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Publish a dashboard for Strategic Plan accountability to highlight the progress and impact of implementation. The outcome of this initiative is an interactive dashboard and narrative on the website. 

2023-24 Winter Progress Update 

Accountability to KSD students, families, and community is essential to a well-functioning public institution. The Strategic Plan is a guiding document for KSD leaders and staff to prioritize the areas of our daily work where we will cultivate systemic change. To ensure that the Strategic Plan continues to be a guiding document for decision-making in the years ahead, we will create a public-facing Strategic Plan annual report and data dashboard which shows progress towards our goals, commitments, and measures. 

Thus far, the annual report and data dashboard have been in a technical planning phase. KSD Central Administration leaders and technical experts on the Research & Evaluation team have met continuously this fall and winter to create an initial design of the annual report and data dashboard. From these conversations, the Research & Evaluation team has built a draft data dashboard, which visualizes the data for Strategic Plan measures, organized by goal area. They integrated feedback around the role of contextual narrative in the annual report by grounding quantitative metrics in their context. Research & Evaluation will continue coordinating with Strategic Initiatives on this work to develop the draft before the next phase of this work, including intentional feedback cycles with KSD community teams and groups. 

Core to this initiative is sharing results around intentional decisions and actions taken by KSD towards its strategic goals. These results will be reflective in both quantitative and qualitative data, and the key focus of the work will be in accounting for how to share this data in an approachable manner. In planning for building this deliverable, the Research & Evaluation team has met with experts across the KSD Central Administration to discuss data collection methods and ensure that there are systems set up to reliably track the quantitative data making up the Measures over time. 

In addition to using quantitative data to build the data dashboard, the Research & Evaluation team have planned out the initiative development aligned to learnings from a history of communicating data to the public. They have learned from experiences in sharing survey results publicly through the KSD website and in community forums about how to craft stories around quantitative data which richly contextualizes metrics. The team plans to learn from the feedback of other communications experts and stakeholder groups during their feedback phase to build out a dashboard which connects with all members of our community. 

The design of the Strategic Plan accountability initiative has been to create an enduring tool which could be used as a source of accountability through transparency to the community. When it is published online, KSD leaders, staff, families, and community members will be able to track KSD's progress towards achieving its goals through reading about the priority initiatives and their outcomes, annually, and seeing the historical change of the Measures. By creating a dynamic data dashboard which can be updated annually, the impact of the deliverable will be sustained throughout the course of the Strategic Plan implementation. Additionally, creating systems to update the data dashboard and annually account for the story of priority initiatives year-to-year, we will ensure that the reporting continues after the initial push to create the tool in Year 1. 

This fall, our Action Planning Team met with key leaders and stakeholders for this initiative to outline a vision and expectations for a public-facing data dashboard to track the Strategic Plan measures and outline the contextual elements to be integrated into the public-facing dashboard.

Anticipating the quantitative data component to a future dashboard, the team has also developed a data source with historical and baseline data for each measure included in the Strategic Plan data dashboard. For measures without baseline data, we have identified areas of data tracking where the team will need to connect and partner with other KSD district teams to develop a cadence for collecting and sharing data.

The Research & Evaluation team is currently drafting an early version of the Strategic Plan data dashboard, with the goal of reviewing a draft toward the end of January.

Centering Stakeholder Voice

For this priority initiative we will be seeking stakeholder voice in a unique way. The Research & Evaluation team will coordinate with Kent School District domain experts to develop new methods of gathering data specific to measures outlined in the Strategic Plan. We will also gather feedback from school staff, families, students, and more, to create a data dashboard which is inclusive and accessible to all.