New Network Support Model

Searching for inspiration for this blog post I ran across some information about the 56 Network Support Position that Dr. Alonzo has created to help decentralize North Avenue. In essence, the idea is to trim the bureaucracy in the central office and replace it with a new tier of support for a small subset of schools.

According to this model, all of the schools in the Baltimore City Public School System will be placed into 'networks' of 10 - 15 schools. Each of network will have a network team consisting of 4 team members; a Network Team Leader, an Achievement Liaison, a Business Support Liaison, and a Student Support Liaison. Each network will be accountable to the Network Director, who I presume will report to Dr. Alonzo and the School Board.

In effect each school will be placed into a smaller district within a district. I find this idea particularly interesting and appealing for several reasons. First I think this creates an excellent opportunity to bring school leaders from within each network together with the Network Support Team to create more concrete vision for that network and apply some of the concepts of integrated vertical teaming between schools. Ideally I would like to see more communication, integration, and collaboration between elementary and middle schools and middle and high schools to create more overlap and greater depth of understanding from one grade and school to the next. I can't recall how many times I've heard students from different schools respond to the same content in completely different ways. On one end of the spectrum "I've done this before, why do I have to do this again," yet on the other side you have the "I've never heard of this before and don't have a clue what you're talking about." This happens despite the fact that we're supposed to be following the same curriculums in each grade.

I also like this approach because, again ideally, should create more autonomy for individual networks and help remove some of the steps required to do things like file requests for field trips and other activities that get bogged down in bureaucratic paper pushing.

Conversely, I worry about ineffective Network Teams failing to deliver effective response to local concerns and creating more gridlock than collaboration. I think a major step to reduce the likelihood of this happening is utilizing space within schools inside the network for their office and meeting space. I think this would help prevent the association of the Network Teams with the stigma of central office and make the members of the Network Team more accountable to the members of their Network by making them physically close.