Principal's Vision

2 Pages 459 Words

To support an environment that recognizes the potential of all students to excel emotionally, academically and physically in order to become responsible and productive citizens in a multicultural society. That is the mission statement for Nansemond River High School in Suffolk Virginia. A lot of things are to be taken in to account when developing and implementing a mission statement. I picked this schools’ mission statement, because I thought it was well written.
There were three steps that were taken to develop this mission statement. The first step was to organize a steering committee of five to ten people who represented various branches of the school community. The next step was to collect information on the things people wanted to continue and the things people wanted to change. Also things that were currently occurring in the school were included in step two. The last step was to reconcile those areas where there are opposing views. Develop a more refined draft to be presented to and discussed with all groups in the school community.
After the principal took all of this into consideration he shared with me the actual day that he and his staff developed the mission statement:

We had a half-day conference day. Having collected some examples of mission statements, we gave them to people ahead of time so they could get an idea of what we would be doing.

When we assembled in the library (whole middle school staff) an overhead was used to look at some examples. We discussed the different types, such as one line or more complex. We also looked at the sorts of things that were important and then brainstormed the things we thought were important for our middle school.

The faculty was divided into groups of two. Each group wrote a mission statement. Groups of two were then combined into groups of four. This group came to consensus on one statement. This was repeated, with groups joining until there was only one left. As...