By Kyle Roberts
During the May 2025 Lincoln Parish School Board meeting, LPSB Assistant Superintendent John Young unveiled the new strategic plan for the years 2025 – 2030. What follows is a question and answer session covering a variety of topics surrounding the strategic plan and what it means for the future of schools in the Lincoln Parish School District.
The conversation has been lightly edited for consistency.
LPJ: Can you walk us through how this plan was originally created?
John Young: Post-COVID, the Louisiana Department of Education asked school districts across the state if they wanted to be a part of a plan to recover from COVID losses. We all know the negative effect COVID had in terms of the academics for our students. We agreed to join Cohort No. 1 in the Strong School Systems Initiative. And that initiative entailed developing a steering committee of central office employees from various backgrounds that handle each grade level of of content — these are people on the ground that knew how the district had performed academically and where we’d like to be in terms of achievement in the future. And then from there, they matched us up with Attuned Education. This is a nationwide company of K-12 experts that have worked with school districts, large and small to create goal oriented strategic plans. They helped us create an organizational diagnostic using our school data, interviews and surveys about how people felt about our schools. Questions like, “How does the community feel about your school? How do your students feel about your school? How do your employees feel about your school system?” Employee, student, and stakeholder viewpoints were captured in a document and we started plan development. Attuned help facilitate discussions rooted in incremental growth and we narrowed down the strategic plan’s focus to the four or five things that were important to all of us. In each priority, there are multiple layers of complexity but the 4 Strategic Priorities include Rigorous Instruction, Individualized Student Support, Foundational Skills (K-2 Literacy) and Building a Diverse and Talented Team.
LPJ: Can you unpack each of those priorities?
JY: Sure. SP1: Rigorous Instruction focuses on developing teachers to deliver high quality instruction every day that reaches every student. We have a district content facilitator for ELA, Math, Social Studies and Science. They know the curriculum very well, and it is their job to ensure that the correct standards are taught, lesson planning is uniform across the district and that student work is analyzed correctly. We had to make sure teachers knew what to teach and what’s going to be assessed at the end of the year.
SP2: Individualized Student Support is about meeting our students’ diverse needs. This focused on several aspects of whole child education. “Do they feel safe at school? Do they feel supported by their teachers? Do they feel welcome in our schools?” We want spaces where students feel comfortable but we have to provide tiered support structures because no two students are the same. If a student is not proficient in mastering grade level content, we have interventions in place to help them get what they need to master the content. We want to have support structures in place where every kid, if they are behind, can essentially get time during the day to work on it. We have carved out a small section of the daily schedule to give students that may not have gotten the lesson the day before, or need some additional help on something that they learned two months back. It’s almost like after school tutoring during the day.
The other thing, too, is the behavioral support. We use Panorama education to inform our social emotional well-being instruction and practices. We survey our students to get a temperature of how well they feel the school is supporting their needs — it’s tailored to finding out specific things about them and informs us on what to do to help.
SP3: Foundational Skills (K-2 Literacy) is UFLI. We had so much response from our faculty in the lower grade bands that a phonics piece was missing from our grade level curriculum. We did some research and we noticed that Louisiana Tech had started a pilot with University of Florida Literacy Institute — they have an outstanding curriculum for helping kids read. This is used to close some gaps that we had with kids that were struggling to become proficient readers.
And SP4 is Building a Diverse and Talented Team. We wanted to make sure that teachers did not have any kind of bias toward students that were sitting in their classroom. We’ve had training sessions on cultural competency, so no matter what the students’ background is they should feel comfortable in the classroom. We do online training with Vector Solutions where teachers can actually sharpen those skills and that library is available to them.
LPJ: Talk a little bit on how you’ll be measuring and assessing that this strategic plan is working.
JY: We have strategic plan progress monitoring software from Attuned Education that we use. When we talk about strategic priorities, they all have an initiative lead that is a directly responsible individual that oversees all the implementation of the work for their priority. And there are other layers of support but each priority has a measurable goal. We have progress reports to check how we are doing. It’s also important to note that when we are looking at data, we don’t want to see huge jumps — we want to see incremental success so outcomes are sustainable.
LPJ: From here, how will you be communicating this strategic plan to the public? How will you be able to get this to parents?
JY: We’re making sure to communicate these things on our social media pages and we’ve made sure to put this on our website. We also, obviously, released the plans to schools and outlined in laymen’s terms what our areas of focus were regarding the strategic plan. It also communicates “who” we’re using as well — people want to know what curriculums we’re using to support the strategic plan.
LPJ: Our last question — how often will you provide updates and reference the strategic plan? Will this be something we can expect to hear about at school board meetings?
JY: I think the natural progression will be when we get new data and see changes. I think what you’ll see over the next year are points about the strategic plan coming out of board meetings. For example, in June or July, we’re going to get an update on DIBELS. It’s going to be our first year doing UFLI implementation, and I’m pretty sure the board’s going to be interested to see exactly how that is. Another piece will be when our District Performance Score comes back, typically some time in October or November. When we get data back that’s significant, we’ll report that out.
LPJ: Thank you for your time.
LPSB District Instructional Leadership Team Members:
Ricky Durrett
John Young
Justin Barron
Amy Brister
Michelle Thrower
Emily Howell
Courtney Martin
April Winstead
Shannon Lee
Daryl Savage
Phaedra Blake
Becky Stutzman
Sheila Nugent
Dr. Lillie Williams-Hearn
