ASCEND 2026 Approximately 35 people spent 189 days holding more than 60 meetings to develop a blueprint to guide St. Mary’s for the next 5 years. The result: ASCEND 2026, a strategic plan that sets performance objectives and strategies to achieve them in four categories: Student Success, Student Well-Being, Operational Excellence and Partnerships. “The emerging theme was that student experience was going to drive our future success,” said Mark Doyle ’76, who co-chaired Ascend 2026 with Ellen Fritz ’86 P’21’23. “We wanted all groups to look at it through the lens of student experience.” The ASCEND 2026 committee, with guidance from Public Consulting Group, collected feedback from students, parents, faculty and staff, trustees, the Sacred Heart School community and other stakeholders. The committee split into three groups, all chaired by trustees: Student Experience (Fritz and Elizabeth Molloy Twomey ’52), Physical Plant (Paul Price ’75 and Glenn Morris ’65), and Resources (Jim Lyle). The groups were charged with soliciting input and detailing strengths and weaknesses in order to build the 5-year plan. “The idea was to determine where we want to end up for all students and develop performance objectives along the way to guide our work,” said Fritz, whose son, Lucas, graduated in 2021 and daughter, Allie, is a junior. “We rolled up our sleeves and went to work. We needed to see what those performance objectives looked like.” 20 ST. MARY'S MAGAZINE
ANNUAL EDITION 2021
ASCEND 2026 objectives include: • E ach student will participate in at least one extracurricular activity. • Each student will have a personalized learning plan to meet their needs. • Each elementary (Sacred Heart) and middle school (Marian Division) student will have an older student as a buddy/mentor. • St. Mary’s will invest in adjustment counselors and programming for students’ emotional and mental health. • St. Mary’s will actively recruit an employee base that is reflective of the students it serves. • The partnerships/volunteer opportunities will meet the needs of students, specifically with regard to the creation of real-world experiences. Fritz said it was important to include teachers in the conversations. “They have to take this and make it a living document,” she said of ASCEND 2026. “We have a beautiful, new building. We have to make sure we can deliver instruction that matches.” The ASCEND 2026 committee met for the first time on Jan. 27 and presented their work at a board retreat on August 4 – a period of barely more than six months, an ambitious timeline to say the least. “It seems like record speed, but you don’t realize that when you’re going through it,” said Fritz, who serves as principal of Lynn Woods Elementary School. “There were a lot of great people involved.”
