Tulsa Public Schools Releases 5-Year Strategic Plan

Tulsa Public Schools released its five-year strategic plan today, but it's still just in a draft phase. Superintendent Deborah Gist talked about what the plan holds.

While these 14 pages may be encouraging and positively inspired, the plan is long on words and short on specifics.

TPS released a draft of its five-year strategic plan, and if you look through the pages, it looks generic.

Read the plan here

Gist says right now it's just an outline, an introduction of the way the district would like to approach the next five years of educating Tulsa's children.

“We talk about supporting schools and teams of teachers and individual teachers as well, helping them to innovate and create and to make improvements focusing on that goal of excellence."

But it's not quite finished yet. The first draft is for public input.

“Public education is part of the public trust and it takes all of us working together for us to get to where we need to be."

And the district faces some tough challenges like teacher retention, the Oklahoma school grading scale and most importantly according to Gist the graduation rate.

Which currently sits at 63 percent, well below the national average.

“We know that today students need not only a high school diploma but actually more than 60 percent of the jobs by the year 2020 will require a degree beyond high school."

Right now the draft is more of a philosophy, and hopefully by the end of the process a clearly defined road map for the years to come.