La Joya ISD rolls out 5-year strategic plan
After a year of development and community discussion, La Joya ISD revealed their five-year strategic plan, which will guide the district as it continues operations under the watchful eye of the Texas Education Agency. 
Superintendent Dr. Marcey Sorensen presented the details at the Aug. 13 school board meeting.
“This was a labor of love because we gathered over 5,500 voices in this process across our district to land here for our strategic plan for the next five years,” the superintendent said. “So I am very excited to roll this out and share it with everyone.”
The plan, titled Achieving Excellence Together 2030, is a culmination of 49 community engagement events, an online survey, 23 town halls and multiple advisory council meetings. Through these engagements, La Joya stakeholders expressed a desire for strong leaders and teachers, career-connected learning for students, high-quality curriculum and support systems from the district. Other community wants include trust, transparency, accountability and improvement in technology, compensation and infrastructure.
Based on the feedback, La Joya ISD developed five strategic priorities to take them into 2030:
- Excellence in leadership
- Empowered graduates
- Thriving students
- Community trust, unity and partnership
- Operational excellence and financial stability
Each priority has four aligned initiatives, such as enhancing leadership development pathways, strengthening college credit opportunities, expanding access to extracurriculars, strengthening communication and upholding strong financial management. For each initiative, the district will create measurable outcome goals and goal progress measures to track where they are in the process.
To maintain accountability, LJISD plans to implement a Performance Monitoring Oversight Committee (PMOC) that will ensure the district correctly executes their strategic plan and that it is continuously measured and improved. The committee consists of cabinet members and identified district leaders. As part of the monitoring system, each strategic initiative will have a leadership team member responsible for tracking progress and reporting to the PMOC. The PMOC will then provide quarterly reports to the board of managers. Additionally, Chief Information Officer Haissam Mayasi is already in the process of building a dashboard that will track progress on the LJISD website. 
“Organizations generate strategic plans, school districts generate strategic plans and too often they end up as a binder on the shelf that collects dust,” Chief of Staff Joe Niedziela said. “So our PMOC is a safeguard against these pitfalls. It’s going to provide ongoing support and accountability to maintain momentum. It’s going to be a unifying structure that aligns all our district efforts. And it’s going to be a mechanism for continuous feedback and course correction.”
By September, the administration plans to identify and train all PMOC members. Sometime in the fall semester, the district will finalize the benchmarks and launch the reporting dashboard with initial data.
Niedziela and Sorensen explained that while the district plans to keep all priorities at the forefront for the next five years, some initiatives will take longer than others.
“Some of the initiatives may genuinely take five years to accomplish,” Sorensen said. “And we’ll need community input or we’ll need additional resources or our resources will have to shift in order for things to change. But there are some, like around special education, we were already starting to move on that. So it will vary, not only when it begins but how it begins and how it lives over the five years.”
