The Rancocas Valley Strategic Planning process kicked off at the first community engagement session on October 20, 2016. The session included stakeholder involvement from students, parents, teachers, school administrators, sending district Superintendents, and municipal officials. The first community engagement session demonstrated the real pride and passion for Rancocas Valley as the group expressed what they want Rancocas Valley Regional High School District to be by the year 2020.
I think it is important to define the often overused term, stakeholder before we prove the importance of their involvement. As a term that has been used for a long time, Freeman (1984) described stakeholders as any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of organizations’ objectives. As you can imagine, Rancocas Valley is the hub of the RV Region communities and the stakeholder base within Freeman’s definition is deep. Mitchell et al. (1997) refined the definition to say that a stakeholder is an individual or a group that significantly affects an organization’s behavior. This may be a better definition to describe Rancocas Valley’s efforts as both internal and external stakeholders have a vested interest in the future of the RV organization. Roome and Wijen (2006) found that stakeholder involvement has an important influence on improving current practice and for creating positive change for new initiatives.
It has been proven that strategic planning and community engagement are powerful when used to create change and plan the future of a school district. Rancocas Valley is off to a good start and we are looking to increase the involvement during the upcoming sessions on November 15th and December 15th.
Above you will find the video created by RVTV to document the session and below you will find the data collected during the night that will help to guide when the strategic plan is developed. Thank you for your participation … RV PRIDE!
vision-2020-community-engagement-session-1-graphs
Freeman, R. E. (2010). Strategic management: A stakeholder approach. Cambridge University Press.
Mitchell, R. K., Agle, B. R., & Wood, D. J. (1997). Toward a theory of stakeholder identification and salience: Defining the principle of who and what really counts. Academy of management review, 22(4), 853-886.
Roome, N., & Wijen, F. (2006). Stakeholder power and organizational learning in corporate environmental management. Organization Studies,27(2), 235-263.