Key Points
- The sustainability of positive change is almost as important as the change itself.
- There are many sustainability factors that school leaders need to consider beyond the budget.
You’re reading this article because you want to make a change in high school life. You may have experienced firsthand how challenging it can be to rethink, redesign, and collaborate on building a student-oriented high school that prepares graduates for the future. The innovative and creative energy necessary for this labor of love needs to be sustained, and that sustainability requires a dynamic strategy that involves the entire community.
In my role as Senior School Success Officer at XQ, we have partnered with communities to help them realize their high school dreams, turn their innovative ideas into action, and create more rigorous and equitable schools. I’m learning with the team and eager to share their insights in hopes of accelerating your work.
“Sustainability can’t be achieved without the communities that surround schools. This is accomplished by creating meaningful partnerships between public, private, and nonprofit organizations,” explains Jamie Van Leeuwen, Director of Youth and Community Engagement at Emerson Group, who advises XQ Schools on how to build these relationships.
With that in mind, it’s critical for school leaders to consider the various factors that impact school sustainability, as well as how their school connects with the community. Where can you develop or strengthen relationships that support, inform and guide this work?
New insights into sustainability
Through XQ’s partnership with XQ Business School, we have distinguished five components of sustainability that we believe are critical to sustaining innovative schools in realizing their vision: financial, operational, academic, leadership, and extended impact.
- Fiscal. This is what most people think of when they think of “sustainability.” In fact, multi-year budget planning, transparency, and accounting are critical to a school’s long-term viability because they are the lifeblood of its day-to-day operations. We at XQ are grateful for the work and resources provided by Afton Partners and ERS Strategies in this area.
- Operational. Adding a degree of complexity to the concept of sustainability is the area of operations. If a school is forced to move into a new facility, will it be able to stick to its model? What programs and structures are in place to ensure the continued health and engagement of students and staff? Can all staff and programs be supported through long-term, reliable funding sources?Fielding International provides strategic planning in this area, while technology providers such as Abl Schools offer robust technology to manage important elements such as master schedules.
- Academic. At XQ, the core of our concern is creating meaningful and equitable student learning experiences. This requires learning models and systems (such as those that are competency-based and/or personalized), how student growth and achievement are monitored and supported, and what students achieve during and after their school experience. Each of these requires a deep and shared understanding of how the nuanced details should look and operate. There are many organizations that support this type of work, including the Aurora Institute, Spring Point Schools, and Vision Learning Partners.
- Leadership. All of the other areas that impact sustainability are leadership. Because school and district leaders tend to make change on a scale of years rather than decades, it is critical for any leader trying to affect change to consider how to build long-term momentum behind their vision and culture, prioritize distributed leadership, and build strong board and governance relationships and structures. Board of Education Partners and High Tech High GSE offer unique and high quality services in this area.
- Extended Impact. Once a school has created meaningful positive change and become financially, operationally, academically, and leadership sustainable, it is worth considering how others can capitalize on or benefit from the strategies and processes that the school experiences. This can be done through initiatives such as community partnerships, leveraging political capital to expand to new locations, or providing professional learning. We appreciate Getting Smart’s work in this area.
The above components are shown below.
The components of sustainability that any school needs to focus on are determined by specifics such as school models, district relationships, network partnerships, etc., but it’s not hard to see that each has the potential to influence a wide range of initiatives and structures. Gaining a wide range of expertise and contributions from your community is critical to maintaining your momentum and building resilience for the future.
Important details such as leadership, learning patterns, and political context will inevitably change. What is a school leader to do if a change in district policy threatens some aspect of the school’s daily practices and norms? How should they respond if a local news outlet publishes a scathing story about parents’ concerns about innovation in their school? Perhaps least well known, more than one XQ School leader has observed that even mature innovation teams can “regress toward the mean” over time if they are not intentionally and regularly re-energized.
Some changes, such as increased funding through the federal K-12 COVID Relief Fund, will require new decisions about how resources are used to improve learning. (Click on “High School Choice Now” to learn more about opportunities to spend this money on high school renovations). Through the journeys of XQ Schools’ recipients, we have learned time and time again the importance of intentional planning to sustain these changes, and trust that school leaders will consider these lessons as they plan for the future.
While many of the schools we work with continue to refine and pursue sustainability programs, we wanted to share some inspiring examples of what these sustainability factors look like in practice.
High School Sustainability Strategies to Consider
For example, the Washington Leadership Academy focuses on a number of guiding principles and related actions to solidify their position. They focused on developing and maintaining a strong, actively engaged board of directors that could connect the school with new community partners and provide insight into local politics and community priorities. They have creatively developed a structure that allows them to operate at full capacity using only Americans with Disabilities Act funds, and to use additional appropriations for innovation. They are also expanding their reach through national partnerships with organizations such as CommonLit, which work to build and provide open access to high-quality learning products.
Elizabeth High School is a public high school that has been around for decades, but has developed a new commitment to education in recent years. They know that they will be able to exist for many years based on their history and community, so for them, sustainability is about laying a strong foundation to ensure the resilience of their academic innovations. To do this, they ensure that they pursue new strategies with a “bottom-up” mentality, deeply engaging and reflective of student voice, prioritizing the needs and ideas of their faculty. They have expanded their reach through community, business and higher education partnerships, maintaining the school’s brand in their community. This has allowed them to further pursue strong connections with industry and CTE partners.
Crosstown High School has made significant strides in sustainability by seeking facilities that are directly embedded in the heart of the community’s businesses. This community engagement and proximity, along with the associated partnerships and visibility, provides a unique value-add to the school that will support their financial, operational, and leadership sustainability moving forward.
They have strengthened academic sustainability by focusing on implementing competency-based learning practices, including the creation of strong program and scheduling structures to support student mastery of the school, and innovative technology solutions to support their collection and tracking of this student data.
Conclusion
In terms of importance, the sustainability of positive change follows the change itself. For schools, sustainability requires continually adapting and strengthening the school model to engage not only staff and students, but also community partners and other stakeholders in the “why” and “what” of the school.
For this reason, we encourage schools to keep moving forward. If your school has made great strides in serving students better, it’s worthwhile to consider how consciously asking your school community and stakeholders to help you develop practices and next steps might strengthen your model. As a starting point, consider the following.
- What resources (e.g., finances, political capital, staff talent and interests) do we have that do not currently support our model in depth?
- What kind of regular registration structure is in place to ensure the continued effectiveness of our program?
- Are there possible community and/or nonprofit partnerships that we have not yet explored?
- What public sector leaders, academic institutions, and private businesses might be interested in our work?
- Who are the coalitions that help you think about each dimension of sustainability? How can you build an advisory board of supporters who can also support the school externally?
- If you were going out to dinner with a potential funder looking for an attractive project for a $100,000 grant, what would your team suggest?