Best Practices in Facilitating School-Based Organizational Change and Strategic Planning

Today’s children are coming to the schoolhouse door significantly at risk for both educational and social failure. According to the Children’s Defense Fund (1990), “the mounting crisis of our children and families is a rebuke of everything America professes to be. It also will bring America to its economic knees and increase violence and discord within this country unless we confront it” (p. 3). As examples of the broadbased problems currently facing our children and families, this report highlights the devastating statistics regarding school dropouts, child runaways, abuse and neglect, teenage parents, drug and alcohol abuse, children killed by guns, and the effects of poverty and homelessness on America’s children (p. 3-5). On a positive note, the decade of the 1990s may turn out to be one of the most important relative to rededicating ourselves to the educational and social needs of children and youth in America, but only if our nation’s schools are prepared to respond to the challenges described above. Significantly, when the divorce rate, the number of two-parent working families, and our nation’s health care crisis are factored in, virtually every student in this country is potentially at risk. Starting with the 1982 National Academy of Sciences report (Heller, Holtzman, & Messick, 1982) addressing the fundamental problems that exist in the provision of services to handicapped and at-risk students, continuing with the 1983 Nation at Risk report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, and fmishing with the National Governors’ Association educational summit in the Fall of 1989 to specify the nation’s educational goals for the con&g 10 years, the commitment to educational reform has been sounded at national, state, and local levels. With our National Education Goals and the Goals 2000 legislation now in place, all of our schools have benchmarks recognizing the importance of children’s academic, social, and learning readiness skills to their educational success. The question that now remains is, Do our individual schools have the skills, resources, motivation, and wherewithal to plan for and actually Howard M. Knoff University of South Florida