BRIDGES by GAPS

 

Greater Albany Public Schools is proud to announce a new mission statement and values and beliefs, crafted by the Strategic Planning team from the survey data shared by our students, staff, and community members.

After analyzing data from roughly 1,200 surveys, 17 focus groups, seven staff discussions, and four community forums, the Strategic Planning Team met for five four-hour sessions to capture the district’s future focus.

The mission and values and beliefs were crafted by the 20-person Strategic Planning Team and multiple drafts were vetted by several groups before being presented to the GAPS Board on Feb. 10, 2020. The Board approved the new statements at their next meeting on Feb. 24, 2020.

A central piece of the mission, values, and beliefs is the term BRIDGES, which appears both in the mission statement as well as serving as an acronym for the district’s seven central values and beliefs. The Willamette river bridge that crosses into downtown Albany has already been part of the GAPS district logo and the concept of bridges is integral in the district’s initiatives.

“The idea of the bridge is to connect,” Superintendent Melissa Goff stated at the Feb. 10 School Board meeting. “We know we have students that are further behind than other students and we want to build a bridge to their success and close the gap that has been created.

“We talked about bridges in a lot of metaphorical senses and we liked the counter message compared to our acronym of GAPS. If we can get everyone saying what we do is ‘build bridges’ I think we’ll have gone a long way.”

The values and beliefs, built off the acronym BRIDGES, were heavily driven by the feedback from the community. Key words including Build, Respect, Instruct, Design, Grow, Engage, and Strengthen serve as a blueprint for how the community envisions its school system.

“It was very important to us that equity and relationships shined through in many ways,” Goff added. “Making sure that instruction and learning were called out explicitly were also important. The D for design systems comes from one piece of feedback we received particularly from those internal in the organization that there was a need for systemic consistency.”

“It amazes me how much work and time it takes to thoroughly create these statements,” GAPS Board Chair Jennifer Ward said. “This shows the kind of work that has gone into this over the last few months so thank you to all of our stakeholders and all of our students and everybody that has been a part of the team for the hours, the thought, and the heart that were put into it.”

With Board approval to move forward, the Strategic Planning team met again on Feb. 26, 2020 to develop goals to be recommended to the School Board. 

Spanish Translation