Adapting the Architectural Charrette to Educational Strategic Planning

January 27, 2006
Michael Papa & Kim Willens

An educational charrette is an intensive planning session where, over the course of three consecutive days, parents, teachers, and other concerned constituents collaborate with a team of community experts to define a clear vision for their school and to arrive at the critical steps that can be taken to realize that vision. It provides a forum for ideas and offers the unique advantage of giving immediate feedback to the board of trustees and administration. More importantly, it allows everyone who participates to be a mutual author of the plan.

We all have used this example with our students — the fact that the Chinese character for "crisis" is the same as the one for "opportunity." At the Academy of the Palm Beaches, this example became reality in February 2005 and a dynamic new approach to strategic planning in a school setting was the result.

In 2003, I was appointed head of the Academy of the Palm Beaches, a progressive school in West Palm Beach, FL, for students age two through grade eight. I inherited a school whose constituencies poorly understood its educational philosophy, that was under funded, and in need of more sustainable development programs. 

It was clear that we needed to do some intensive, community-wide tactical and strategic¹ planning to arrive at solutions that would fit the needs of both our program and our parents. We estimated that we had about three years before failing to address these issues would put the school at risk.

Why Not Traditional Strategic Planning?
Excellent planning models have been developed by others engaged in the development and support of independent schools. Nonetheless, these established processes require anywhere from nine to 12 months to complete. We did not have that kind of time. We needed action now!

Traditional long-range planning also encompasses every aspect of an institution's operation, usually emphasizing five-year goals for all administrative, academic, and constituent components of a school. The Academy had four areas that required intensive and immediate examination: its program, and the school community's understanding and ability to articulate it; its marketing of that program, which was being hampered by lack of clarity about the program; its finances, which were out of line with the requirements of the instructional program; and its development operations, which were overly dependent upon special events.

A parent who has long been involved in community redevelopment for West Palm Beach suggested a school-wide charrette. "Great!" I replied. "What’s a charrette?!" The term comes from the French word meaning "cart." During the 19th century, at Paris' Ecole des Beaux Arts, proctors would pull a large open-ended cart through the studios as senior students were still finishing their projects, lifting the paintings from the easels to take them for grading even as the last flourishes were being applied. Urban planners adapted the term "charrette" to describe the intensive community planning review process that has become the norm for major public works and civic architectural projects.

Adapting the Charrette to the School Setting
After reviewing literature from the National Charrette Institute, it struck me that a similar process could enable the Academy to really target the kind of short-term, community-wide planning that we felt we needed. The charrette, as we adapted it to the school setting, is not strategic planning in the traditional sense. It is more narrowly focused, action-oriented, and looks only to a short-term period (two-three years). It is designed to generate, in a three-day time period, a sequence of specific actions the school can take that will have an immediate impact on whatever issue(s) it wishes to target. 

The charrette allowed us to zoom in on the four key areas that we felt needed to be brought into better alignment: our innovative academic model and the marketing, development, and financial strategies that would be able to move it forward.

Next we needed a team of experts to guide our charrette. Dr. Carol Conger, a seasoned strategic planner for schools in New Jersey, agreed to be our facilitator. She found that she needed to put aside her established notions of strategic planning when she began meeting with me to discuss this charrette approach. I had designed the process we would employ, and was most gratified to see Dr. Conger accept it and implement it well.

We then secured experts in the four areas upon which we would be focusing: Donna Tobey, principal of Gulliver Schools' South Miami campus, served as our expert in educational innovation. Alan Fish, vice president for business services at the University of Miami, served as our expert in school finance. Phillip Winter, development director for the Miami Museum of Art, served as our expert in development. And Mike Connor of Connor Associates, the California-based educational marketing firm, served as our expert in marketing.

From February 1–3, 2005, this team and the entire school community worked tirelessly to create "a singular vision for successful educational, marketing, development, and financial strategies through a charrette design." The process encompassed four distinct stages:

• Fact-finding,
• Public vision,
• Public input, and
• Public review.

Fact-finding
The Academy's administrative team compiled an in-depth briefing book in the key areas of the charrette. The team had two weeks to review these background materials and one meeting each with the head of school to gain further perspective.

Fact-finding continued during the first part of day one of the three-day process. Meetings with administrators, trustees, parent-school association leaders, and Faculty Academic Council members rounded out the experts' understanding of the Academy and the challenges it faced.

Public Vision
The evening of day one saw the first of two town meetings held for the entire school community. Parents, faculty, and interested community members filled our cafeteria and offered their input on what made the Academy important to them. They also presented their observations on the school's finances, development efforts, and marketing outreach.

