By Adriana Gasiewski

As Stow-Munroe Falls City Schools look toward the next five years, the district is finalizing a strategic plan, targeting multiple areas of improvement.

“The goal here is to make sure that everyone’s voice is in this strategic plan, because this plan is really, like I said, the roadmap, is really going to help us develop our future leaders, really talk about what needs to happen,” said district Superintendent Felisha Gould.

After months of collecting feedback, the district anticipates making a recommendation and action steps for the plan come fall. If accepted, the plan will then go into effect.

The areas the plan focuses on are student learning experiences, student culture expectations and support, staff well-being, professional empowerment, operational systems and learning environments, community engagement and communication, and fiscal accountability, trust and stewardship, Gould said.

This strategic plan differs from the previous 2022 plan that focused on curriculum, diversity and wellness.

“The plan before was done more internally than gathering voices from the community,” Gould said. “This one, it just has all voices. We’ve had focus groups with students. We’ve had focus groups with community partners. We’ve had focus groups with teachers.”

In the spring of 2025, the district kicked off the process with its cabinet leaders creating a vision script during its retreat. The information was then passed along to its board members “to hear their feedback on what their core beliefs are, values, going through the same process,” she said.

The district then partnered with The Impact Group, a Hudson-based consulting organization with expertise in strategic planning to help schools and nonprofits with communication and marketing strategies.

The Impact Group was able to collect feedback from smaller groups, removing any potential bias.

“They were able to ask questions, get the information, and none of us would be part of that process because we really wanted true feedback,” Gould said. “So, then we took all of those items, we continued to work through our vision statement and everything at the cabinet level.”

Doreen Osmun, The Impact Group’s director of strategic services, explained that the organization worked with the school’s leaders to create a plan based on a SWOT analysis they conducted before introducing the plan to the board of education. A SWOT analysis examines strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

After presenting its findings, the group conducted another SWOT analysis with two new board members in August 2025, “because this plan is going to transcend different terms,” Osmun said.

Following the analysis, The Impact Group organized 17 focus groups, as Gould wanted to ensure that everyone had the opportunity to be heard and to participate. The Impact Group went to every school in the district, offering parents and community-focus groups chances to answer three or four questions. Understanding that not everyone would be able to attend the focus groups, they also launched a survey in November of 2025, which was made available to families and students in the district’s communities.

To further widen the net of responses, the group then approached business owners who supported the schools within the district, Munroe Falls Mayor Allen Mavrides, Stow Mayor John Pribonic and the cities’ fire and police departments.

“We have a search and there’s open-ended questions on the survey also. Put all that information together and then themes emerge and those themes really are the guideposts for the goals and objectives,” Osmun said. “Because it’s not Dr. Gould’s plan, it’s not one person on the board’s plan — it really is a compilation of what we heard from the greater community.”

The survey helped inform the district on its six goal areas, as it highlighted the strong pride in its staff, the desire to update old facilities and a hope for transparency about finances.

“People want to see new facilities. They want our kids to be involved in that, but also understanding that we need to look at what will be the burden to our taxpayers, as well as looking at our facilities as a whole and not just the ones that we need to rebuild or renew,” Gould said.

The feedback was used to create a plan presented to the board in March. The district’s administrative and leadership teams then worked together on creating revisions for the plan.

During the last week of April, Gould reviewed the responses from the plan with students. 

Now, Gould and district leadership are preparing to create goals and objectives for board members to evaluate during their board workshop in June. Gould, Osmun and Phil Herman, partner of The Impact Group, will facilitate a portion of the meeting focused on the revised plan.

If the plans go into effect in the fall, she will inform staff about it, ensuring they have a clear understanding of the plan’s expectations.

“Then with all of the feedback that we’ve gotten, we will then take that at the cabinet level and really make sure that it’s clear language — that people can understand it," Gould said. “We don’t want a document that’s going to be sitting on the shelf. We really want it to come to life.”

The district would also create marketing pieces and update families about the plan’s status, as she strives to provide everyone with a clear understanding of the plan.

Osmun added that The Impact Group will continue to work with the district during the first year of implementation, offering them support throughout the process.

For Gould, the process of creating the plan demonstrated the district’s commitment to supporting and growing future leaders with the Stow and Munroe Falls communities.

Anticipating the plan coming to fruition in the fall, she also hopes to see more partnerships developed.

“I’m hoping to see a healthy staff that continues to want to do their careers here in the school system,” Gould said. “And I’m hoping to see a balanced budget where everyone understands exactly where our money is going and what it is being spent on.”