Welcome to Our ESU!

Welcome from Deb Paulman, ESU 16 Administrator

Greetings,

On behalf of the Board of Directors and the staff I would like to welcome you to Educational Service Unit 16. We look forward to sharing our continuous improvement journey with you over the next few days. Per Rule 84, ESU 16 has always engaged in a continuous cycle of review, reflection and improvement. However, approximately 10 years ago under the direction of then Administrator, Margene Beatty and Staff Development Director, Juliann Barger, the agency expanded their notion of the continuous improvement process. Since that first meeting in August, 2011, ESU 16 has embraced and engaged in an ongoing, regularly scheduled, all staff inclusive, process of continuous improvement.

The ESU improvement process has an agency level component as well as a Job Alike* level application. Each Job Alike group has identified their own improvement goal and associated action plan. These Job Alike goals/action plans fall under the umbrella of the agency's improvement Goal 1 (see below). Every staff member participates in both the agency and their particular Job Alike improvement processes. In the current 2016-2021 cycle there are two agency level goals.

Goal 1: To continually improve leadership and services through the use of data driven decision making.

Goal 2: To continually improve service and leadership through effective communication.

Recognizing the importance of review and reflection the ESU 16 Board of Directors annually designates five all staff meeting dates (August, October, January, March and May). These days afford an opportunity to develop staff capacity and focus on agency level, as well as Job Alike level improvement planning.. The improvement process is consistently and intentionally embedded in the work of these All Staff meetings. All Staff agendas typically include training opportunities to build staff capacity per the agency level action plans. A chunk of time is also set aside for each Job Alike group to evaluate implementation and progress on their respective action plans and adjust accordingly. The work of each Job Alike group at the various All Staff days can be accessed in the Profile of Services section. The Job Alike action plans and alignment to the ESUCC Standards can be accessed underneath the ESUCC Standards section.

The Steering Committee that oversees all of this work includes representation from each department and Job Alike group. The committee is responsible to organize and facilitate the continuous improvement process in general as well as the five All Staff days. The Steering Committee meets monthly to review implementation of the agency level action plans. This group is also responsible for developing the objectives and programming for each of the five All Staff days.

It has been a multi-year process to bring ESU 16 staff along. We have worked to expand staff understanding of the four types of data that can be used to support comprehensive program analysis, as well as build their capacity to leverage the information contained in the data to improve programs and services back to school districts. Our agency-wide ability to remain relevant and responsive is correlated with our capacity to access, evaluate and act on the data available to us.

The Welcome pages will give an overview of ESU 16 demographics. The Continuous Improvement pages document our internal continuous improvement processes as we’ve engaged with them these past five years. As the Steering Committee has reflected on where we’ve been and what’s been accomplished to date relative to our goals and the associated action plans, there are some next steps considerations. Continuous Improvement pages also provide access to the work of the various Job Alike groups over the past five years. And finally the last section of our CIP portfolio includes the Job Alike action plans as well as alignment of each group's services to the ESUCC pilot standards. Alignment to the pilot standards is also embedded throughout the portfolio.

*Job Alike groups refers to staff within a particular program/service. ESU 16 job alike groups include:

• Speech Language Pathologists

• School Psychologists

• Early Childhood Special Education Team

• Mental Health Team

• Transition/Inclusion Consultants

• Deaf Educator

• Occupational and Physical Therapists

• Paraprofessionals

• Administrative Assistants

• Network Operations

• Teaching & Learning

About ESU 16