PORT ANGELES – The Port Angeles School District is reaching out to the community for developing a new strategic plan.

The district has launched a community-wide survey for all residents in the district regarding the planning process and educational needs for students.

Superintendent Marty Brewer says the information is critical. He says instead of gathering the typical advisory groups at the beginning of the process, the district is going directly to the public to get input.

“We’re going to do it differently. We really want to make this an inclusive process, that anybody and everybody that has a voice that wants to share their opinion on where our district should have the opportunity to do so,” said Brewer.

Brewer says the community input will be critical in how the district creates goals and objectives.

“It’s about 15 or 16 questions. And there’s some text boxes where you can add some narrative:  if there’s anything else you’d like, you know, to provide to our district. That’ll really give us some guidance around some big ideas that we have moving forward, like, for instance, our special-ed programming and, you know, asking questions are what are we doing well and what do we want to improve upon,” said Brewer.

After the data is collected, Brewer says there will be another round of outreach.

“So, we’ll take that data and then we’re going to push out into the community and to what we’re calling focus groups, focus groups could be any population or sub population with in Port Angeles. As we have. The material that’s guided by way of survey results will push out into these focus groups and drill down more and make it in a way that you don’t have to commit 16 hours of your life to provide our district with feedback.”

The anonymous survey is open through April 11 at 5pm. The survey is available here:  https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/QNQG7VW