Dr. Walt Cooper
(Click for bio)
In April, Cheyenne Edition Publisher Andy Walter and Associate Editor Pattye Volz very willingly supported what will be a monthly guest column in our District 12 neighborhood newspaper paper sharing important news, perspectives, and issues within the Cheyenne Mountain School District. The Edition’s willingness to support such a column is another important step to fulfilling one of the goals established by the District 12 Board of Education in its 2012 update of the District 12 Long-Range Plan.
Specifically, the new monthly column will address one of the five work priorities established in the focus area of community engagement and moves toward achieving a goal of strengthening and expanding communications with all stakeholders in the Cheyenne Mountain School District. Other work priorities toward attaining this goal include distributing city-wide press releases on important items, expanding the content of the District 12 website, establishing and maintaining a comprehensive list of area media contacts for school district news, and actively seeking opportunities to promote District 12 to the larger community. And while there is a great deal of work involved in each of these work priorities, they are but a small component of the much larger long-range plan which has been the guiding document for much of the District’s work since its inception.
Initiated in 2010 to “further excellence in academics, arts, and athletics,” the District 12 Long-Range Plan is made up of five focus areas. In addition to the aforementioned focus on community engagement, the plan includes goals and work priorities in the areas of academic achievement and growth, highly effective instruction, safety and wellness, and fiscal responsibility. The logistics of the long-range plan involve the Board of Education publishing at the end of each calendar year an updated listing of work accomplished toward each goal as well as establishing either new or continuing work priorities for the present calendar year. All of this is intended to serve a dual purpose of keeping our efforts on track toward what is really important, and also to record for information and accountability purposes how successful we have been in meeting what we set as goals.
The full context and history of the District 12 Long-Range Plan can be found on this website and includes the most recently updated plan reports that show not only where we are headed, as evidenced through goals and work priorities for 2012, but also where we have been, and I think both are roads with which all District 12 constituents should be familiar.
Click here to go to the District 12 Long-Range Plan.
Respectfully,
Walter C. Cooper, Ed.D.
Superintendent of Schools
