Howard County Public School System (HCPSS) Superintendent Michael Martirano presented his first system-wide overview of progress toward achieving the desired outcomes of his strategic plan and announced a new Strategic Call to Action (SCTA) website for monitoring performance measures moving forward.
The Strategic Call to Action (SCTA) Annual Report for 2018-19, presented during the Sept. 5 meeting of the Howard County Board of Education, reflects the work of all HCPSS schools, offices and divisions in their efforts to increase equity, close opportunity gaps and elevate expectations across the system.
“This first annual report provides an assessment of our progress and challenges, and takes our system to a higher level in terms of transparency and accountability to our stakeholders,” Martirano said. “The new SCTA website makes this information available in a user-friendly format to help our staff and community members review our ongoing efforts and strategies to provide equitable opportunities for all our students to be successful.”
Martirano established the Strategic Call to Action: Learning and Leading with Equity (SCTA) during the 2017-18 school year, his first year at the helm of the school system. The SCTA identifies the system’s four overarching commitments of value, achieve, connect and empower to students and other stakeholders, as well as 15 desired outcomes relating to student-centered practices, inclusive relationships, and responsive and efficient operations.
Performance measures, added when the SCTA was updated at the start of the 2018-19 school year, support HCPSS in implementing a continuous cycle of action, alignment and accountability.
The SCTA Annual Report identifies the level of progress achieved during the 2018-19 school year for each desired outcome, and includes key metrics, preliminary measures and key strategies for continued progress moving forward. Progress is defined for each outcome on a scale from Level 1 through Level 4.
At the close of the first year of implementing the SCTA, HCPSS demonstrated Level 1 progress in nine of 15 outcomes and Level 2 progress in four outcomes. Outcomes showing the most progress relate to creating inclusive relationships and responsive and efficient operations. The report notes two areas of concern in outcomes related to student-centered practices.
The SCTA website provides baseline data across desired outcomes and will continue to track progress moving forward for performance measures. It can be found at www.hcpss.org/scta.