Examples of concerns expressed ranged from whether tuition would have to increase to sustain the educational program to a desire for more hard data to show the progress of the children. 

Public input
Day two of the charrette saw working groups recruited from all elements of the school's constituency coming together in roundtables of eight people each for one-hour brainstorming sessions. Each table was facilitated by one of the four charrette team members, thus ensuring that each one of our experts met with every participant.

Team members opened each of their four roundtable sessions with an overview of the options they had gleaned from the fact-finding and public vision segments of the charrette. Working group members responded both to the ideas being floated by the experts, and also offered additional insights into the programs at the Academy that had not surfaced during the town meeting.

By the end of that very long day, more than 200 person-hours of discussion had been completed! We knew going into it that the roundtables would generate information for each topic being highlighted at each of the four experts' tables. What proved to be the greatest dividend of these discussions was something I had not predicted. As the groups moved from table to table, new thinking began to emerge as ideas from one conversation became integrated with the next. The excitement and sense of "buy-in" experienced by faculty and parents alike were tremendous. I can honestly say that we were not the same school community by the end of that second day.

Public Review
Charrette team members spent day three in conference session, outlining the sequence for immediate implementation of their recommendations for the Academy. A PowerPoint presentation of this first-draft tactical and strategic plan for the next year and the two years following then was reviewed in the second town meeting of the whole school community, held that evening. Parents, faculty, and other charrette participants assembled to listen to the recommendations of the charrette team and to respond to them with candid feedback.

We ended day three with a tremendous affirmation and clarification of our school's mission and with tangible steps we can take, right now, to move us toward a more sustainable future, with an economic foundation equal to the academic program we embrace.
 
After the Charrette?
Fully two-thirds of the school's families were active participants in the charrette, whether as participants in the roundtables, attendees at the town meetings, or hosts at the various lunches and dinners for the team.

Following the charrette itself, families have continued to remain engaged in the follow-up actions stemming directly from the three-day forum. More than 15 percent of our parent body have joined with faculty and administrators to form task forces to explore many of the charrette's recommendations.

Our previous strategic plan, authored by the board of trustees in 2002, has now been fleshed out with full involvement by parents, faculty, and administrative staff. Decisions to hire a new assistant head for curriculum and instruction and to expand our programs for academic assessment of our students, for example, met with enthusiastic support, having been embraced during the charrette process as the correct steps to take. Even the imperative to put into place a 13 percent tuition increase was clearly understood and accepted by all constituencies.

Perhaps the greatest evidence of change is in our families' understanding of the annual fund and the importance it plays in funding independent school operations. Based on the recommendation of our post-charrette development task force, we increased our target for 2005-06 by 30 percent, and by January 1, were already 43 percent over that higher goal!

The 2005-06 school year saw our enrollment meet projections for the first time in a number of years. Thanks to the charrette, our parents had a much clearer understanding of their children's school. We are experiencing the highest retention rate in our upper grades in our history, moving our new middle school program toward the enrollment target requisite for its ongoing sustainability.

The Charrette as a Model for Educational Planners
Is a charrette the way to go for future educational planning? It certainly is a powerful tool for building community, for addressing critical areas of concern in an inclusive process. It is intensive, no question. But it makes it possible to generate, in only three days' time, a tangible roster of actions to take right away to address key issues. This process is a flexible one — a school can direct the focus of a charrette on a specific issue or set of issues of immediate concern. Although designed for a primarily tactical and short-term strategic planning need, there is no reason the more extensive range of issues covered by traditional planning models could not be incorporated into a charrette. The integration of experts, school leadership, faculty, and families makes the special strength of the charrette the mutual authorship of the final plan. 
The recommended actions are steps that have been thought through in concert with the full school community and have the power of consensus to move them forward.

There is no question the charrette moved our school community into action in a way never before realized. We have become an energized community, achieving with the charrette in three days’ time what used to require up to nine months to even get started. I think the charrette will prove to be a significant wave of the future for educational planners.

Michael Papa is the head of school for The Academy of the Palm Beaches in West Palm Beach, FL. He co-authored this article with Kim Willens, the Academy’s director of development and communication. The Academy is a progressive, child-centered school for children two years old through eighth grade. The school's approach develops life-long learners with the critical thinking skills necessary to achieve success in the future. The Academy is committed to fostering intellectual curiosity, self-respect, self-confidence, and social responsibility in an environment that enables each child to reach his or her full potential.

¹ Tactical plans address immediate short-term actions required to reach a specific objective; strategic plans address objectives required to reach a larger overall goal.