After many months of hard work on the part of hundreds of the faithful throughout the diocese, Bishop Morlino has put forth a strategic plan for addressing the challenges that face our Catholic schools.
This plan forms a foundation or structure for planning our work over the next several years. The natural question that follows something like this is, “How are we going to do this?”
The simple answer is, “We’ve already been doing it!” The implementation committees of every parish already have a process to address strategic plans. The cluster directives for schools, just like the parish directives, give a direction to parishes and schools to address their specific challenges in the context of the overall strategic plan. They are part of the total plan for parishes and schools and will be addressed by parish implementation committees in the same way as the parish directives.
Future steps for the plan
Okay, sounds great, but when will we see them?
The bishop has his staff and the Planning & Implementation Commission (or PIC, as I fondly call them) looking at the final draft of the cluster directives for schools before he sends them out in the next couple of weeks. These directives are the result of all the conversations that occurred over the last 18 months during the school study.
The parish directives remain much the same as they were but take into account clusters’ communication with the PIC as well as the new priest movements. In both cases, they just spell out what everybody already knows and again, clarify the direction the parish should be moving in.
These directives are just in time for parish planning groups to take them into account for their next annual planning cycle. May is the time for parishes to be evaluating how their last year went working in the cluster, while June is the time for parishes and clusters to be planning for the upcoming year of pastoral ministry.
Clusters turn in an annual evaluation around May 15 that tells about the good, the bad, and the . . . everything else. Then, using that evaluation and the parish and school directives they’ll be able to work on putting together a new, improved annual plan for their cluster by the end of June.
Including schools in a concrete way
Just like the parish planning, this planning will now include schools in a more specific and concrete way. As always, if there are problems or issues, clusters should feel free to give me a call and we can work through them.
I would like to personally thank all of the people who have worked so hard on all of the pastoral planning that has occurred, both parish and school, over the last many months leading up to the schools strategic plan. Let’s all continue to pray for each other.
If you have any questions at all, contact us at trustinginthespirit@straphael.org or mail us at Trusting in the Spirit, 702 S. High Point Road, Madison, WI 53719.