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Why are we undertaking this strategic planning? The Board of Directors is committed to fulfilling Iona’s mission and realizing its vision. The Board also believes strategic planning is a great platform for me, as the new President, to learn about Iona Prep to shape any necessary change for the school. It has been a number of years since Iona Prep undertook an in-depth planning initiative. Strategic planning is a process that objectively asks a school how well it is doing. Schools are notoriously prone to making opinion-rich decisions based on anecdote and hunch. Current thinking and good management require informed decisions – decisions that are made after thorough environmental scanning, data mining and trend analysis. Strategic planning contributes to a continuing and flexible strategic vision that could result in a new destiny. Board initiated strategic planning provides a roadmap to guide the focus of Iona Prep. Competition in Catholic education is high. Iona Prep must continue to be current and compelling in our curriculum, student activities, service programs, athletics, recruitment and retention of faculty, fundraising, admissions and marketing – in short, all aspects of operating the school.
Through our strategic planning process, we recognize that given current needs and unforeseen roadblocks that emerge, detours may happen. Strategic planning requires schools to grapple with a difficult question. Instead of “How do schools get more?” they ask, “How can schools best use what they already have?” This question challenges schools to manage resources strategically and to look closely at their current use of resources first. Adding new resources on top of the old, without understanding the answers to these questions, ignores evidence that schools can and do improve performance when they prioritize their goals and restructure their resources to match them.
How is Iona Prep approaching its strategic planning process? We have an eleven-person Steering Committee, co-chaired by Al Kelly ‘76 (Board Member) and me. The role of the Steering Committee is to track the progress of our nine Working Teams, each focused on different aspects of the school. These teams are – Academic Affairs, Admission & Financial Aid, Athletics, College Placement & Guidance, Faculty Excellence, Finance & Support, Mission/Values/Brand, Outreach & Marketing and Student Life. Each Working Team has a Steering Committee member and a Board Member serving as liaisons.
The Working Teams do not signal the top nine priorities, but provide a vehicle to segment the planning effort. Each Working Team has co-chairs, one an internal Iona Prep person and the second a person not on the Iona Prep staff. The Working Team co-chairs were charged with populating their teams with people from various constituencies within the school community. In short, we strive for broad and diverse involvement. We have more than fifty people involved in this process, including current parents, past parents, alumni, administrators, Board Members and faculty members. All nine working teams have completed initial SWOT (Strengths, Weakness, Opportunity, Threats) analyses that have provided a very good starting point for our work. We hired an outside firm (Market Street Research) to help us develop and facilitate a community-wide survey. The web-based survey was administered from December 9 - 19 to gather feedback from current students, current parents, alumni and the faculty/staff /Board. The survey results are being tabulated by Market Street Research and will be presented to the Steering Committee during the third week of February. We are expecting that the data from the survey will provide important insights for the various Working Teams and, at an appropriate time in the process, we will share the summary of the findings with the broader Iona Prep community. Currently the Steering Committee is in the process of a fact-gathering assignment, comparing competitor schools and "like" schools, those which we want to benchmark ourselves against.
What is the strategic planning timeline? When the Working Teams complete their tasks, the Steering Committee will take the output from the Working Teams and prioritize it to develop a school-wide strategy to present to the Board of Directors. Once the strategy is approved, we will develop three plans: 1) a campus master plan; 2) a fundraising plan/capital campaign plan (feasibility study, followed by a quiet phase, followed by a formal announcement of the campaign); and 3) a mechanism for tracking our progress against the strategic plan which will be our guidepost for the next five to seven years.
What can you do? Be ambassadors for this work by letting people know that it is a very important effort that will set the direction for Iona to the 100th anniversary (that is why we are calling it the Centennial Strategy). Let us know if you have any ideas or input along the way. Email any suggestions to me at jdi08@ionaprep.org. Help us realize our collective vision. Help steer Iona Prep’s destiny.
Thank you for your loyal and continued support of Iona Prep. I look forward to continuing to work with you to provide vital resources to our students that will allow them to reach their full potential in and out of the classroom. Please let me know if you have any questions, comments or suggestions.
May God’s love, faith, and compassion live in your hearts.
Warmly, 
James Irzyk
President
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