Design Plan Process

In an effort to create an even higher performing district, Colton Joint Unified School District (CJUSD) has partnered with The National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) for several years. NCEE has more than 30 years of experience studying the world’s top-performing education systems and is known widely for its proven professional learning supports for district and school leaders. Our work together has been guided by the NCEE Blueprint, a conceptual framework for system redesign. 

Our partnership began in 2018 when CJUSD committed to providing NCEE’s NISL program to forty of our principals and assistant principals. After seeing the impact the NISL program had on CJUSD’s leaders, former Superintendent Jerry Almendarez and his team began NCEE’s District System Design Partnership (DSDP) in 2019 to grow the skills of our leadership and reenergize and reengineer the district to improve student achievement. CJUSD stakeholders developed a shared understanding of our district’s unique context while researching high-performing education systems. They developed a research-based plan to redesign CJUSD’s system with each organizational component working to support and enhance other elements of the system. 

Since beginning the DSDP, the former Superintendent identified more than 40 district and community leaders to engage in this system work. Since stepping into the superintendent position in 2020, Dr. Frank Miranda has continued the system design work by beginning NCEE’s Teaching For Effective Learning (TEL) Series to support our district’s teachers.

Moving forward with our commitment to offering CJUSD students and families a high-quality education, district team members will engage with NCEE’s System Design Benchmarking in 2021 to build the district’s readiness for implementing the redesign plan. A small design team will finalize the redesign plan while CJUSD continues teacher learning through TEL, and principal and assistant principal learning through the NISL program.