Strategic Planning at the Elementary School Level

Strategic planning is a catchy buzzword that is influencing organizational behaviour in many industries, including education. Strategic planning is vision and goal setting process that aims to solve both short- and long-term problems of the organization. Strategic planning is an inherently political process: organizational strengths, problems, and opportunities can be highly contested. Educational strategic planning literature exclusively explores strategic planning at the school district level. However, strategic planning happens at the local level as well. In Ontario, principals are mandated to create School Improvement Plans (SIP). This research focuses on the strategic plan of the local school by interviewing elementary school administrators responsible for creating SIPs, and comparing interview and SIP data to district-level strategic planning documents. Three key areas of interest arise in the paper: (1) administrator perception of