Here’s how decisions about schools are usually made: The same insiders call the shots behind closed doors, year after year. They make judgments about families and children based on limited data, rarely speaking to anyone directly. They write “strategic plans” that no one reads. Or, worse, they let politics prevail.

These bad habits result in schools that don’t match the needs or wants of the students, families, and communities they serve. Bad leadership habits create divisions and breed distrust. They are the reason that waves of politically motivated policies and initiatives keep pounding schools but never effect real change.

As top education officials in Kentucky and Burlington, Vermont, we said: enough.

We began exploring new ways to shape schools with families and communities through our superintendents’ network, the Deeper Learning Dozen. We agreed that our school systems, in two entirely different parts of the country, needed to completely overhaul the way education is imagined and assembled, in ways we knew would mean taking big risks and upsetting entrenched practices.

Along the way, we found a huge appetite among our school families and communities to be directly engaged in the decision-making process; in both Burlington and Kentucky, they pushed hard to give far more people significant influence in shaping what we do. We aimed to reach across our divides to create real understanding.

In Vermont’s Burlington School District in mid-2020, we found an unmet desire among families to be seen and for schools to address the full needs of students.

We realized there was a need for an entirely different way to involve the community in crafting the district’s five-year strategic plan.

With the support of the Center for Innovation in Education (C!E), we assembled a coalition of residents — some who were appointed, some who applied and some who were invited from under-represented subgroups — which ultimately included families, students, school staff, community members and a school commissioner.

The coalition conducted more than 75 in-depth interviews with residents before synthesizing themes and building a strategic plan aligned to Burlington’s core needs and desires.

As a result, the plan’s first priority became supporting belonging and well-being for students, families and staff — something requested over and over in the interviews.

Read the full article about how communities can help shape schools by Jason E. Glass and Tom Flanagan at The Hechinger Report.