January 24, 2019
by Brent Peacock, Chair of the MPA Board of Trustees
In 2015, MPA launched an extensive, highly collaborative, strategic planning process. The process, which was initiated, designed and driven by a task force of the Board of Trustees and Head of School, involved and engaged 64 stakeholders from across the school community, including leadership, faculty, staff, families and, critically, students. The process was grounded in the mission and values of the school and was designed to be collaborative, comprehensive, transparent, and inclusive. It provided both a compass and a blueprint to make informed decisions in order to respond, anticipate, and proactively plan for changes and challenges ahead. Not only did the process produce a strong 5-year strategic plan (Momentum 2020), it also built trust and partnerships among its wide array of stakeholders.
As we continue the tremendous progress we have achieved with Momentum 2020, the MPA Board of Trustees is also preparing the groundwork for our next strategic plan. One in which we have the luxury of taking a more focused approached. We will continue to use a very collaborative process utilizing our entire school community. One of the key resources we will use to guide our work will be the ISACS visiting team’s report in which they recommended full accreditation for MPA.
As the team leader of our recent ISACS Visiting Team remarked: “Mounds Park Academy is a school that has maintained its core ideals and its reason-for-being since its inception. At the moment, it may be living its mission more fully than at any other time since its inception. Through conversation with all constituencies, our visiting team heard evidential support for the high scores reported in the Kensington Survey. Buy-in is high right now, as is morale and institutional self-confidence. Yet that idealism and good spirit is tethered to reality.”
