English speakers, we will do our best to provide the information to families in their native languages.
We will implement a student-based budgeting process that gives principals the flexibility to make investments in staffing and programs they feel will help improve student outcomes at their schools.
We will invest in a new accounting software system that will help us streamline our work and make us more efficient as we allocate resources.
We will continue to invest in fencing and other infrastructure improvements to make our schools safer and to work with our school communities and community partners on ways to keep guns and other weapons out of our schools. We will also roll out our new crisis alert system that will eventually give every APS employee the ability to call for help with the click of a button.
We will create a better system for deploying technology to schools to ensure that teachers and other school-based staff have the resources they need to do their jobs effectively.

This page was last updated on: January 10, 2022.