Part of Dr. Mark Shanoff’s plan to make Osceola County’s schools a better place for students, teachers, staff and family when he took the job of school superintendent earlier this year was to find out what all of those groups are thinking.
He’s closer to accomplishing that goal, after wrapping up a series of town hall meetings at the county’s public, charter and magnet high schools.
If you came for the array of cookies he put out as a snack to the meetings, hopefully you stayed for the input sessions. Each meeting was in two parts —one for school staff members, and a second for parents and students. Using cellphone technology, attendees could answer questions about the School District’s strengths and weaknesses—then rate each other’s responses.
“I knew I’d get a lot of feedback relative to opportunities to improve. I was encouraged to hear the things everybody feels are going well,” he said. “The opportunities to improve were the things that I saw on the periphery during the application process.”
Shanoff, who is just two years out of the school administrative office—he was the Edgewater High principal in Orlando in 2021—used those opportunity sessions to remain in tune with what goes on in classrooms.
“I know teachers and staff members want that sense of ownership over what occurs in classrooms and how well students perform. They desperately care — they need to create the conditions that allow them to be successful. A primary way to do that is to communicate with them better. I think if we have more ongoing, consistent feedback and opportunities to reach out to me, we can really bring the organization in tighter, so anytime we need to implement a change, it’s with everybody behind it.
“What you want out of a large-scale school district is to assure that. We may never get it perfect, but we will continue to work to get there.”
Shanoff said he’d be sharing the input he got at the series of public meetings with the District’s departments and the School Board, as the basis of the next draft of its strategic plan.
“It will all result in goals that will be attainable, that will challenge us, and will definitely move this district,” he said.
