TPS Unveils New Five-Year Strategic Plan

Monday night, after months of town hall meetings with the community about what it wants from the district, Tulsa Public Schools unveiled its plan for the next five years - even while facing a state budget shortfall.

The plan focuses a lot on how to work with what the district has in order to make it better, including new strategies to help students learn through more modern techniques and how to give teachers more freedom to teach the way they feel will be most effective.

The TPS Board of Education reviewed the final five-year strategic plan Monday night.

Superintendent Dr. Deborah Gist said, “It is hard to be a teacher right now in Oklahoma. But what we know that we have to do in Tulsa Public Schools is to have our district be the best, most desirable, most prestigious place to teach.”

Destination Excellence Plan

Gist said it also has to be a successful place for students to learn.

In order to make that happen, the entire TPS community will have to be learners to gain skills necessary for success; be contributors to the well-being of the district and community, and be designers to reimagine and innovate in the classroom.

"Fewer pieces of paper where a student is just doing a workbook, and more projects where they are completing a task and working together as a team to get something done, and using the skills they're learning in the context of that problem," Gist said.

And, she said, the state budget shortfall isn't going to make things easy.

It may take reaching out to Tulsa's philanthropic community, especially to support staff ideas that include using more innovation and technology in the classroom.

Gist said, “They might need some extra resources to get that off the ground, so we might seek some extra support to help them do that kind of work.”

Hopefully, allowing teachers flexibility when it comes to thinking outside the box regarding curriculum.

“To be able to target learning for individual students so that when students are really doing well we can challenge them and not hold them back because the rest of the class isn’t there yet,” Gist said.

You can read the full report here.